Literary Graves
More or less you measure the patterns of the scarf, pleated gray, and the flare of a wooden match as the vaporetto pushes out from the dock into the dark curves of water. No one steps in the same country twice, and so the noteworthy, Russian-born pilgrims have come to settle the cemetery of San Michele: Stravinsky floats next to Vera on a wide, flat stone; Diaghilev collects another gift of ballet shoes; and in the Protestant section, Joseph Brodsky lifts one of the many pens left at his grave to praise the haggard, wintry dust that blankets the cypress and frozen weeds, or to instead lob an insult at what remains in the nearby coffin of Ezra Pound. Memorize a poem and you’ll ensure a civilization. Build a city on water and you test the impossible: doves into gulls into doves turning back between Leningrad and that apartment in Brooklyn Heights, its flight of stairs leading to the study where Brodsky passes a sheet of paper, a cigarette unsmoked, a book of Greek poems open on his desk.
—on her hundredth birthday
With my son in the backseat, we weave an hour through midmorning traffic and exit past warehouses, apartments, a public course for golfing. We’d expected maybe a crowd, that string of admirers I measured (next time) after Brooks read in what came to be the final months of her life. At Lincoln Cemetery, alone, we circle her granite and recite a poem. Life must be aromatic, she writes, but a girl tires of flowers, of cooking and sweeping and, especially, the cold breath of a diagnosis: she left us almost immediately, among family and friends and with a pen in her hand. Not yet three, my son asks why these gifts for the poet who mirrors the day, whose etched likeness catches even the wind of the nearby trees. Together, we make stories for the woody cone, the candle and stone, trace the lucent shell a thousand miles back to the sea. By the droves such favors will arrive and we will give them voice: dropping the mop, broom, soap, iron or carrot grater to write down a line, a word.
Before she crossed the quarter mile between the homestead and town cemetery, Emily Dickinson helped plan her own funeral. “Everything was white,” one biography reports: white ribbons and textile handles, flannel for the lining (“five-sixths of a yard of Russian white”) plus the robe that Susan, her sister-in-law, designed and in which the poet would be buried. According to further description, we should add the circumference of the flower garden to the distance traveled by the funeral party, then a single pass through the “great barn” that kept the family’s horses. I’ve visited Emily’s grave more than any other. And while spring becomes summer in a snap, it was the beginning of the latter when, late one night and a dozen sheets to the wind, I hoped to marry past and present by launching my empty bottle toward what might’ve been a field of buttercup, where some bystander surely caught sight of six Irishmen (per Emily’s instruction) carrying the poet’s white casket.
I mailed countless postcards from Tübingen during the earliest months of my marriage. The poet Friedrich Hölderlin spent much of the second half of his life there—writing under a pseudonym and plagued by mental illness—before dying in 1843. I’d stop at his grave every few weeks, suspecting already that my nuptials too would soon be buried. I wandered the German streets as if it were my job, pausing now and then to smoke a cigarette, eat the day’s orange (my waistline shrank), or thumb haphazardly The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, cover by Larry Rivers and among the few books I’d packed for the fall and winter. I’ve since tried Hölderlin, have mostly failed, but O’Hara surprises as he did even then. For instance, in that grievous spell of my life, I remember looking up from the page, following a curl or two on the surface of a nearby stream, and believing there’d never come a better time to memorize a poem that begins: “Hate is only one of many responses . . .”
At the end of our marriage, as anyone should, we turned to the poets: a cigarette with Bishop in Worcester; half an hour with Frost behind an old white church; and lastly, in the hamlet of Austerlitz, a kind of reckoning at the former blueberry farm where Edna St. Vincent Millay played the part of the difficult wife and then, through that final year, the widow. We’d stood up Millay before, paired guesswork with the AAA map and wandered the public cemetery blind, drove East Hill Road to photograph the brackish pool, the quiet house in which we swore the faint shadows of a dress. The afternoon collapsed, spilled forward into weeks and months. One summer a humid matrimony; the next, the last of our mid-twenties swerved toward Steepletop. Past a clean placard and headlong down its trail, we pressed an ear at last on Millay’s resting stone. By then of course, in those New England woods, there was no we. Alone and without so much as a word, I asked of my teachers only everything.
Although no one expects the fever of last summer’s fireflies, certain hours ripple across the mouths of rivers—the Colorado and Mississippi, the Susquehanna—and having clung to my paddle come what may, I pull breathlessly north from Camden, revel the ground teeming with ghosts of copper mines, of nervous horses, of the rabbit hunters and, among them like President Truman, he who makes house calls, aims his flashlight, examines the throat while a restless language hammers up from the typewriters of Rutherford, forget not the boneyards of Lyndhurst and with such pleasure for the perilous seasons in which a doctor set my arm, in which a doctor made the hasty stich, in which a doctor asked I follow the shine, left and then right, steady now while outside the dogwood, meadow, and milkweed begin once more their flowering, the harmless mouse wrestles free, and this time that ancient lamp behind the clouds, broad and timeless, waits for us where we left it.