Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Death Is Not the End
The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel Laureate, a poet known in American
literary circles as 'the poet's poet' or sometimes simply 'the Poet,' lay
outside on the deck, bare-chested, moderately overweight, in a partially
reclined deck chair, in the sun, reading, half supine, moderately but not
severely overweight, winner of two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics
Circle Award, a Lamont Prize, two grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts, a Prix de Rome, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Medal, and a
Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters, a president emeritus of PEN, a poet two separate American
generations have hailed as the voice of their generation, now fifty-six, lying
in an unwet XL Speedo-brand swimsuit in an incrementally reclinable canvas deck
chair on the tile deck beside the home's pool, a poet who was among the first
ten Americans to receive a 'Genius Grant' from the prestigious John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of only three American recipients of the
Nobel Prize for Literature now living, 5'8'', 181 lbs., brown/brown, hairline
unevenly recessed because of the inconsistent acceptance/rejection of various
Hair Augmentation Systemsbrand transplants, he sat, or layor perhaps most
accurately just 'reclined'in a black Speedo swimsuit by the home's
kidney-shaped pool,1 on the pool's tile deck, in a portable deck chair whose
back was now reclined four clicks to an angle of 35° w/r/t the deck's mosaic
tile, at 10:20 a.m. on 15 May 1995, the fourth most anthologized poet in the
history of American belles lettres, near an umbrella but not in the actual shade
of the umbrella, reading Newsweek magazine,2 using the modest swell of his
abdomen as an angled support for the magazine, also wearing thongs, one hand
behind his head, the other hand out to the side and trailing on the
dun-and-ochre filigree of the deck's expensive Spanish ceramic tile,
occasionally wetting a finger to turn the page, wearing prescription sunglasses
whose lenses were chemically treated to darken in fractional proportion to the
luminous intensity of the light to which they were exposed, wearing on the
trailing hand a wristwatch of middling quality and expense, simulated-rubber
thongs on his feet, legs crossed at the ankle and knees slightly spread, the sky
cloudless and brightening as the morning's sun moved up and right, wetting a
finger not with saliva or perspiration but with the condensation on the slender
frosted glass of iced tea that rested now just on the border of his body's
shadow to the chair's upper left and would have to be moved to remain in that
cool shadow, tracing a finger idly down the glass's side before bringing the
moist finger idly up to the page, occasionally turning the pages of the 19
September 1994 edition of Newsweek magazine1, reading about American health-care
reform and about USAir's tragic Flight 427, reading a summary and favorable
review of the popular nonfiction volumes Hot Zone and The Coming Plague,
sometimes turning several pages in succession, skimming certain articles and
summaries, an eminent American poet now four months short of his fifty-seventh
birthday, a poet whom Newsweek magazine's chief competitor, Time, had once
rather absurdly called 'the closest thing to a genuine literary immortal now
living,' his shins nearly hairless, the open umbrella's elliptic shadow
tightening slightly, the thongs' simulated rubber pebbled on both sides of the
sole, the poet's forehead dotted with perspiration, his tan deep and rich, the
insides of his upper legs nearly hairless, his penis curled tightly on itself
inside the tight swimsuit, his Vandyke neatly trimmed, an ashtray on the iron
table, not drinking his iced tea, occasionally clearing his throat, at intervals
shifting slightly in the pastel deck chair to scratch idly at the instep of one
foot with the big toe of the other foot without removing his thongs or looking
at either foot, seemingly intent on the magazine, the blue pool to his right and
the home's thick glass sliding rear door to his oblique left, between himself
and the pool a round table of white woven iron impaled at the center by a large
beach umbrella whose shadow now no longer touches the pool, an indisputably
accomplished poet, reading his magazine in his chair on his deck by his pool
behind his home. The home's pool and deck area is surrounded on three sides by
trees and shrubbery. The trees and shrubbery, installed years before, are
densely interwoven and tangled and serve the same essential function as a
redwood privacy fence or a wall of fine stone. It is the height of spring, and
the trees and shrubbery are in full leaf and are intensely green and still, and
are complexly shadowed, and the sky is wholly blue and still, so that the whole
enclosed tableau of pool and deck and poet and chair and table and trees and
home's rear façade is very still and composed and very nearly wholly silent, the
soft gurgle of the pool's pump and drain and the occasional sound of the poet
clearing his throat or turning the pages of Newsweek magazine the only
soundsnot a bird, no distant lawn mowers or hedge trimmers or weed-eating
devices, no jets overhead or distant muffled sounds from the pools of the homes
on either side of the poet's homenothing but the pool's respiration and poet's
occasional cleared throat, wholly still and composed and enclosed, not even a
hint of a breeze to stir the leaves of the trees and shrubbery, the silent
living enclosing flora's motionless green vivid and inescapable and not like
anything else in the world in either appearance or suggestion.3
* * *
1. Also the first American-born poet ever in the Nobel Prize for Literature's
distinguished 94-year history to receive it, the coveted Nobel Prize for
Literature.
2. Never the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, however:
thrice rejected early in his career, he had reason to believe that something
personal and/or political was afoot with the Guggenheim Fellowship committee,
and had decided that he'd simply be damned, starve utterly, before he would ever
again hire a graduate assistant to fill out the tiresome triplicate Guggenheim
Foundation Fellowship application and go through the tiresome contemptible farce
of 'objective' consideration ever again.
3. That is not wholly true.