The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (12 page)

D had been in charge of the eviction team, and he was now there at Renton. He was a far cry from C who had first told me the story. D had repressed none of his humanity in the years he had spent in industry. The eviction, and The Admiral and his wife, had made such an impression on him that even then, almost twenty years later, he still kept the entire file with him in his desk. He had me to his office several times (at Boeing your own office meant you were somebody) to talk about The Admiral. And he talked about The Admiral with unqualified love.

He showed me aerial photos of the land, the point jutting out into the river beyond the confines of the rectangular fencing. And he showed me the following two letters written by The Admiral. All thanks to some heroic secretary who took hours to type these from near-illegible, primitive scrawl so I could have copies. I’m ashamed to admit that over the many years I’ve forgotten her name.

You can almost smell the man’s fear in the words. What an act of courage it must have been writing these. How little that poor twisted man had, and a terrifying billion-dollar corporation was taking it away. And what sudden bursts of eloquence reserved usually it seems for primitives. “I only lost homes in my lifetime.” T .S. Eliot said “Bad poets imitate. Good poets steal.” If not stealing that line means I’m a bad poet, so be it. I couldn’t do it, though years later I changed it to use in a long poem called “Last Words From Maratea”: “Green in your lifetime/You lost nothing but homes.”

As for The Admiral and his wife, their departure was something like it is in the poem. The Admiral claimed he owned property in the Monroe Valley, north and somewhat east of Seattle, about thirty miles away. The company provided a truck and driver, and in a scene that must have been agonizing, The Admiral threw worthless things onto the truck, old pieces of dirty rags, hunks of wood, maybe even stones, anything that might show a hostile world that he was not destitute, that he had the pride of possession still. No one mentioned what became of the rabbits.

The driver drove The Admiral and his wife and their strange possessions to the Monroe Valley. There for hours The Admiral directed the driver to this place and that. Is this it? Yes. No. Wait. That’s not it. Down the road farther. I think this is it. Finally at nine or after, the driver, tired and hungry, simply announced: This is it. He left The Admiral, his wife, and the odd items, worthless except in The Admiral’s mind, by the side of a remote country road in the dark. That was the last anyone I knew ever heard of them.

Although it didn’t impress me at the time, it seems important now that no one at Boeing questioned the writing of the poem. It seemed an unstated fact that people like The Admiral and conditions like eviction are what prompt poems. It was the only time a lot of people I didn’t know at Boeing were aware I was a poet, and certainly the first time they’d read a poem I’d written. I was surprised at the response, the sophisticated reception. I’m not saying Boeing didn’t have its share of Philistines. All groups do. I’m saying that there’s a broader base to humanity than I’d been aware of.

I suppose I haven’t done anything but demonstrated how I came to write a poem, shown what turns me on, or used to, and how, at least for me, what does turn me on lies in a region of myself that could not be changed by the nature of my employment. But it seems important (to me even gratifying) that the same region lies untouched and unchanged in a lot of people, and in my innocent way I wonder if it is reason for hope. Hope for what? I don’t know. Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization.

But the original question remains even though I’ve tried to answer it and some other question it implies. Let’s drop the phrase “as a poet.” As a person, I simply like teaching in a university better than working in an aircraft factory. The rumors have stopped. The three people who hated me for being a poet have moved on, and the remaining ones know I lead a rather solitary life, certainly not a swinging one. Here, I am close to poetry’s only consistent audience. I like students because they are not far removed from being children, and that is a bond between us. What adult would dream of writing a poem? And teaching gives me a personal satisfaction no other job ever did.

But no job accounts for the impulse to find and order those bits and pieces of yourself that can come out only in the most unguarded moments, in the wildest, most primitive phrases we shout alone at the mirror. And no job modifies that impulse or destroys it. In a way The Admiral speaks for all poets, maybe for all people, at least a lot of us. We won’t all disappear on a remote country road in the Monroe Valley, but like The Admiral and his wife we are all going into the dark. Some of us hope that before we do we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates. Or if we never did it ourselves, that someone, derelict or poet, did it for us once in some euphonic way our inadequate capacity for love did not deny our hearing.