At a party in New York in 1997, the poet Philip Levine asked me why Ralph Dickey and I never visited him in Fresno in 1972 as I’d told him we would. I did my best to explain it and he was kind enough to say he understood and was glad to finally know the reason after so many years. I wasn’t sure why he asked, we’d known each other for years already, but I knew why I hadn’t gone out of my way to explain it to him. It was too painful.
I was surprised when Ralph called me in Kalamazoo from Oakland over my spring break in 1972, surprised and alarmed. He’d sounded bad before but not like this. We’d managed to keep in touch since the late Sixties in San Francisco, but I hadn’t seen him in two years now and he’d never sounded worse. He wouldn’t say why exactly he was calling, only that he wanted to hear my voice, and I feared the worst and flew out there to see him. He was living, if you could call it that, in a small two-room place just outside of town, and his books, his piano, his job, and the woman he’d been living with were gone; under his shades he looked gutted, bruised, Talmudic, as if all his preceding suffering was only practice. Only the sheer drenched cloth of him remained, and a poetry book, They Feed They Lion, by Philip Levine, his favorite poet, lay on the floor near his feet. Yes, his favorite poet was a Jew from Detroit, one whose appetite for rage was famous. Neither of us ever questioned this fascination, but I must have understood on some private level that the wildness of his admiration was no doubt inspired by his own unleashed anger. And hoping that Levine might remind him of the lion in himself that needed to be fed, I suggested we visit Levine. “Why would Levine want to see us, we haven’t done anything,” he answered. But now I was desperate, and without his permission, I looked Levine’s number up in information—everyone in poetry knew he lived in Fresno—and called it, without even looking at Ralph. Fuck him, I thought, I didn’t need his permission to save him. And when Levine answered, I stuttered something about how my friend Ralph, a really good poet, was also from Detroit, like him, had gone to Wayne State and Iowa, like him, and was friends with his friend, the poet Michael Harper, in one breathless whoosh, adding that Ralph really needed to see him. He didn’t laugh or ask why, didn’t want to know who I was or why I was speaking for someone else, and just said, sighing, “Okay, good, fine, come visit then! On Wednesday.”
Maybe it was simple curiosity or intuitive goodness on his part, but neither Ralph nor I understood or questioned it, and the next morning we packed Ralph’s rackety old VW and headed south toward Fresno, not knowing exactly where it was or how to get there. It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in maps, in our hurry and uncertainty it just never occurred to either of us to do anything as mundane and practical as worry about direction. Ralph also didn’t seem to care if we got there or not, just the idea of going to see Levine was hopeful enough. After driving for some hours in the direction we assumed was right—south of the Bay Area—we stopped at a campground in Big Sur, which Phil later explained wasn’t anywhere near Fresno, and, thinking we should probably eat something, I bought processed meat and a few potatoes at their market, all without speaking. Ralph had grown ever more silent and resentful that I’d talked him into this trip to “nowhere.” That’s how he now referred to this opportunity to see his favorite living poet, a “trip to nowhere.” My silence had everything to do with my growing anger—how did I ever talk myself into spending my week off from teaching here, with him? We were a match all right: the Orpheus and Eurydice of poets, a marriage made in hell. It was suddenly clear to both of us, I thought, that silence was better than what was causing it. Which is when Ralph came up with the idea of smoking some hash he just happened to have with him. I hated drugs and almost never went near them, but for some reason I still don’t understand, it suddenly seemed like a good idea. And then, a little later, while watching me cut potatoes for an inordinate amount of time over a fire neither of us seemed to particularly hold in high regard, he felt it necessary to explain in excruciating detail how Marie’s face surfaced every time he made love to a woman, it didn’t matter whom. He said it curiously, somewhat bemused, watching me for a reaction.
“I always thought you knew, and didn’t care,” he added.
Dropping the knife, I walked far into the silence of the redwoods, and started screaming. At the moment, the idea of my holding a knife was what frightened me most. He’d stared at it the whole time he told me all this.
The night grew suddenly darker, the sky higher, and the surrounding timberland more resoundingly silent. I stood there, in that embryonic darkness, shivering. It was all so clear suddenly: it was time to give up, just give up. He didn’t want to be saved, by me, Levine, or fate. Encouragement was the last thing he wanted; coming this far was a last desperate act, for my benefit. He believed what I, too, often believed, that poetry only continued the pain, called further attention to our inability to rise above it. Saying the one thing his genius knew I couldn’t resist, his shitbird had worn me down, had in fact won, if one could call complete surrender a victory. Cioran, whom Ralph had introduced me to, speaking of that “expatriate deluxe” Rilke, imagined the number of solitudes he had to accumulate in order “to be nowhere . . . extricate oneself from the world.” Now we were both nowhere, lost in the midst of a vast primeval forest.
We returned to Oakland in silence. I didn’t call Levine to explain or apologize. I wanted to but couldn’t. What would I say—that death had won? That there was nothing left to save?
THIS MORNING, WALKING ALONG THE ocean on a splendid July morning here in East Hampton, I found myself eavesdropping on an argument between two strenuous points of view. I at first ignored the intrusion but then, looking around and seeing no one, realized that the argument was one I was having with myself, that once again I was trying to convince my friend Ralph Dickey that none of his reasons for such profound self-loathing were true or essential; once again I was attempting to find the perfect words that would finally convince him to hang on until the purpose of his existence could become as clear to him as it was to those of us who valued and loved him.
Everything else around me was calm and unassuming, barely a cloud in the sky. Everyone in my family was well and there was no other disturbance I could claim as a reason for this internal war of unyielding authorities. In any case, I knew all his arguments by heart: the ongoing plague of systemic racism, his many rejections and depressions, his unwillingness and incapacity to seek the kind of recognition and distinction so many of us wished for him, and of course, his endless infatuation with death: an obsession more urgent, sincere, and passionate than his poetry and music could compete with or endure. If art is a means of self-introduction, a trusted resource in the hazardous mission of self-knowledge, then death was his most faithful collaborator in that ambiguous and fecund state in which he lived most of his life; the state Keats so elegantly described in “Ode to a Nightingale”: between waking and sleep. Even here, now, amid the exquisite beauty of the ocean, he remained obstinately indifferent to his gifts, sighing as I listed all his qualities and prizes—what did they matter, finally, he argued, showing me that superior smirk he seemed to reserve for me alone. His destiny, to die young, like Keats’s name, was writ on water, and everyone except me seemed to know it.
Hadn’t he said all this, everything, in a letter he wrote me after I left Iowa and he stayed to finish his degree, about a moment in our friendship when everything made sense, when we truly became essential friends? Yes, I remembered the letter well and the moment it was about. We drove down to the big reservoir outside Iowa City with two fellow students in the poetry program, two young women we liked, the four of us drinking vodka and walking around the edge of the reservoir, singing poems we all loved, by Neruda, Nazim Hikmet, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and of course, Lorca—wonderful all-knowing, ever-evolving Federico García Lorca!
DELIRIUM
The day blurs
in the silent fields
Bee-eaters
sigh as they fly
The blue and white
distance
is delirious
The land has its arms
thrown wide
Ay lord lord
All this is too much
Singing into the icy December wind at the tops of our voices, all and each so young and full of love for the very idea of being poets . . . and then Ralph broke away and ran down some stairs to the semifrozen lake below and began hopping over the ice like a true madman, waving his long arms about and hopping foot to foot, as if daring the fates to deny him such bliss. Then we all were running, hopping over the frozen water, singing and laughing ourselves hoarse, until we fell into one another’s arms, drunk with what seemed an unending moment of joy we’d possess for the rest of our lives.
In any case, this is how I remembered this moment. In his letter, he remembered it somewhat differently:
Well, I’m still writing letters too carefully, like literary documents. What I want to say is that I’m unhappy. No, that doesn’t mean anything. I’m dissatisfied. Except that it is not satisfaction that I want; it’s joy. I am joyous when I’m reading work I already know and love, when I discover a new writer or a new work by an old writer, when I’m creating life with words. Most of the words form abortions, some of them are hideous. Stillbirths. One of which was forty pages. I tried to write the Reservoir story. What is the Reservoir story? It is on one hand the story of a moment in our friendship, and I wasn’t willing or ready to examine the feelings of hatred and jealousy I had for you at that time. What I hated first of all was that you were actually trying to become my friend. That you wanted to know me. Impossible. How could you stoop so low as to value me that much? I was disgusted with you. I think I must still act with reservation with you. You, my best friend. The person I feel closest to. When I resist your criticism—about my poems, ideas, about the things we both value—it is because I still hate you for valuing me so much. This is not psychologizing. I know what I’m talking about.
“Yes, yes,” I hear myself shouting back, “but how about the citywide piano-playing award you won as a high school senior in Detroit—a seventeen-year-old good enough to be chosen from thousands to play in Tiger Stadium, a major league baseball stadium!”
“There were hundreds there, not thousands, and I didn’t win first prize . . . a white boy did . . .”
“But you won a full scholarship to Wayne State University and then a fellowship in science to study at Stanford and another to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—dammit! they put you up there on the stage before all of us first- and second-year students, showing you off as someone who’d just published his translation of Paul Celan’s great Holocaust poem ‘Death Fugue’ in Daedalus, the most prestigious literary journal around . . .”
“But I never could publish any of my other translations of his poems . . .”
“You, the only student on the stage with all those famous writers, the pride and admiration on their faces that someone so young should be so gifted, possess such a bright future . . . We were all of us so proud and envious . . . How could someone so brilliant see himself as without worth—be so wrong?”
“Yes, okay, man,” I can hear his shitbird answering, “but that guy up there with the elegant demeanor being held up as a standard didn’t really exist, was a phantom, an illusion, it was all a role I played having to be someone, something to others, I always knew who, what I was—a boy not white or black or anything enough in between to be loved by his own mother . . .
“You want to know who I am, I once told you but you’ve forgotten—human beings love pain so let me share my pain with you—a private moment, a crisis, a moment of violence between me and . . . my first foster father hitting my foster mother . . . out of jealousy, to consolidate his position, to strike at the man his wife spoke with familiarly, out of fear she didn’t love him anymore . . . because I betrayed her, because I wanted it to happen and said what was necessary for it to happen . . . to punish her for not being my real mother but a substitute . . .
“ ‘The world is ugly and the people are sad.’ I think I must have said those lines to myself every day at least once a day since I first read them. Wallace Stevens said it. ‘The world is ugly and the people are sad.’ ”
Yes, okay, fine, but the world also provides poetic geniuses like Stevens and, in my humble opinion, you, Ralph. It is indeed ugly and sad and incommensurably beautiful, almost too much to behold. This one image of you playing your version of “Round Midnight” at a bar in Iowa one night—how you just stood up from the bar and went over to the piano in the corner and started playing like it’d all been arranged ahead of time, one moment we were talking about poetry and women and the next you were at that piano, your eyes closed, a cigarette dangling off your bottom lip, busy making a sound so ethereal and piercing, so intimate and full of prophecy and yearning it no longer had anything to do with Monk or Coltrane or Rilke or anyone else, just you, Ralph, just you making music so pure everyone stopped talking and drinking and breathing and just sat there staring . . . at you, the almond-skinned young man perched on the edge of a piano bench, not knowing I or anyone else existed, sitting there doing the one thing you liked most to do, make music so fine God was probably looking down at you like some idea of bliss come alive, thinking what all the rest of us were thinking: that what we were hearing wasn’t coming out of that old rickety upright bar piano, or even out of the pianist himself, it was arising out of the floor and walls, down through that water-stained ceiling, coming from a place beyond and deeper and more unforgiving than anything any of us had ever heard before, a place so fragile, so elegant, there was nothing and nowhere before or after, only this one moment that would soon end and return to wherever it came from, as if it knew what we all knew: that it was just too beautiful and fragile to survive . . .
. . . like the stillborn lullaby he wrote as a last goodbye:
MULATTO LULLABY
Be my stillborn son my son
So the doctors will haul you
Out to the world
And whip your skin to suede
Be my stillborn son my son
So the flies will land
On your wet glass eyes
And wade like cranes
Be my stillborn son my son
So the flies will deposit
Their pouches of maggots
Mouthfuls of rice
Son born stillborn
Float in the jar
Like you soaked in my womb