reading

http://blog.syracuse.com/shelflife/2008/09/in_memoriam_16.html

a friend emailed me a few days ago with some kind words about something i'd written, something about an author who died recently. in his email he sent me a link to a small story about a writer i think of as maybe the finest poet our country has, about how he has finished writing. i didn't plan to write so much about folks dying, but i can't control the fact that they do. the women in my family would tell you it happens in threes. clusters. i suppose that's just how our minds work, clumping things together to make meaning, but still, it feels painfully unfair for two people like these to leave so close together. and i want to write a little something here because although mostly i've said my piece about this poet, i suppose i want to say a little more.

hayden carruth was 87 when he died this week. that's a pretty good age, i think, and i'm pretty sure he thought so, too, although most folks wouldn't say no to a little more time. the paper said he'd been having strokes for a while and although none of that is really my business, i read it and wondered how he felt. a mind like his having little fits, smashing bits of itself out of spite or fear or whatever it is that causes a brain to go that way. for most folks strokes cause a flaking off of things. memories. abilities. ways to connect one part of the world to another. some can read but not write. think but not speak. and for someone who spent a good part of his life crammed full of words, i would imagine that might feel like dissolving. i would be petulant. i would whine. i would give in and up.

but there in the paper- the online version of it anyway which is at the top of this post- was a little video of hayden reading one of those poems i love so much. "ray". it is a long time since i'd heard him read and according to the paper it was his last reading. there he was on a stage. wheelchair. something helping him sip at the air, turning him to darth vader. someone finding and turning pages for him, putting the book under a contraption that allowed him to read the words, his words. and he read those words just the way it sounds in my head. you can hear how much one person can love another person right there in all those words. you can really hear it like a thick hum going through the whole thing. and then at the end he tells this little story. it's just some funniness about ray, about how clumsy he always was and it just about broke my heart to hear it because i can't imagine many things better than hearing ray tell hayden almost anything and hearing hayden answer back. anything. really.

but what i like about the story he tells is this. i wanted to meet ray carver a long time ago. i wanted to tell him how his own words had done more to shape how i think about writing than anyone else i could think of, but he was gone before i could get my courage up. and i always imagined him a certain way. i wanted him to be a good man. it wouldn't matter, really, because his writing is good no matter what, and it's not fair for me to want something like that or expect it, but i did. and then there's hayden carruth telling everyone who can hear him that ray carver was exactly this kind of man. just exactly. and if you can't tell from hayden carruth's poems what kind of man he himself was, you sure can tell from this little video. you know exactly who he is.