His Poem in your words
Kirstin Scott
Daniel let her have the dog. He’d heard himself say it—I let her have Betty—whenever anyone thought to ask about it, and each time he inwardly noted that this wasn’t quite right. Because there was never a question. Louisa had said she was taking Betty and that was the end of it. That private admission, though—that he didn’t bestow the dog so much as relinquish her—this was where Daniel was a little bit noble: he doesn’t lie to himself.
So when he recognized Betty—her body now a weighted sac, her muzzle gray, a pink and fur-less pearl atop her head that surely should be biopsied—he didn’t tell himself Look at that gross old dog; I’m lucky I don’t have to deal with her. Among the possible reactions he might have developed, this was one he was happy to subordinate. He had loved her, after all.
This sighting was at the outdoor Christmas market. Louisa was nowhere in view. Betty’s leash was held by a man in a tan corduroy coat, the kind Daniel’s father once had, the collar standing up around a scarf. The man was standing at the entrance to one of the booths—sheds, basically, each with one plywood wall propped open, the entire marketplace was like an Advent calendar in this way—and he was talking to a woman with a canvas apron lashed around her puffy coat. The sign above the entrance said Kirsten’s Kreations in that gothic Nazi font, and as Daniel approached he saw that the shelves were full of wooden carousels, the kind powered by the rising heat from candles. German, Swedish, Swiss, whatever—they’d have forests and chalets, gnomes and milkmaids,
olde world alpine goats, everything glued onto stacked-up balsa platforms, everything fire-hazardous and spinning. Daniel continued slowly past the booth, pushing his hands deeper into his coat pockets. Snow sifted down like ash. If he was honest with himself—he was honest—he’d always liked those carousel things. They were way too cute of course, grotesquely Eurocentric and unmanly probably, from an outdated point of view, but they were harmless, right? And it was nice to watch them, each scene going round and round, self-contained inside its thermal updraft, its layers aesthetically aligned and balanced in a pyramidal shape. So why had Daniel never bought one or ever really considered buying one? And why now—six years after the divorce, in the parking lot rebranded as CHRISTKINDELSMARKT, their city’s little taste of Nuremberg—was this guy here with Daniel’s dog, talking to Frau Kirsten? Judging from the renewing plumes of vapor that had hung above them in the air, the man had been engaged, poised to make a purchase. Seriously? Those carousel contraptions were not cheap. These were handcrafted, too; that would surely set you back a sum.
Batter my heart. The words dropped into Daniel’s mind from nowhere, clattered. Batter my heart.
He stopped. After a moment he turned and walked back toward Kirsten’s booth, retracing his own cartoonish footprints in the asphalt’s skiff of snow. Batter my heart, three-person’d God!
The new Oncology chief, a relentless self-improver, triple board-certified, was the one who had made Daniel take the class. One elbow on the nursing-station counter, she’d explained that it was free, an initiative to address the abstract ongoing crisis everyone agreed that they were in. Physician burnout, compassion fatigue, moral injury? “It’s to enhance the general vibe,” she’d said,
swiveling the monitor around and leaning toward the screen. She vowed to make sure Daniel was off clinic for the class-time hour; he could eat his lunch for once. And so far, she’d said, glancing up at him over her shoulder, mostly case managers and OTs had attended the class and it looked bad—it was bad, she clarified, “bad for the culture and bad for the team”—if no physicians participated. She herself had already taken it twice.
“Anyway,” she said. “I enjoyed it. I suspect you will too.”
Thus once a week in the third-floor hospital conference room Daniel was learning about John Donne, seventeenth century metaphysical poet. This was not what he’d expected from the class. He’d assumed they’d keep a journal, maybe read that cancer book or try their hands at haiku (Pulled his PICC line out / Before his mother saw him / A child fake sleeping). But the regular teacher had had some sort of personal emergency and so instead they had greasyhaired Miranda, PhD candidate. And Miranda’s monomania was this guy Donne—poet, preacher, ladies’ man.
O’er throw me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
See Miranda in blue sweatpants, standing at the head of the conference table, reading aloud. See Daniel slumped in his chair with his chin resting on his chest, eyes closed. Imagine the words flying at him like beams of radiation. Understand that he is falling asleep, darkness nipping at him, and see his final grimace—the slightest myoclonic twitch—as he goes.
Daniel circled back to the carousel booth, stopping just outside the sweep of its open door. Ruddy-cheeked Kirsten, both gnome- and milkmaid-like in the rounded capsule of her aproned winter wear, was still deep in conversation with the man holding Betty’s leash.
“Bloop and bloop,” she was saying with authority.
She was describing how she painted the eyes of all her little wooden people; this was always the final step in the process of her craft. Because she’d read about other cultures—“you don’t want to call them primitive, but you know what I mean”—and she’d learned that when making representations of their gods or saints “or whoever else,” that’s how they always do it: eyes last. Why? Because that’s the moment when divinity enters into them. The spirit. Again Kirsten’s mittens batted at the air in front of her face—bloop goes one eye, bloop goes the next—to demonstrate the unblinding of her little people.
“Sure,” smiled the man. His brown beanie matched his coat; it was impossible to know if he still had all his hair. “Bloop go the eyes,” he said, “then zing they see, like, everything.”
“Zing,” Kirsten nodded. “Exactly.” She noticed Daniel then— eavesdropping, he’d inched forward toward her booth—and rotated like a mechanism to face him. “Can I help you?” And with that lilting swoop in Kirsten’s voice, Betty lifted her head and sniffed in his direction.
Daniel cleared his throat. The man with Betty’s leash pulled a glove off with his teeth and reached for his back pocket.
See then, as Daniel did, the yellow gleam of the man’s wedding band as he fumbled his wallet out of his pocket. See Kirsten’s right mitten—blue yarn, one white snowflake like a widening net across the backhand part—quickly swallow the man’s credit card. See Betty still blindly bobbing her hoary head toward Daniel, still seeking a trace of a new presence in her diminished radius.
“Well!” said Kirsten. She stepped to one side of her booth and raised both arms towards its shelving. “Do you know which one you’d like, then?” The embodiedness of thought, the spiritual striving of the body: this was the focus of Miranda’s studies on Donne. A
completely unoriginal interest, she told the class, “no one in the field will give a shit” about her dissertation. She was standing at the far end of the conference room, arms crossed under her impressive breasts, addressing the three participants who’d lasted past the second session. “Sad true fact,” she said.
The nurse and the respiratory therapist, both women, stared at Daniel across the table. Did they expect him to contradict or reassure Miranda, provide her some support? She seemed fine to him. With her thighs against the table’s edge she swayed slightly forward and backward, then stabilized. Like a tree in the wind, Daniel thought, surprising himself—was that a simile?
“I’ve got a fellowship,” Miranda continued. “Like, I wasn’t scheduled to teach this semester.” But she’d agreed to pick up their noncredit class because it was for medical people, people who could relate. “I mean, you guys all have some sense of this”— her arm waved toward the whiteboard, the near-side boob shifting down a notch—“because bodies. Their factual immediacy and horror. Because decay and death.”
The nurse glanced at the ceiling tiles. The RT gave a sigh.
“And also, as we’ve seen, physical intimacy.” Miranda pushed her glasses up with her knuckle. “Physical intimacy and sacred desire and—”
Suddenly, a four-part jolt: the three cellphones on the table buzzing together in common time. Daniel and his classmates reached for their devices and glanced at the screens—it was CODE GRAY, COMBATIVE PERSON, but far away in Building 3—before putting them face down again. Miranda raised her eyebrows, her mouth an offset O. What was that? she was likely going to ask.
But the nurse spoke first. “So why do it then?” She wound her hair around an index finger, un-growing curls up toward her scalp. “Why study something nobody cares about, if you can’t get a job?”
Miranda gave a quick, small nod. “I know, right? It makes no sense.”
She walked once around the table counterclockwise—a heel scuffer on the carpet, she passed behind Daniel’s chair with electrical potential—and returned to where she’d stood before. She lifted her chin and squinted upward; she began to recite.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved faine
Miranda’s lips closed; her gaze drifted to the table. Later that night, diagnostically, Daniel would decide that the sternal tug he’d felt in that moment was pity: Miranda was so weird and incomprehensible, and there she was standing unprotected from the frowning nurse and her big curls.
“Captiv’d,” Miranda reiterated, “Reason captiv’d!” She shrugged and gave a gleaming grin to the nurse and then the RT, and when it came to Daniel he received it grimly, sitting back heavy in his chair.
Could his ex-wife Louisa be nearby, after all? While Kirsten and the man with Betty’s leash conducted business on her iPad, Daniel scanned the market once again. Along the aisles of vendors, the paltry snow was stirring sideways, up, and down. Was it merely ornamental? Gently puffed from theater equipment concealed behind the pretzel stand? Daniel had to squint against its oblique battery.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved faine
No one had asked Miranda what that meant, but she’d told them anyway. “Faine means gladly, by the way.”
Women and men with their coats and hats and boots, moving through the market under strings of colored lights, children and their parents, teens, couples with their sweatered dogs in arms— but not a single one of them was Louisa who, even on the day she left, had claimed that she loved Daniel always.
Thus, see Daniel consciously un-squint his eyes, despite the pricking snow. He knows that narrowing his eyes makes him look intense, or mad, or mean—and he isn’t like that really; he never was. And he would faine be approachable, just in case, just now.
Miranda slid pens across the table; they spun to rest near four used paperbacks, The Collected Poems of John Donne, and the stack of paper she’d pulled from the copier tray.
In the previous session she had had the class rewrite a Donne poem in modern style—Daniel noted that “Batter my Heart” had ended up a lot like “Hit Me Baby One More Time”—and now she wanted them to do it as an individual exercise, with a poem of their choice. Her eyes on the class, she blew her nose comprehensively, clearing each nostril in turn with long phlegmy sonority. No one moved. “Go ahead,” she spoke through her wad of tissue. “His poem, in your words.”
Daniel was not going to choose one of the sex poems, not in this crowd. But what else was understandable? He pushed on the armrests to sit higher in his chair and picked up a rumpled paperback.
Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
Would Miranda be shocked to know that Daniel had had only one sexual partner in his life, his ex-wife Louisa? He had recently acquired a girlfriend, but they were taking it slow; Daniel hadn’t disabused her of the idea that this signaled his good and serious intentions for the romance—he didn’t need to; good and serious intentions were his entire personality. But now with a pen in his hand Daniel evaluated whether part of the problem—part of the
issue, or the celibacy situation—was his strange amnesia about it all. Like he’d forgotten how to start it, or do it, and maybe it was somehow not repeatable. He’d been a different person then, a learner and discoverer, and sex with Louisa had seemed complete and self-contained, a little battle and a little loss and triumph every time. It was a cascade of metabolic phenomena, sui generis, idiogenetic; it simply wasn’t clear to Daniel how to do it with someone else.
So yes, Daniel privately allowed, he was in a sex fog. Visibility zero. He and his new girlfriend—both with their educations and professions, their work badges and lanyards and car keys—fucking? Like they do online? He couldn’t see it yet.
He took a piece of paper from the stack. He quickly scrawled. Look, Death, you little bitch
And suddenly another scene slid in, a thing from clinic yesterday: four-year-old Sammy K. in the play therapy room. Again it was yesterday on 2 West; Sammy’s in blue hospital socks, in his blue gown, standing by the LEGO table. Sammy’s going to die but not this week; someone’s holding onto hope. They have to give another round or two of chemo. They have to do more harm before they let him go.
So there is Daniel yesterday, mighty and dreadful, filling the doorway of the playroom. There is The Eternal Toddler Sammy K. glaring back at him, his head a glowing bulb. Behind him is the therapist, there is that teen patient—newly admitted, another shit prognosis—glancing warily from the couch as they work the Gameboys.
“You’re not real,” said Sammy K. unquietly, like a tiny prophet. “You’re not real.” He’d pushed his little fists into his face, smashed shut his little eyes. “Not real not real not real.” The therapist stood up, wide-eyeing Daniel, and gently reached for Sammy’s shoulders.
Daniel backed into the hall. Sammy had a valid take, he realized, because maybe Daniel wasn’t actual? So often he did nothing; sometimes he couldn’t be perceived. Mouths of babes.
That was yesterday.
Look, Death, you little bitch—
Back in the present and the class, sitting at the conference table, Daniel wrote quickly now.
Look, Death, you little bitch—I see you.
You can’t have me or anyone.
It wasn’t true, he’d failed to vanquish death or overthrow it many times, but it was good, trash-talking, to feel again that fight.
CHRISTKINDELSMARKT had a Krampus—that horned and hairy folk monster who assaults you, evidently, if you play things wrong at German Christmas. It was some dude on a wooden throne, full makeup, wagging his tongue like Gene Simmons. You could sit on his lap and get a picture with him and the line for that was long; it snaked past the nutcracker booth, past the kettle-corn stand and its nauseating fumes, and ended at the handtooled leather guy next door to Kirsten and her Kreations and the man with Daniel’s dog. “No, I’m not in line,” Daniel had to keep explaining.
Inside the booth they had their backs to Daniel. They were arranging the man’s new purchase in a box, cushioning it with crumpled tissues on all sides. The man held the handle of the leash behind his back and its line extruded slowly from the reel as the old dog limped step-by-hitching-step toward Daniel.
When they got Betty as a puppy, when Daniel was in med school and he and Louisa were first married—back then, was he any different? Was he ever metaphysical (or as Miranda might say, grandiloquent and hungry)? Like all great men Daniel had wanted things, a lot. But not divorce.
“Look. You don’t really know me,” Louisa had said during their breakup. “And you don’t let me in.” They’d gone round and round on this. Daniel couldn’t understand. He had never understood. The man straightened up, shifting a leg to stand astride the open box. He reached out to pat the quilted shoulder of Kirsten’s coat, saying thank you. She thrust out a mitten for him to grasp. Thank you!
By this time Betty, eyes milky with cataracts, had finally made her way to Daniel’s side. Her nostrils quivered wide and wider, her good old head swayed back and forth.
Louisa had been right. There was something big in Daniel, something wondrous, something imprisoned or enthralled (he hears Miranda say this part); it powered everything he did. But who knew what it was? And not knowing, how then could he let it out or change?
I am a little world made cunningly Betty pushed her snout into Daniel’s hand. Across his palm she sniffed and breathed; her tongue slipped around his fingers like a thing with sight, and searching. He could smell her fur and breath, her familiar stink. The rot.
And with her skull pressing down and fitted there, Daniel’s hand felt enormous at his side. It seemed to grow, grow warm; it was edematous, alive. Aflame.
Did his old dog recognize him? After all this time?
“Here Betts.” Now the man had turned around and was pulling on the leash. Daniel tried to catch his eye—could Louisa’s husband see it too, how Betty seemed to know him?—but with the box held awkwardly before him, the man was looking down to watch his step. “Sorry, man!” he said. He pushed past to join the slow-moving crowd, and Betty—her grizzled head redirected from on high—followed stiffly in his wake.
And then it was just Daniel in the booth. With Kirsten. She had put the iPad down and tugged her apron smooth, and now her
face was set for more retail engagement. As he described it later to himself, he couldn’t exit fast enough
But not before he took a final look across the shelves. At the towers with their little worlds, turning at different speeds as if in overlapping dialogue. As if spinning out more bewilderment in rhyming verse, in frequencies too high for human ears.
Did she know me? Daniel turned and stepped outside the booth. The snow again enclosed him as he walked away. Yes, he thought, she did.