Learned By Heart: On Living with a Poem by Charles Wright
A poem memorized in common becomes part of a life together.
By Chelsea Wagenaar
As the Train Rolls Through, I Remember an Old Poem
By Charles Wright
Well, here we are again, old friend, Ancient of Days,
Eyeball to eyeball.
I blink, of course,
I blink more than ten thousand times.
Dear ghost, I picture you thus, eventually like
St. Francis in his hair shirt,
naked, walking the winter woods,
Singing his own song in the tongue of the troubadours.
What strange irony–to not remember the thing you’d remembered so well as to quote it in an alternate state of consciousness.
A couple years ago, I had a university student with a severe disease of the colon. It sent her to the hospital often, wracked with pain, unable to eat. The longest and most brutal of her hospital stays overlapped with the Covid-19 pandemic, and this meant her family could not be with her. No one could visit. All her nurses and doctors wore masks, so she did not even have the comfort of a warm, open face to tell her all would be well, to ask if she needed anything. When she had the strength, she’d email her professors with updates. I pictured her alone in a bright sterile room, looking out her high hospital window over Chicago, her eyes large and entreating as ever, her skin pale and sallow.
With no visitors and no energy to read or write, she explained, she returned to the words she’d memorized as a child. Other children had watched Nickelodeon. But she copied Tennyson and Dickinson poems into a notebook over and over until she’d memorized them. She knew many verses of scripture by heart. This is how she spent her hospitalized days, turning over a few lines, whittling a question in her mind until it was smooth, a comfort.
When I received her emails, I was reminded of the time my husband Mark had outpatient ankle surgery. When the surgery was over, and I went to his room to see him, he had hardly emerged from anesthesia. I greeted him, put my hand on his leg, and tried not to feel nauseated about a speck of blood I spied on the blanket. He looked at me, his eyes vague and unrecognizing. “Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,” he said.
I still tease him about this, but really it astonished me, even more so when I asked him about it later. “Why did you quote Wallace Stevens to me in the hospital room?” He had no memory of this. What strange irony–to not remember the thing you’d remembered so well as to quote it in an alternate state of consciousness. “What did I say?” he asked. I reported the line. Without missing a beat, he supplied the next: “the maker’s rage to order words of the sea.”
As usual, I can count on Stevens to illuminate. Perhaps that line elucidates an impulse behind the need to memorize: it’s a rage for order. The memorized text imposes one possible order in the language of the mind. What to say? Here’s something.
Another poet’s reading of Stevens’ “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” inspired Mark to begin a poetry reading of his own with a recitation of a poem by Charles Wright. The idea horrified me: so much potential to go wrong. It put me in mind of all the piano recitals of my childhood, the pressure to memorize the piece for performance. I loved piano, but I loathed that custom. I was a terrible memorizer. All muscle memory. I’d spend the whole recital up to my turn practicing with my fingers on my thighs in a cold sweat. I’d deliver the piece in a rush, the manner stilted and awkward, as though the next measure would pop in my brain like a bubble of gum. Finally, at my senior piano recital, my teacher acknowledged that I played so much better with the music in front of me that she broke her rule and let me have the music.
“I’m going to recite ‘As the Train Rolls Through,’” Mark announced to me before the reading. “I already have it memorized anyway.”
“That’s a bad idea,” I told him.
The reading was at Paschall’s, an upstairs bar on the downtown square in Denton, Texas. It had a speakeasy feel, floor to ceiling built-ins crammed with books, walls painted in dark greens and jades, leather sofas, velvet drapes, walnut furniture with clawfoot legs. The bartender might be wearing a bowtie or suspenders. Heavy cut glass bowls on the bar top held mint and sliced limes. Nothing was sticky or reeked of chlorine, as in other bars we frequented.
It was a small space, so readings there always felt both full and intimate, though the crowd might be only twenty people. When it was Mark’s turn to read, I was already aflutter with piano recital anxiety, and I wasn’t even the one trying to recite a poem.
He walked up to the stage area by the long westward windows. There was no platform, no microphone. He wore a light blue t-shirt with the word “no” printed in script across the whole front of it with the exception of the very bottom corner, close to the hem, which bore a single “yes.” He’d found the shirt on a trip we took to Washington D.C. back in our Charlottesville days. “It reminds me of the Wallace Stevens line,” he’d said, “‘after the final no there comes a yes.’”
I sat toward the back of the crowd. Mark cleared his throat and met my eyes. “This is called, ‘As the Train Rolls Through, I Remember an Old Poem.’” He drew a breath and tilted his head back to look at the ceiling in thought. The moment stretched out like a slinky, but it was one of those cheap plastic party favor slinkies that stretched too far and was never the same again, marred by a kink in the plastic.
And that was it—he forgot the opening line. It took about fifteen seconds for me to be overcome with silent laughter—the panicky, irrepressible kind that I got in church as a child—because it really happened. The momentary amnesia I’d dreaded with near-worshipful attention at every piano recital really happened to him. I tried to laugh quietly into my palms, but my shoulders shook and sweat beaded my temples. Mark made a funny comment about the hubris of reciting a poem in front of other people and moved on, characteristically unfazed and unembarrassed.
I excused myself out to the sidewalk beneath the blister of the sinking sun and laughed until my tears streaked mascara in black rivulets down my blotchy face.
I knew Mark had memorized it, and perhaps in the manner of early love, I did so too to feel closer to him.
When Mark and I were students at the University of Virginia, we memorized that poem, “As the Train Rolls Through, I Remember an Old Poem.” It’s a sestet by Charles Wright, who was Mark’s teacher. I don’t remember us ever deciding to do this together, but the poem was typed and taped on the wall in Mark’s apartment, where I read it like a talisman. Somehow without asking, I knew Mark had memorized it, and perhaps in the manner of early love, I did so too to feel closer to him.
A sestet is six lines, usually the last six lines of a sonnet. Charles wrote an entire book of these, which is like writing a whole collection of poems missing their first half, each poem a fragmented whole. I admit I have a penchant for short poems, this often being the way I evaluate a book on a store’s shelf: I open it, read the shortest poem in the pages, and from there decide whether to keep it or put it back. A short lyric poem that is somehow clear and mysterious at the same time, with a tinge of the wistful, and a fresh image thrown in for good measure? That’s my favorite kind, which is why my copy of Sestets is so dog-eared.
When I was twenty, just beginning my poetry-writing life, much of the poem puzzled me. (And indeed, some of it still does, but I now think it is a virtue of the good poem to successfully avoid being reduced to explanation.) Could you really begin a poem as colloquially as with the word “well”? I certainly couldn’t begin any of my undergraduate essays that way.
And in what sense is the speaker really “eyeball to eyeball” with that “old friend, Ancient of Days,” if he also must “picture you thus?” If you’re eyeball to eyeball, you don’t have to picture: you see. It is the mysterious posture of faith, of course, to know that which you haven’t seen, but the literality of the Holy Spirit staring contest image tripped me up. And yet it’s really no contest: the speaker blinks, “of course,” blinks “more than ten thousand times.” I see the blinking now as Charles doing what he does so well, bringing a touch of humor in the unassuming colloquial expression face to face with the metaphysical. The innocence of the blinking, the suggested childlike nature of the faith, feels revelatory when juxtaposed with the wistfulness of returning, again, to the desire for the invisible to be visible.
Mark had a standing weekly appointment with Charles in office hours, which he missed for nothing. Usually it consisted of Mark bringing in the poem he was working on and asking Charles for advice. Charles would read the poem in his quiet, inscrutable way, uttering not a word of praise nor criticism—if anything, something self-deprecating about why Mark should potentially ignore his advice—and then cross out at least one-third of the lines in the poem. “Every poem wants to be one-third of the way shorter,” he was famous for saying. My poetry education at UVA was seasoned with Charles Wright’s adages. “If you go in your backyard and it’s just your backyard, you may as well crack open another Budweiser,” he’d often quip to classes, though I was nineteen years old, drinking whatever was a notch cheaper than Budweiser. Certainly none of us had a backyard—we lived in dorms, or apartments, or old houses with too many roommates—but in the future, in my Texas years, the advice would serve my writing well.
Every now and then, Mark would try to convince me to come to Charles’s office hours with him. Not for any particular reason—just to be there, to meet Charles. I usually refused. Charles wasn’t my teacher; he only taught graduate students, and everything I knew of Charles came by way of Mark and Lisa Russ Spaar, my advisor, who had once been Charles’s student herself. I suppose I was a little in awe of Charles, and maybe shy, but mostly I think something in my upbringing recoiled at the idea of showing up where I hadn’t really been invited. The way I saw it, Mark didn’t have the authority to invite me to Charles’s office hours. But I conceded and went with him, once or twice.
On one such occasion, Mark brought along an advance copy of Sestets. The book was due out soon from FSG, and Mark had written to the press early to ask for an advance copy. It had come in the mail that morning, and Mark planned to ask Charles to sign it.
In Charles’s office, I felt awkward, as usual, though in hindsight, I see that I was wrong to feel this way. Charles was always happy to see me, which you could tell only by the fact that he smiled and greeted me personally by name, an almost lavish display of welcome for this reserved, unassuming man. In later years, whenever we saw Charles at an event or a reading, he always did the same, usually before he even said hello to Mark.
“Hey Charles,” Mark said, slipping the galley copy of Sestets from his leather bag. “I hope you don’t mind, but I brought this. I’m planning to review it for a magazine. Do you think you could sign it for me?”
Charles regarded the slender galley copy in front of him with an almost stricken look. It was pale and paperback, whereas the official version of the book, not due out for a few months, would be black and hardback, with a minimalist cover bearing nothing but the title in white lettering. Charles reached for the book and flipped the pages, the concerned look still on his face. I could feel Mark grow nervous that he’d committed an offense.
“Where did you get this?” Charles finally asked.
“I wrote to the press to ask for it,” Mark said, as though confessing to a parent.
“I haven’t even seen a copy of this yet,” said Charles, but his voice was light with humor. He signed it “first signed, last laugh,” and indeed, we have laughed about it for years.
And then I saw them: train tracks bisected our street just two houses down.
When we moved from Texas to Valparaiso, Indiana, we rented our house sight-unseen. I’d seen pictures, and we had friends who’d rented the home previously and vouched for the location, the beauty of the yard, and the reliable landlord, but we did not see it ourselves until we pulled up with the moving truck and our one-year-old daughter, Eloise. It was an old G.I. home, a two-story brick with a basement, each floor a perfect square. And it was small. Staggeringly small. I could not open the refrigerator door and the dishwasher at the same time, and it was simply impossible for Mark and I to both occupy the kitchen. We couldn’t fit our dresser or our mattress up the stairs, so we sold the mattress, but the dresser, which I didn’t want to part with because I’d had it since I was a teenager, simply sat in our driveway for a year, collecting snow like a hedge. (It is now in my children’s room and holds all their clothing, the mold and pollen of its foray as lawn ornament long since scrubbed away.)
But the small house wasn’t even the most shocking part of our arrival. There we were, innocently unloading our belongings and stacking them in the front yard because the rooms were too small to accommodate the boxes. People were driving by slowly, eyeing the teetering towers of cardboard, thinking there was a yard sale. Eloise had plucked her plastic grocery cart from the truck and was running it at breakneck speeds up and down the sidewalk. And then I saw them: train tracks bisected our street just two houses down. Dread flooded me when I glimpsed the shining rails, a rush of heat to my face. Soon enough, I knew, that first horn would shatter the sounds of our happy relief after two days of driving from Texas. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell Mark.
Mark, my insomniac husband. Mark, who would awaken if I turned over in bed too abruptly and be unable to fall back to sleep for hours. God forbid I hummed in a dream. He would often suffer weeks without four consecutive hours of sleep, his anguish brought into sharper relief by the fact that I could sleep anywhere, any time of day, sitting, standing, no matter. I was his perfect foil in sleep. How would he survive with a train blasting its horn fifty yards away at all hours of the day and night?
In the sestet, the train triggers memory of an old poem—a comment on writing, I suppose, that all poems are in response to the ones that have come before. The thunder of the train’s approach as it “rolls through” is the initiating domino in a cascading collapse of thoughts. The emphasis is on the repetition of the event, a repetition that is a fact of living in a town crosshatched with train tracks, which is to say, anywhere in northwest Indiana. When a friend stayed in an Airbnb near our home, he complained that the Airbnb was in a bad location because he could hear the train at night. You can hear the train anywhere in this state, I told him. The only difference is the volume.
Mark survived, but what I remember is how the train plumbed my own memory, unearthing bits and trinkets that floated to the surface. Once, walking our dog to the open, grassy block just over the tracks, I heard the horn sound a mile or so off. We were right at the railroad crossing, and I paused a moment, both feet on the rail. The reverberations grew beneath us, an industrial wave swelling and swelling toward land, buoying me at the foamy crest. When the wave crashed, I was ten years old, in a new dress, a maroon gingham print with flowers. My shoes were navy and comically large for my small fifth grade frame. My father and I had escaped, through a side door, his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration. We spent a while lining pennies from his pocket along the cold beams of the nearby railroad tracks until a distant horn signaled the train’s approach. After it hurtled past, the two of us approached the tracks again to collect our treasure: the pennies flattened into oblongs, unstamped of their monetary traces, shining like flecks of mica in a riverbed.
After a while, Mark and I failed to wake to the train at all, its sound a mere undercurrent in our dreams, like wind or rain. One night, as I stumbled to our crying toddler’s room in the wee hours, I glimpsed it, a film with the sound turned off. A pulsing shine behind three lawns of snow-laden hemlocks, quiet as stealth. I blink more than ten thousand times. I’d woken to Eloise’s nocturnal wailing, but not to the train’s horn.
I have no words but the ones we’ve carved our lives into, and these will do.
Some things we inadvertently know by heart: jingles, ad slogans, the billboards on the way to work, terrible pop songs we loathe but sing anyway. These are the houseflies of the mind: permanent residents, always knocking around at some window of thought. Not exactly welcome.
And some things we memorize with a form of intention, however unrealized it may be at first. Phone numbers of beloveds, songs we love, the Lord’s Prayer, favored driving routes, a recipe: these things we know from habits and devotion. Most of us can still assemble the lines of a poem we memorized to recite for class in grade school. As a child, I had to memorize dozens and dozens of verses for a church program, and while I can’t remember reciting them at church, I see clearly my grandmother seated on my bedroom floor with me, patiently helping me parse them phrase by phrase. These latter texts, the chosen ones, are given space in the mind the way a newborn is welcomed home—with a kind of pride, with expectancy to see how it will grow and become an integral member of the home. These texts are companions in the loneliest hours.
Charles’s sestet isn’t the only poem Mark and I have memorized in common, but it is the one we most frequently quote. At one end of the poem is my mind, and at the other end of it, Mark’s. If we, married, are at times like neighboring houses, the poem is a string stretched from one upper window to its next-door match, a string that might be tugged, that might pulley a note from one sill to the other. Well, here we are again, old friend, I can say, when he’s poured a finger of rye for us to sip in the kitchen as the kids bicker in the next room. Eyeball to eyeball, he’ll supply. Dear ghost, I picture you thus, he will say on cool mornings when the mist clings close to the meadow near our house. The lines never change, but they teem with flux and nuance, an ineffable intimacy. A public language we’ve turned private. I have no words but the ones we’ve carved our lives into, and these will do.
Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently The Spinning Place, winner of the 2018 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her first, Mercy Spurs the Bone, was selected by Philip Levine to win the 2013 Philip Levin Prize. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of North Texas, and currently teaches in North Carolina. Recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review and The Massachusetts Review.