In this week’s poem, a speaker describes what happens when he runs into an old therapist in a store. In a few moments, a whole story of how this person helped him through a difficult time is unlocked.
The word “stanza” comes from the Italian word for a stopping place or a room, so it might be said that any poem in stanzas leads us from room to room. Here, each quatrain leads us to a different complication or layer of the story.
You might note also how the sentences of the poem are strung across the line breaks and stanza breaks. The poet teaches us how to read the poem and what words to emphasize by how it falls down the page.
Robert Farnsworth has taught writing and literature for many years at Bates College. He published two collections from Wesleyan University Press: “Three or Four Hills and a Cloud” (1982) and “Honest Water” (1989), and, most recently, “Rumored Islands” (2010) from Harbor Mountain Press.
Well Enough Alone
By Robert Farnsworth
For M.
So when my melancholy turned
personal, edged with resentments
my intimates were now having
to bear, I began to schedule
afternoons with you. The stories
you prompted from me weren’t
all that different from those I’d
always with a mordant smile
told to friends who cared to listen;
but—as of the spheres, perhaps—
mightn’t there be a music of the past—
the arbitrary & the intended
assembled in necessity’s melody,
that once heard might be
comprehended, even sung
back into the wind for comfort?
That’s partly what I hoped.
Though I began to wake at two
with unfinishable thoughts:
Only a man who’d been secure in his
mother’s love could…what? Could
what? I had never done just this
kind of confessional thing before,
but your alert, steadfast, if not
exactly sympathetic interest
did gradually calm and clear
my reflections, helped me render
the past in primary colors.
Still I would not give up that wire
Of skeptical attention, that peculiar
Relish and suspicion I have always
kept for and from the world.
So when I saw you today in the market,
I was torn—there was an urge
to tap you on the shoulder, thank you
for your ministrations those four
years ago, but something prevented me,
maybe some instinctive code of conduct,
and also—yes—that I’d never really
gotten over your knowing judgments
of my laughter as a symptom.
Ok, perhaps it sometimes was
a nervous parry, but why—I still
wanted to ask—can’t mirth be heard
to embrace, not just avoid?
Mightn’t even real joy need salt
or strong pepper? Must I always now
know irony as armor, never arrow?
Inquiries have methods, I know.
It was enough to feel grateful.
So I kept a few aisles between us,
A distance we could call professional.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Robert Farnsworth. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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