The right kind of insurance
By Randy Koch
A good poem is a memory written by a stranger. It's waking up on Sunday morning, stepping into the bathroom, rubbing cold water over my face, looking up into the mirror at my disheveled hair and realizing I dreamt last night about having long, straight, brown hair that fell over my eyes when I leaned forward, hair with a blond streak in it, bleached by the sun like when I was a teenager. In a box in my closet I have a picture of myself when I was 19. It was taken at the homecoming coronation at Lamberton High School , and I was there because someone asked me to come back from college in Mankato and crown the new king since I was the Reigning Homecoming King. So I did. And in the picture my hair is parted in the middle, nearly down to my shoulders, wavy, and bleached a coppery blond from a summer spent walking beans, picking rock, and stacking hay bales in the sun.
No more. Now it's as dull brown as mop water, and yesterday I went to the place on McPherson, the one next to the Juice Stop, and asked for a clipper on the sides, a #4, and at least an inch off the top so I can comb it with a washcloth. After the woman finished and dusted my neck with a big soft brush dipped in talcum powder, she asked if I'd like a shampoo. I followed her to the rear of the shop, sat in the chair, slipped down so the back slid forward, and rested my neck in the groove molded into the edge of the black sink. I closed my eyes, heard the water run, and waited. Then, it was the warm water and her fingers across my scalp. I felt funny having my eyes shut, self-conscious, I suppose, that she was thinking I was enjoying more than I should an $8.95 haircut and shampoo. So I opened them, and, of course, there's not much to see with your head braced on the edge of a sink. Just the ceiling and the air conditioner duct work, big and round and everything spray-painted black. It's cheaper and more retro than a false ceiling with all those square, antiseptic, white tiles, like in a dentist's office. It's the kind of thing they do to warehouses converted into dance clubs. Just hang a disco ball from the middle with a small spotlight shining on it, and nobody'll even think about the ductwork and junction boxes and conduit and pipes and sprinkler heads, just the little beams of light ricocheting around the room.
That black ceiling is like a negative of the mesquite outside my patio door this morning. (My hair freshly combed, the washcloth drying on the towel rack.) The tree is a lush green, full and lacy with limbs stretched out toward the sun. And if a green jay had been sitting in there, I'd have never seen him. In fact there might have been a whole flock of green jays or green parrots -- though they'd have to be mute and immobile -- and I still wouldn't have seen them. But no, there was a grackle, black and shiny as the sink and holding a bread stick in his beak like an obnoxious cigar. That's the way poetry is. You can walk right under a ceiling spray-painted black and not notice it, not until some short, middle-aged woman in a blue smock is pushing water through your hair. You can look past a mesquite dripping green. Then you stop and look close. And my God, you think, how couldn't I have seen that before? And maybe I did, but I just wasn't looking. Like the difference between hearing and listening, touching and feeling, forgetting and remembering the black, tin ceiling from 22 years ago above the booth in the corner, a deck of cards scattered on the table, and her sitting next to me. That's what a good poem can do.
This British poet, Basil Bunting said, "Poetry is no use whatever. The whole notion of usefulness is irrelevant to what are called the fine arts, as it is to many other things, perhaps to most of the things that really matter." Sometimes I don't realize how much things matter to me until I talk about them -- the reasons I rarely drink, the coy nudge of a girl's hip, a ghostly curtain of light shifting in the cold January sky, the smell of a lit Winston, and suddenly I'm back at the kitchen table where Mom blew on her saucered coffee at one end and Dad held a cigarette in the fork of two fingers at the other. Talk is cheap, he always said. It takes money to buy whiskey. The Canadian stuff -- Windsor or Mac -- in the winter or schnapps for snowmobiling and that sweet southern crap -- Jack Daniels or Southern Comfort -- only out of boredom in the summer. There's probably still a fifth stashed in the rafters of the car shed, left from the night I had to hold a hand over one eye while I was driving home so the two lane county road didn't look like a freeway and pinched the left eye shut as I aimed the Bel Air through the door. We called that car The Sherman because it was built like a tank. Except for the floor in the back that Mark stepped through one Saturday night when seven of us piled in to cruise Main and the back road to Revere -- beer cans flushed through the floor and WLS out of Chicago playing ZZ Top on the radio -- and to fly over Rollercoaster, the gravel road where a year later I ran. I ran until I had nothing, sometimes 19 or 20 miles , until my face was gritty with salt and my thighs quivered. I ran until stopping felt like a luxury, until I had no strength to drive my mind, until I wouldn't dream, until I lost the strength to remember that she had left. Until my mind was still -- the thing I could only do for five or six breaths under the eucalyptus tree near Real de Catorce with Quemado rising above us in the east -- and nothing mattered but collapsing on the hide-a-bed and sleeping. I needed to fill up that emptiness with something else. That's what poetry is for.
On my desk is a photo of Tammy Gomez's back, her left hand holding her long black hair on her shoulder so that the words printed on her t-shirt are visible: "Poetry is not a luxury." But for a long time it was to me. I still have the first book of poems I ever bought -- John Ashbery's Houseboat Days. It was an extravagant purchase back when I lived from paycheck to paycheck and could barely afford to drive the 45 miles to the nearest town with a bookstore. A page is missing, the one that contains "The Wrong Kind of Insurance." I don't mutilate books, don't bend the corner of pages to mark my place, don't curl the cover of a paperback so I can hold it open to read with one hand, but I pulled that poem out of Ashbery's book. Only one thing could have moved me to such recklessness.
The rush of speed and wind through the open windows as my older brother Ken, behind the wheel of the Bel Air, held the foot feed to the floor, the speedometer shimmying around one hundred as we flew across the dark, new pavement of the Wanda road, was nothing. And Steve hanging 30 feet above the ground, one hand gripping the ladder on the side of the silo, was an innocent, greedy stunt (a sawbuck rode on it). Lying to my dad about why weeds dangled from the bottom of the '68 Chevy when I got up one Sunday morning was just a dry-mouth reaction. But pressing Ashbery's book open (his words saying the thing I felt but couldn't say, my voice corralled by the old silence at the kitchen table-gray smoke rising past his thin face turned to the window and sliding across the ceiling like weightless fog), weighing the sanctity of a book against the effect pages 49 and 50 would have when drawn from inside an envelope found between the Piggly Wiggly flyer and the job offer from Rockford, and then pulling the page from the frail binding -- that was reckless. The absence of that page is still visible nearly 30 years later: a sliver of space near the binding when the book is closed. There is a loss there not unlike finding blood inside my coat sleeve when I came in for supper and now the scar below my elbow that reminds me of my fondness for barbed wire. Poetry is sometimes all we have.
T. S. Eliot said, "April is the cruelest month," our time taxed with numbers, not words, and nudged ahead to save the evening light. I sat on our small porch on Sunday and read " Do Not Drive into Smoke." I thought about a student's description of the brown, fat Buddha in Saigon Plaza and felt the knotted eyes of the pine fence on me. I worried about the late night call, her crying into the phone, her fear of her own life and of failing as a mother. I could still see the photo on the wall in Toni's house of Lee when he was 17 -- thick, dark hair parted on the left and rising in a dry pompadour, a white t-shirt, and leaning like Jack Kerouac against his younger brother. I thought of June and found Washington in a road atlas, the two pages littered with strange names -- Lost Horse Plateau, Wenatchee , Horse Heaven Hills, Cowiche Mountains , and the Strait of Juan de Fuca . Yakima and Port Angeles ring of Raymond Carver, of his hard days at the laundromat when stories and poems called him and later the cancer. Cruelty is an absence, a negation, a loss against a background of spite or forgetfulness. But this April is -- though fraught with false memories -- raucous with grackles, heavy with yucca, and filled with poetry: the voices of strangers and friends saying what, over the years, I wanted to say, needed to say, feared to say, and only recently have been able to say.
(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University .)
