Laura Kasischke - Mind of Winter

Many of those poems had been love fragments written to Radnóti’s wife, and in graduate school Holly had memorized translations of nearly all of them, although the only lines she could now recall were Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever—still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death or a beetle inhabiting the heart of a rotting tree….

It didn’t help Holly’s writer’s block to think of these poets, or for Eric to remind her of the tales she’d told him of such poets. He didn’t mean to be cruel, but he also didn’t understand what she needed in order to be a poet. To be a real poet. To be the poet she’d wanted to be when she was in the MFA program. An American poet of the world, like Carolyn Forché, or a poet of the deepest interior, like Louise Glück, or a poet of love and loss, like Marie Howe, or a poet of humor and irony, like Tony Hoagland (whose poem “Hard Rain” had been the inspiration for her ringtone). Those were the poets she’d set out to be.

Now, with Tatty back in her room, Eric of course would say, “Go write a poem now! What’s stopping you?”

He had no idea. He had no idea how much she wanted to do that. But she couldn’t sit down and write a poem. A poem had to come to her. She couldn’t go to it. And no poem had come to her for a decade and a half.

Fine. She was not a poet. She could admit that now. If she were, the poems would have come. She was not a poet like the ones she’d admired, or the ones who’d been in that MFA program with her. Even the fellow students who’d never published a word (which was most of them)—Holly knew that they were still out there writing. That they were scribbling in their studies somewhere. That they managed to find poems while they were shopping at the mall, working at mindless jobs like Holly’s. They were even managing to scribble on their lunch hours, or in the car while they waited for their kids’ ballet classes to be let out. They could not even be discouraged by rejection. If they could not get their poems published in journals, they published them on websites they started themselves. Holly had seen those poems on those websites, and, she couldn’t help it, had felt contempt for that self-advertising, that commitment by those poets to an art that had abandoned them. She hated, didn’t she, that they continued to write, and to write, and to write?

Well, that was never going to be Holly’s path, was it?

For Holly it had always been futile, hadn’t it? She was fallow ground. She’d always allowed herself to believe that there could be something there—given the right amount of time, the right pen, the right desk—but she never got those things, because those were things she would have had to dig for with some tool she would have had to invent herself. Impossible. “Just sit down and write!” her husband would say, but Eric would never be able to understand this frustration, her frustration, the clear sense Holly had that there was a secret poem at the center of her brain, and that she’d been born with it, and that she would never, ever, in this life, be able to exhume it, so that to sit down and write was torture. It was to sit down with a collar around her neck growing tighter and tighter the longer she sat.

It was the collar:

When, at twenty-five, they’d told her at the Campion Cancer Center that (of course) she had the gene mutation they’d tested her for, Holly felt that collar being slipped over her head and put around her neck. The lovely red-haired oncologist had held her hand and said, “I really believe, Holly, that if you want to live to see fifty, maybe even thirty-five, or thirty, you need to have your breasts and ovaries removed.”

They’d told her to take at least six months to think about it. Take six months to think about whether you wanted to die the way your mother and sister had. As if it would really take six months to choose between that fate or living to see fifty, or thirty?

Still, Holly had taken the six months—the longest six months of her life. They’d been a lifetime, those months. She’d been a woman at the top of a tower during that half a year, surveying the land in every direction for thousands of miles. That land was flat, and familiar. There were gardens full of cabbages. And the weather never changed. A lukewarm drizzle all night and all day. She could see her mother’s and sisters’ graves out there, from that tower, and she could also watch the children she wasn’t going to give birth to playing on rusty, dangerous playground equipment. But she could see that she was out there, too—growing older, without disease, without passing her mutation on, and, except for this collar, for the rest of her life, nothing would be any different than it had been before:

That fifty-year-old woman she otherwise would never be—Holly would pass that woman on the road. That woman would be driving a ghastly little car, and Holly would drive past her until she could no longer even see in her rearview mirror.

She’d even quit reading poetry, except for happy nursery rhymes to Tatty.

THEN, HOLLY REMEMBERED the inspiration she’d woken up with:

Something had followed them home from Russia.

As she’d known it would, that sentence had grown to mean nothing to her now. Now she needed to get on with things. Now she needed to put the roast in the refrigerator, so it wouldn’t rot, so that it could be eaten tomorrow, when the storm had passed. Now she should again call Eric. And she also wanted to talk to Thuy—although she imagined her friend curled up on the couch, Patty between herself and Pearl, watching something on TV. It’s a Wonderful Life ? Or Miracle on 34th Street ?

Pearl and Thuy were the kinds of mothers who seemed determined that every hour of their child’s life be filled with memorable and seasonal pleasures and events. They took Patty to orchards and to cider mills and on hayrides in the fall. In the spring they walked with her through the woods to sketch the wildflowers they found (and did not pick!). There was the beach in the summer, of course, and Christmas began in late November with the Nutcracker (in Chicago) and the Ice Capades (in Detroit) and the stringing of cranberries and popcorn. Holly thought of them on the couch together now, snowed in and glorious, and she thought how much she wished she’d had their model for motherhood when Tatiana was still a child.

Because Tatiana was no longer a child, was she?

It was a terrible thought. Tatty’s childhood was over! Holly walked over to the kitchen island and rested her hands on the cool and tomblike granite. It was a deep-sea blue, nearly black, but inside the smoothed stone there were tiny silver flecks. She wished she had more energy. She wished she felt strong enough to call out to Tatty again, to tell Tatty to come out of her room, to take off her terrible black shoes and that dress, to put on her white tank top and yoga pants, to wear her fuzzy slippers, and to bring a blanket. Holly would make hot chocolate, popcorn. If there weren’t any good old movies on TV the two of them could sit and watch the blizzard outside the picture window. Holly would keep her arm around the thin blue shoulders of her daughter.

But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear it. The thought of going to that door and knocking on it again, of stepping into Tatty’s room—she couldn’t even do that, could she? She couldn’t even knock on the door. If the door were locked, if Tatiana had hooked closed that door on Holly with the lock that she herself had provided, what would Holly have to face then? And if it wasn’t? That would be even worse. Holly could not bear that, either, to step into that room and find her daughter’s cold back turned to her again.