The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

  If you could have given me something along those lines back then, some version of that, you would have passed the question. If you could have illustrated it with an example, you would have passed with honors. Look at the effect of the breach. You have an agreement with two men. One is a formalized agreement reduced to writing. The other is not. The other is with me. Forget the terminology. Look at the effect of breach. You will not see it all. You will not see what is happening to me. No one will. No one knows. It will be for all the world as though we never happened.

  You have never been hurt before, never had a relationship end before you were ready, never failed to have any man you have wanted, any job you have wanted. You do not know what it is just to shut down, to walk around dead inside your clothes. You will eventually convince yourself that this never happened, that I never happened. Then only I will know. But if only I know, did it still happen?

  I cannot sleep, think, read. Where are you now? I kiss you though you’re not here. I am so used to waiting for you, so good at it that I cannot stop. You will, sooner or later, get on with things, but I will go on waiting, my breathing interrupted, my step faltering when I think it is you in the street until one day it is you and you do not stop but look right through me.

  But what shall I do now, right now? Think, sweetheart, think. You who had wanted me for the rest of your days, think about me, think about me now. What should I do? What will I do? Sit in the living room and stare at the ageing fruit in the bowl? Go to my study? You know it, all that wood, all those books. Is this the reward for loving not wisely but too well? Can you see it, sweetheart? Shall I go to my study to lose myself in yet another brief, another pleading? By an agreement dated years ago I, the plaintiff, agreed to love you unconditionally in return for an offer of the rest of your life. The terms of the contract were partly oral, partly implied and partly imagined. It has been breached in a way that makes its further performance impossible. I am entitled to treat it as at an end. But I am unable. There is damage.

  I WAS ONLY IN A CHILDISH WAY CONNECTED TO THE ESTABLISHED ORDER

  Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalized and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.

  I am not well and I make no bones about it. It is largely a psychological disorder, but only the most obvious of its manifestations have ever led me to hospital. These flights of fancy, as Madeline initially wished them to be known, are actually psychotic episodes. But these are just its most extreme symptoms. It is more than the sum of these. It is there all the time and no one knows what it is, a disease so new, so rare, that they haven’t developed a classification for it. They had one briefly but the condition mutated beyond human understanding, beyond recognition. My work is said to compound the malady. I am, by profession, a poet.

  When I cry I suck on my front teeth and purse my lips involuntarily as though in anticipation of an onslaught of kisses. I never realized that I did this, never even suspected it. It is a mannerism just short of a tick and it belongs to me. There is a rhythm to it and I rock slightly in time with the pursing of my lips. I do this all in time. This rhythm is a matter of instinct with me. I am a poet.

  How does that happen? In spite of everything, how does one become a poet? The term has become derogatory. How did that happen? It all happened before Madeline’s father died. These days people assume, if ever they give it any thought, that poets must be inept, glassy-eyed people who, tyrannized by their own private internal anarchy, ramblingly conjure instant affect. But that, of course, is a stereotype. And it all starts way before this.

  You are born. You remember nothing of it but get told at selected intervals that yours was a traumatic birth. The nature of the trauma does not really matter. What matters is that you are told about it at an early age. It quickly assumes a tremendous significance in your own private mythology. You visualize it in gray or sepia as a scene from a prewar newsreel. As you grow up you use it to explain otherwise inexplicable and unjust events. It is why you cannot perform certain tasks as well as other people, or at all. It is why your mother was this or that way with you.

  You read, not just well, but powerfully.

  You do just well enough at school for your distraction from what other people are interested in to be encouraged once, briefly, by a sympathetic teacher who, by the time you timorously graduate, has left the school and cannot be reached.

  You read more.

  You get a clerical job and study literature and history or philosophy, classics or art history at night. At work you meet an attractive young woman from the country. You flatter her. She flatters you. You write a poem about her. You tell her it is your first but it is not. It is actually just the first poem you have ever shown anyone. She is your first, the first to see it. But the poem is not your first. The others, the earlier ones, were naïve, derivative and masterfully bad. This one, too, is bad, but you show it to her because otherwise, without it, in its absence, you are a clerk. It works and you are a poet.

  You spend time together. You take each other to art galleries and museums. You teach her and then recite in unison the opening to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot:

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  You get promoted. There are more art galleries. She gets promoted. There are more museums. You drink strong coffee, almost professionally, in the inner city area. She encourages you to submit the poem about her for publication. She tells you she has never met anyone who wrote poetry. You suspect that it is just that she has never met anyone who admitted it. You think everyone writes poetry. The poem about her is published. You share a kind of delight.

  You meet other people who have published poetry. You take her to their poetry readings. The two of you drink coffee with them after their readings. You get promoted again. She knits you a jumper. You meet her parents during a weekend at their cattle farm in the country. One still night you tell her about your traumatic birth. You get married.

  You are married. She gets promoted. You write a volume containing many poems. Two of them are published. She gets promoted. There are more museums. She gets pregnant. You write some poems about it. She takes maternity leave but not before being promoted again. A child is born. In many senses he is yours. Andy. You write Poems for Andy.

  Andy grows to learn Christmas carols, and when he is old enough to sing them, you change the lyrics outrageously. You change their meaning. You take away their meaning. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny name. It is a game. It delights him. It is the last time you remember delighting him. She gets promoted.

  You take him to museums. You write a poem about museums, about taking your son to museums, about the ways in which museums record time. You used to go there with your wife. Later she sends you there with her son. He continues growing. “What are you feeding him?” colleagues ask at work Christmas parties. Too big for your knee, you recite to him across a room: Twinkle twinkle little bat! How I wonder what you’re at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea tray in the sky. Too big for Lewis Carroll, there is so little in him that resembles you. Your parents die. It affects you more than certain acquaintances think it should. She gets promoted.

  Your son grows. Up, up and away! He plays different games. He grows more like his mother, at least more like her than like you. They share a certain closeness you attribute to the famed bond between mothers and sons and also to your traumatic birth. She tells you she does not want any more children. You write a poem about this. It is published in Meanjin. It is anthologized. The anthology becomes a prescribed text for secondary students. Of the six years your son spends at secondary school, fifty minutes are devoted to poetry. The anthology is for a moment in your son’s hands. One book between two. It is an aust
erity measure. He does not see you waiting in the table of contents. They read Kipling. At work you are made redundant. Still not old, you read ever more. She gets promoted.

  Your wife’s father dies and bequeaths her the farm. She resigns with a large payout. Your son leaves home. You and she return to her roots to run a cattle farm. She tells you it might be good for you. You are so pleased to hear that she wants it to be good for you that you do not question the move. You know nothing about farming or cattle but you can write poetry anywhere, if indeed you can write it at all. You picture a new rural phase with rural themes. Wordsworth meets Ted Hughes and Les Murray. You aim to keep in touch with the literary community through the membership of committees. You plan to be a literary agitator. You will write angry but witty pieces denouncing government funding cuts to the Arts. “Your Tiny Handout Is Frozen.”

  The year that Madeline and I moved to Mansfield was the year that Andy and one of his friends bought a four-wheel drive to take around Australia. He was by then already a big and practical young man, good with his hands. All the girls liked him. He had not wanted to go on to university. He did not have any plans for the year after the four-wheel-drive trip. He told me this quietly as we shared a cup of tea on the verandah the day he drove up to Mansfield to say good-bye. It was, I thought, a defining moment in his development, and it occurred to me that it should have been acknowledged with some sort of going-away party. But we were new to the area and, other than the people Madeline knew from her youth, we did not know anyone to invite. He would have hated the idea anyway. He spoke quietly in a low, soothing, anxiety-free voice. He did not read. I thought that maybe he would when he got older. He could do everything else. He had declined several offers to play a number of sports at a professional level. Madeline and I were so proud of him, so proud of his balance. I suspect that he already thought I was mad.

  Mansfield was settled in the 1870s and soon became home to families of Irish and Scots settlers. Madeline’s family, of Scottish descent, had been there for generations. “The best ones had packed up and left,” she had always been told. They were farming people. Madeline had been the first to move down to Melbourne, but her father’s death and my unemployment convinced her that it was time to return. Her childhood, or what I knew of it, had not been an unhappy one. The whole Shire, and not just her father’s property, was full of memories for her, memories, and roads not taken.

  By the early nineteenth century the first European explorers had found the soil to be rich. There was an abundance of grass, excellent for grazing cattle or sheep. (Our neighbor grazed sheep.) But even so there was initially some reluctance to settle it. Perhaps it was the influential opinion of the then Surveyor-General of New South Wales, who described much of the region as “utterly useless for every purpose of civilized man.” Madeline said time stands still in Mansfield. Her family was born and died there, so it had not stood still for them. Something I refrained from pointing out. Andy and I had only been there once.

  Madeline’s father had employed a young, newly married neighbor of his to assist him with the running of the farm, and on our arrival Madeline and I immediately appointed him manager of the farm. Her father had needed only his physical assistance, but I needed a full-time tutor. His name was Neil Mahoney. In his early thirties, he was the youngest of a large family, large enough to spare him from working his parents’ property. His wife was almost ten years younger than him and, within a year of his becoming our manager, was expecting their second child. Madeline had heard that it had been difficult for Neil to find a wife because the Mahoneys had too many sons for their acreage. It was said they would overgraze. Two older Mahoney boys had left Mansfield for Melbourne only to return, having been unable either to find or hold on to jobs. Now they were both married and, together with Neil’s father and an older sister’s husband, they all worked the Mahoney farm.

  Neil was patient with me, patient in his explanations and his demonstrations. In return I was honest with him. I told him I was a poet who had tried to support himself and his family as a clerk. I was also an occasional essayist, I told him. (This was not completely untrue. I had written one unpublished essay titled “Critical Theory as a Metaphor for Illness.”) I tried to be unafraid of my mistakes or at least faithful to them. I had never been a farmer before and was not meant to know the things he was teaching me. But despite this I still had to fight the feeling that he thought I was a fool. He watched me.

  It was not anything that he said, but I felt a little uncomfortable with him. It was an unease that never really disappeared completely. Each time I felt uncomfortable in my role as a farmer, I would force myself to write something, even if it was just a letter to a newspaper. I composed verse in my head while examining the fences with Neil or hay feeding the cattle during winter. I learned that, despite the rain, it was too cold and dark in the winter for the grass to grow. We needed the grass to grow to feed the cattle to support ourselves. Neil worried about the weather and the grass all the time, but I never did. After all, if the grass did not grow, no one could fairly blame me. Madeline could not blame me. I did not think she could blame me.

  She found in me something to blame when I returned from the town one day with three kittens. They were a gift for her. I had bought them from the younger sister of the bored and sullen teenage girl with scrambled-egg hair who worked at the Welcome Mart. Where the older girl at the Welcome Mart had made a weapon of her adolescence, the younger girl had not yet given up on adults and would talk with them in the street. She would even offer them her kittens for sale.

  “People don’t keep kittens in the country—not here,” Madeline told me when I surprised her with them in a canvas bag the young girl had thrown in at no extra cost.

  I thought she might warm to them if I left her alone with them. In the shed I found Neil cleaning a rifle. He seemed to know what he was doing, yet again. I knocked tentatively in order not to surprise him.

  “Is that your gun, Neil?”

  “No, it’s yours. It was your father-in-law’s.”

  “What do we need a gun for?”

  “For killing things.” He looked up at me.

  “Like what?”

  “Animals that need to be put down . . . cattle . . . all sorts of things. You just never know.”

  There was so much I did not know. What I knew was of no use to the people around me. Perhaps it was of no use to anyone. And I did not really know it. It was more that I had heard it. Lines, words, snatches of poems, came to me and then from me. I was merely a conduit for them. What did they have to do with me? Mostly they were not even my lines. I could be in a field and suddenly I would be unable to rid myself of Eliot or Wordsworth or Shakespeare. Increasingly, however, it was something from the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam. His lines, more than any, got me through the day. They hummed to me. Eventually I could not get rid of them.

  If you are voluntary, they let you keep your own clothes. This was the most obvious difference between the first and the second time. Another was that I did not know how I got there the first time. I was there when I woke up. I was lying on a bed with tubular steel railing around it. My pajamas, the sheets and the pillow cases were a standard blue, all with a Department of Health logo on them. The bed next to me was unmade. The mattress was covered in vinyl and had brass eyelets over which there was a thin metal gauze. Two beds down from me a man lay on his front, trying to fit all of his face on the Department of Health logo on his pillowcase. He wore blue pajamas too. We were not voluntary.

  I tried to remember how I got there but could not. I had been in the car with Madeline. She was driving. It was a long drive. We were going to Lake Eildon. The kittens slept huddled together in the backseat. Madeline turned off the radio after we had driven a short distance. I noticed she was not in her usual sloppy slacks but was instead wearing a dress. I remember she was wearing a brooch.

  “Why do you have your good clothes on?”

  She shrugged and kept her eyes on the road.


  “I had an uncle who used to tell us, ‘Always wear your worst clothes.’ ”

  “Why?” she asked without looking at me, still with her eyes on the road.

  “You have more of them. ‘Don’t be tempted into wearing your best clothes,’ he’d say. ‘Save them for a better occasion. If ever you find yourself wearing your best clothes, it means you’ve admitted to yourself that it’s never going to get any better than this.’ They buried him in his best clothes.”

  “That’s not true,” Madeline said, both hands on the wheel.

  “No, it is. I had an uncle and . . . he’s . . . he’s dead now. . . . But it’s like the title of that book by Yevtushenko, prose, not poetry, Don’t Die Before Your Death. Yevtushenko’s telling us to wear our best clothes before it’s too late. He’s got a remarkable spirit, that man. I met him, you know, in Melbourne.”

  “I know.”

  “Few years ago now. Told a great story. Well, more than one, but this one concerned a poor Russian peasant who tried to save what little money he had by training his horse to eat less and less each week. With every week the peasant fed his horse a little less than the previous week.

  “One day, his neighbor noticed him putting a piece of string around the horse’s stomach.

  “ ‘What are you doing?’ he asked the poor peasant.

  “ ‘I am training my horse not to eat so much, to work on less and less food.’

  “‘That’s madness! Both of you will come to a sorry end,’ the neighbor replied.

  “‘You think so. Look at this,’ the peasant said, removing the string from around the horse. ‘This is where the two sides of the string used to meet around his waist, and now—look!’ he said, letting the surplus string dangle in the breeze before adding with pride, ‘And he still works!’