And What With the Blunders
This afternoon, in a brief respite from my job writing about Weddell Seals, thermoclines and the Least Weasel, I dallied with my wife Leslie for a minute or two in an epigrammatic exchange via Skype. These days she's slaving away at National Geographic and I at Discovery. She is making a film about transgendered people. I am doing the North American version of "Frozen Planet," a series on the Arctic and the Antarctic that is supposed to be the follow-up to "Life." My wife and I therefore have much to talk about at night, since our subject matter overlaps in so many ways.
Anyway, I was supposed to be up and at my computer at 8 this morning, but what with my back problems and the powerful meds I have to take to make life run more smoothly, I overslept. I wish I could say I leapt out of bed at 9:15, but the truth is I don't do much leaping these days. I do slow rolls and lazy scampers, followed when necessary by a graceless swing to the vertical, usually accompanied by a grunt and wheeze. The grunt and wheeze are not an aesthetic choice; they erupt from me involuntarily, as a consequence of the sharp pain that always accompanies my smallest shift of position these days.
But I digress.
Because I was in a rush, I decided I would only make one cup's worth of coffee in my Chemex pot. Normally, I make enough for three cups, which is my euphemism for three mugs, in reality about six cups. I do this because as of about a year ago my wife started drinking coffee again, after years of drinking Fortnum and Mason's Fortmason blend. As you might expect, this has had concussive effects on the morning ritual that I'd been doing the same way for 10 years. I eventually adjusted, however, and these days I make "3 cups" so I can have one, Leslie can have one, and there's a little left over if someone wants more -- or, in warm weather, if I have a hankering for an iced coffee with a few drops of vanilla extract, one of the true pleasures in life.
But this is not, as I've already mentioned, the way I did things this morning. In a mild panic, or in as much of a panic as you can be in with a milligram of dilaudid hitting your system, I made an executive decision: there was no time to make coffee for anyone else. And that is what I did.
About three hours later, at about noon, I finished revising my script and recording the scratch narration for the revised lines, and I sent off both to my editor. It was only at this point that I realized I was the only one in the house. Leslie was not in her office, she was not in the bedroom where she sometimes works, and the car was not in its spot in the driveway. Clearly she had left. And I soon began to wonder if perhaps she had been just a little peeved not to have found any coffee in the Chemex pot when she came downstairs. It wasn't like her to leave without saying goodbye. I started to fear the worst. I thought I might be in trouble.
Then I saw that she was "online" in my list of Skype contacts, so I sent her a message: Where did you go? Her reply was terse: "Where's my coffee?" I replied with a kind of abbreviated and far more lame version of the story I told above. At which point she typed: "This is very sad for me."
I agreed. It was sad. So I replied, in my best impression of Percy Bysshe Shelley, "O Sadness!" And she: "Sadnesses!"
I now knew that I was not in trouble, or at least not in much trouble. And so I wrote, "There are so many little sadnesses that it doesn't matter which of them is sadness."
Now, I wish I could say that Leslie caught my playful allusion to a Kenneth Patchen poem. She's been writing poetry lately, taking poetry classes and submitting poems to journals. She is, shall we say, gung ho about it. So I thought maybe she'd run across this terrific poet and had read this poem which seems to be called "And What With the Blunders."
But instead she wrote, "I expected you to eat the meatloaf." This was a reference to something I'd said the previous evening about having the slice of leftover meatloaf for lunch the next day.
So I knew what she meant. Still, it felt like a non sequitur and suggested she didn't know the poem after all.
Soon after this our Skype conversation ended as they almost always do, with her telling me she has to go. It used to bother me that she was always the one to say this and I never was. I even took to saying it randomly and completely untruthfully just to keep things even. Eventually, though, the pettiness of this became distasteful to me, and I let it go. Mostly.
Anyway, I thought it might be nice to send Leslie a copy of the poem I'd unsuccessfully alluded to. Maybe she'd like it. Maybe she'd admire my clever appropriation of its most famous line. Maybe that would balance out the mild pique she felt at my not having made her any coffee this morning.
So I did a Google search, but astonishingly, after 10 minutes (which is a long time to Google search) I'd come up empty. Plenty of web sites quoted that final line of the poem, often incorrectly. Usually they were web sites dedicated to discussions of death and suicide, which I thought was odd. But the text of "And What With the Blunders" was nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, I persevered. I was stubborn. I would not accept that nowhere on the whole World Wide Web could one find the text of one of the really good poems of a really good writer. In my travels I found the poem Ferlinghetti wrote in memory of Patchen when he died. I found some guy who had set the poem to music, sort of -- but only that last line! I found discussion groups where high school girls debated the merits of individual vs. group suicide via a vigorous and often rancorous debate over this one line. But though I searched for another fifteen minutes, I failed to find the poem itself.
As it happens, my dog Ollie likes to stay in the basement with me during the warm months -- and we have had a few warm days recently, so he's here. In fact, he's here now as I write. But earlier today as I contemplated my misfortune, I turned around to see him staring at me happily and wagging his tail. Once he had my attention, he got up and walked over to a bookcase and stood there staring and wagging. And then suddenly it hit me: I actually owned several books of Patchen's poems, and there they were, on the bookshelf.
Now, I'm not insane. I know Ollie wasn't saying to me, "Hey moron, you just wasted half an hour looking for something online that's sitting right in front of you in actual physical form." I also know that the back door is right next to the bookcase -- the same back door I often use to take him for a walk. He was probably angling for a promenade. Still, it set me back a bit to realize that my first move hadn't been to look for the book.
Okay, so this could easily degenerate into a kvetch-fest (something I've been known to indulge in from time to time) about modern technology and analog vs. digital and blah blah blah. I could talk about the fact that I finally went and bought an iPad (and love it) and have been trying to figure out a way to write on it -- an app that synchs automatically with my desktop. I could get into the whole debate over whether the iPad is just for content consumption or if it can be used for content creation. Perhaps I could spend a sentence or two talking about this disturbing word "content," which you hear a lot more these days than "art," "poetry," and the like. I could do all this and more, and you might even find some of what I say provocative or interesting. Far more likely you would be bored to tears and words like "tiresome" and "garrulous" and "prattle" would spring to mind. Worse yet, I would bore myself into a state of blithering.
So let me just say I think there's a moral in this story somewhere. I don't quite know what it is, but maybe you do.
In the meantime, here is the poem in question, read by the poet himself. I hope you like it.