Explication

1.

I spoke to John Haines only once. Unlike the many Alaskan artists and writers whose paths crossed with Haines, I wasn’t his student. I wasn’t invited to kick my feet up in front of his woodstove at the cabin on the Richardson. We never drank together. By the time I showed up, he hadn’t lived at the cabin for years. I arrived in Interior Alaska just in time to feel the shade of his shadow.

It was morning. Winter of course, and yes, thirty below. An appropriate setting for a Haines sighting. To see the poet of Winter News in winter is correct. But that was the only correct thing.

I was standing in the lobby of the Mary Siah Rec Center, wet-headed and barefoot, when I saw him shuffle in toward the check-in window to show his hot tub punch card to the teenaged attendant.

No fire. No woodstove. No candle. No lantern light. The lobby of the public pool is too humid for a parka, so I was in a T-shirt and he was rapidly unzipping his coat, transitioning from the frozen to liquid world.

The parents-and-tots swim class had just ended, and my daughters, one and three, wilded with the crowd of toddlers on the foam patchwork tiles under the Little Tykes plastic picnic table. Screeching and crawling and wet-haired crazy. What must it have seemed like to Haines and the crowd of elderly men arriving for their weekly Sourdough hot tubbing session? Fairbanks toddlers spinning and dropping goldfish crackers in orange trails behind them, so unlike the ghostly newsboys making the rounds. Unfrozen and pink from the hot showers, they slaughtered the morning’s silence with their joy.

I had seen him at the pool the week before and the week before that, but I was too intimidated to say anything. That’s John-fucking-Haines, I’d think as I crammed small boots onto small feet while our car warmed up. He’s going into the hot tub, I’d think as I crawled around on the floor picking up crushed crackers. The sign on the wall reminded parents it was our responsibility to clean up after snacks.

I was a poet too, or thought so, and also unable to speak, my mouth framed on a stifled Hello, Mr. Haines . . . so each week, without a sound from me, he passed into the steam of the men’s locker room, leaving his boots in the cubbies on his way to the tub.

But this day, maybe because his age seemed another door about to open and shut behind him, one that I wasn’t going to be allowed to pass through, I said something. I went up, disheveled, wet hair, leaking milk from one nipple, and said, Mr. Haines, thank you for your poems. He didn’t hear me, of course. He didn’t hear well by then. I repeated myself, loudly and into his ear. Flattered, he asked Which one? But stupidly all I could manage to say was All of them.

And I was lying.