Last
night I read “Part Ten”
of
Archie Ammons’s Garbage
out
loud, twice, in an empty room.
Then
listened in embarrassment
to
hear if anyone was listening.
I’d
bought the book so many years ago
and
carried it with me to New York
the
only time I’d ever meet him.
I’m
not one for book signings, autographs;
I
always figured if what I had left
at
the end of life is a bunch
of
signatures I’d be very sad;
so
rely on my imperfect memory,
that
rarely jogs or kicks in
to
recover what is lost;
like
what is lost from that evening,
me,
standing, sweating coldly, empty,
waiting
to read, the fixed rictus grin
what
those around me fled from,
including
Archie; and then he couldn’t
stay
after because his wife was ill,
so
was gone before I could get up
enough
nerve to ask him
to
sign my Garbage. At the late
dinner,
I sat between two women
who
were interested in me
up
to a point, and then that point
was
reached; and I sat for a while longer,
listening
to some lunatic who later
became
a professional poker player,
or
perhaps already was one;
and
then it was time to go.
I
went back to the hotel alone—
I
always do, the rictus, you know—
thinking
death is an interesting display,
and
maybe I’m caught in the grip
of
a final illusion—that the light
reaching
me on a given day is truly
the
light of that day—and maybe
I
still exist for now in an infinity
that
will be revealed as an illusion,
when
the countdown to death begins,
when
hope is replaced by a number,
the
number of days. So I walk out
each
morning under many different suns,
some
causing my shirt to stick
to
my skin, some covering the park
in
an antebellum light I sometimes feel
in
certain parts of Kentucky. First,
Archie died, then that good man's love,
Phyllis, and I was never known
to
him, nor he to me, except in “Part Ten”
of
Garbage; and in his face as he stood
on
the stage and introduced me,
and
I got up and pretended my poems
were
a reality as real as morning light,
or
the willfulness of dinner-speak,
or
the light a true poet’s face can have
as
he stands in a spotlight looking
at
his watch, wondering at the illusion
he
has set in motion, but only
with
a sidelong glance, as it were,
while
he gazes beyond it, helpless,
to
the numbered days, and feels
the
need to get home quickly, quickly.
— Jim Cummins