Chuck, Nan's boyfriend, appeared late in the afternoon, and I got him a hammer and a cupful of nails and he nailed, too, for a while. He was a perfectly decent guy. He is an engineer who works at the Navy Yard in Kittery caring for nuclear-powered submarines. He and his friends pull the nuclear engines out and change their spark plugs and bang their carburetors with wrenches and then slide the engines back in place. With Chuck there we talked about fractions of an inch and acceptable degrees of gap between boards, and we politely debated which length of board to use next.

When we were almost done I paused, sprawled on my elbow on the floor, thinking about the song of the nails. There were four hammers going now, each with a different speed of hammering. A nail starts by sounding low because there's more length of nail to vibrate, but as more and more of it disappears into the wood, its pitch gets higher and more strained. It goes bong, bang, bing, bink. And then, at the very end, just after the highest-pitched note, there are two or three confident wide low smacks when the nailhead has touched down and you're hitting the whole floorboard-whang, whang, whang. We all wanted to sound like good nailers, and we all did sound like good nailers-and I think we were content in the midst of that happy racket.

Just before I left, Chuck asked me why I was publishing an anthology of rhyming poems.

"It seemed like it would help somehow," I said.

Chuck said, "Are you making a statement? Are you saying that free verse is a bad thing?"

I said no, I didn't think I was, not really. My own poems were free verse, after all. But then again my own poems sickened me, so I was confused.

"Are you editing the anthology out of self-hatred?" Chuck pursued.

I smiled. "Yes, Chuck, I think that's it."

"What's the best poem ever written?" asked Nan.

I told her I couldn't answer that. "One poem I liked recently was James Fenton's 'The Vapour Trail.' "

" 'The Vapour Trail,' " said Chuck. "I'll check it out."

Nan walked me out to the deck and wrote out a check. What a nice sound it was to hear her tearing it out of her checkbook, while the frogs chirred away.

"I hear you singing in the barn sometimes," she said.

"Oh, sorry," I said.

"Roz told me she was at her wits' end because you were up in that barn for weeks singing away, not writing."

"Yes, but I'm doing better now. I'd like her to come back. If you talk to her, will you let her know that?"

"Sure," said Nan. "Thanks for the floor."

I WOKE UP after a nap. It was dark and very late. I found a pen and turned to the back of Mary Oliver's book of poems, and I wrote: "People I'm jealous of." I wrote:

– James Fenton

– Sinead O'Connor

– Lorenz Hart

– Jon Stewart

– Billy Collins.

"Billy" Collins, indeed. Charming chirping crack whore that he is. No, that's incorrect-I know nothing about him. I know only my own jealousy. I'm not jealous of Merwin, though, and I'm not jealous of Mary Oliver. And I'm not jealous of Howard Moss. And I'm not jealous of Elizabeth Bishop. They're beyond all jealousy.

Yes, I wish I were a different person. Yes, I'm attacked by my embarrassments that are like those flying antibodies in Fantastic Voyage that glue themselves to the bad man's face when he swims out of the arterial spaceship. Yes, I sometimes have terrifying dreams in which a cat I've never seen before attacks a mouse and bites it and bites it, until I can hear its tiny neck make a popping sound. I pull the cat gently away and I take my shirt off and ball it up, and I prop the hurt mouse up against a balled-up shirt, and the mouse turns into a wan woman who talks to me in a laborious cheerful whisper in her brokenness. I want her to live. She says: "It's just impossible for me to live after what I've been through with that cat."

Oh, plot developments. Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don't want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself. I want everything to be all right.

What if sometime Roz let me hold her breasts again? Wouldn't that be incredible? Those soft familiar palm-loads of vulnerability-and I get to hold them? That's simply insane. Inconceivable.

12

SOMETIMES I'LL SPEND an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.

Swinburne didn't have that problem with email. Swinburne was remarkably prolific. In fact, he glutted the world with verse. He died in 1909, which is really the crucial year in the war between rhyme and unrhyme. Rhyme won each engagement before then. 1909 was the year, as we know, that Marinetti published his Futurist manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro. Futurism became all the thing in London, among the sophisticates. A little splinter group of tough-talking converts began meeting. They called themselves the Secession Club. Some of them wrote for a certain magazine, The New Age, whose editor was a man named Alfred Orage. Orage believed that rhyme and meter were the ruff collars and doublet jackets of poetry-mere fashions, superfluities. In the Secession Club there was a man named Flint and a man named Hulme and a man named Storer. And a man named Ezra Pound.

Swinburne was the greatest rhymer who ever lived, and Futurism was the breaking open and desecrating and graffitiing of Swinburne's tomb.

How much do you know about Swinburne? Probably not that much. Tiny little guy. Nervous. Brilliant. Red hair. Loved babies, loved peering into perambulators. Wrote some exceptionally mawkish verse about babies. Deaf for the last twenty years of his life, and still writing poetry in the silence. Nobody had much to say about him when I was in college. He was like Vachel Lindsay, out of fashion. Browning? Sure. Meredith? Sure. Hardy? Sure. Dickinson? Sure. But Swinburne was not part of the big sweep.

And even now-take a look at this book. I'll block off the title so you have to guess what it is. Familiar design, I daresay. The little dude at the chalkboard? Yes, it's Poetry for Dummies. And it isn't a bad book. Do you know how hard it is to write a book like this? It's so hard. It's a terrible struggle; you fight with the Balrog through flame and waste and worry and incontinence and tedium. The Balrog of too-much-to-say. I've always liked the dummies books. I've got Photoshop for Dummies, and I learned a lot from it. The dummies' day may be passing, though. Too much yellow all over Barnes & Noble.

But now let's try something. Let's look up Algernon Charles Swinburne in the index of Poetry for Dummies, shall we? I've already done this so I know what's going to happen. But let's try it.

See that? Swinburne's not in the index. Algernon Charles Swinburne has been left out of Poetry for Dummies. And that's what I mean. Swinburne, the nineteenth century's King of Pain, the greatest rhymer in the history of human literature, has been lost to casual view. Without Swinburne, Lorenz Hart and Gershwin and Dorothy Field and the Great American Songbook would not sound the way they sound. And modernism would not have had the thrilling negative energy it had. You can't understand what all those early modern Futurist poets were in revolt against if you don't know about him. Swinburne says:

If you were queen of pleasure

And I were king of pain

Doesn't that give you a strange shudder? "If you were queen of pleasure (rest), and I were king of pain (rest),"

We'd hunt down love together,

Pluck out his flying-feather,

And teach his feet a measure,