I Knew a Woman: February 24, 1988

 

 "She played it quick, she played it light and loose."

 

[Ted Roethke] was out to create people anew, to implant or uproot, rearrange, abrade if necessary, their sensibilities, to tear down and trample on all familial and social veils between themselves and the world as he saw it . . . and expose their little naked spirits, lift them with love or drag them by sheer force of will up to the level where they could confront the most important thing in the world, which was, of course, poetry—confront, comprehend, and sing it themselves.

—Alan Seager, The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke

It was Monica's birthday. We were in the lunchroom finishing lunch. Monica was reading from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke [pronounced RET-kee], which her husband had given her as a present that morning. She stopped, handed the book across the table to me and asked, "So. Peter. Do you read poetry?"

Wincing inwardly, but trying to sound agreeable, I replied, "Not lately, but I'll give it a try." And so I began to read, as if taking a tentative sip of a drink I'd given up long ago:

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones.
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus cheek to cheek).

By the time I hit the lines "She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake/Coming behind her for her pretty sake/(But what prodigious mowing we did make),"  I realized I was undergoing some sort of disorienting time disturbance, a double déjà vu. I wasn't just remembering having read this before (although I also knew I hadn't); I was remembering the feeling of having remembered it, much as a dreamer might recall a portion of his dream in which he is remembering a previous dream.

Part of what I was remembering was the sort of shattering thunderclap of ecstatic recognition I'd felt upon first seeing Laura Clapperton in 1985, and later the dark-haired Kari in 1986. Monica, too, had brought with her a certain sense of familiarity and charisma—but minus the thunderclap.

That was because she had come instead to introduce me to the thunderclap. And this poem—no, the woman who lived in this poem—was IT.

As soon as that bizarre thought slipped, unbidden, into my mind, I tried to shoo it out, but couldn't. In fact, each succeeding stanza made things worse. She moved in circles, and those circles moved. And when she moved, she moved more ways than one. For an instant, it made sense that all the weirdly intense happenings of the past few years might be the work of one woman—a woman so strange and clever and subtle that she could work behind the scenes to make things happen, or at least help them along ("How well her wishes went!"). She had reacquainted me with my mind ("taught me Turn, and Counterturn, and Stand"), with my desire ("taught me Touch, that undulant white skin"), and with my innocence ("What's Freedom for? To know Eternity"). And she had done all this without my knowledge, without revealing herself.

Until now.

Oh, that's childish nonsense, I told myself. You meet these beautiful women, they overstimulate your imagination, and you tell yourself silly things, like "you will find that searingly pure dark-haired girl at high noon on Friday, September 11, 1987, at the Coffee Company in MacEwen Hall" . . . but of course you do find her there, that Kari, at high noon, only to immediately deny your precognition in desperation and panic. . . .

. . . the same desperation and panic I must have shown to Monica as she caught my eye after I'd finished reading and arguing with myself.

"I measure time by how a body sways," intoned Monica, in that way self-consciously literary people have of pretending they understand more than they really do. Or at least that's what I hoped she was doing. Saying, in effect, "Wow, man, that's such a heavy, ineffable line. And I understand precisely why it's there." Not "Well, Peter, how do you like the way MY body sways?"

"I'm martyr to a motion not my own," I replied, in that way unconsciously literary people have of showing they really understand more than they believe they do. Saying, in effect, "This is all getting really strange, but I'm resigned now to following it through to whatever it's supposed to bring me." Not "Why yes, Monica, your body sways in such a way that I could indeed become hypnotized by it. I look forward to exploring this phenomenon further."

Well, we could play this game all day. What happened then was that I hastened to the library (just across the street from work in those days, as it happened) and plucked Roethke's signature collection Words for the Wind from the shelves and began devouring it avidly.

Oh yes, and two days later I broke up with my girlfriend Jana. Not because I wanted to (ahem) start measuring time in a new way, but because (1) unspoken tensions between us had been coming to a head for a while, and (2) things inside my head were coming to a head, too, and it looked as if "things" were about to get a little hectic on that front. Whatever was coming might overwhelm me, and I didn't want Jana to be around for that.

From what I could gather from Ted Roethke, what was coming was the wind. And I needed words for it.

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