The Poet I Dated Never Wrote About Me
He wrote odes to rivers and buses; I checked every stanza for myself.
For two years I dated a man who wrote a nineteen line ode to the number 46 bus, and not one syllable about me.
I want to be precise about the inventory, because I kept one. In the time we were together, Theo wrote about: the Fox River in three seasons, his grandfather's radio and its dial of dead stations, a heron he saw exactly once, the bus, a peach he ate in a parking lot in 2011, the sound the porch made in wind, and a glove some stranger dropped on Halsted Street. The glove got two drafts. The peach got published.
I proofread all of it. That was my seat at the table. He would hand me pages still warm from the printer and watch my face while I read, and I would feel his attention on me like sun through a window, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that he was not watching me. He was watching the poem land.
I checked every stanza for myself. I am not proud of this, but I am done lying about it. Every new poem, my eyes went down the page like a customs officer. Any woman's hands? Any dark hair? Any kitchen that could be our kitchen?
Once he left a draft on the desk titled Clara, which is my name, and I stood there with my heart going like a fist on a door, and I read it... and it was about his great aunt Clara's funeral in 1988.
I laughed at dinner when I told him.
I laughed so I would not do the other thing.
"Would you want to be in a poem?" he asked, genuinely curious, fork in the air.
"Everyone wants to be in a poem," I said.
He nodded slowly, the way he did when a line was not working, and changed the subject, and I let him, and that was the whole conversation we ever had about it while we were together.
The night it broke, nothing dramatic happened, which is its own kind of sad. We came home from his reading at the bookstore on Clark, where he had premiered the glove poem, and a woman in the audience had actually put her hand over her mouth at the last line. On the walk home I heard myself say it, flat, like reading off a receipt.
"You never wrote about me."
He was quiet for half a block... Then he said, "I know."
That was all. Not an excuse, not a promise. I know. Two words with nothing after them, and inside that nothing I could hear everything I needed to, or thought I could.
We lasted five more weeks on momentum.
What I did next, I did out of spite, which I have since learned is a legitimate starting fuel. I decided that if no one was going to write about my life, it would have to be me, which sounds like a greeting card and felt like swallowing glass. I did not know how to begin, so I began the way beginners do, with a prompt I found one insomniac Tuesday: write about a gift you resented.
I wrote about the bus.
Nineteen lines, same as his, because spite is nothing if not petty, about what it is to sit beside a man on the number 46 and be jealous of it. Jealous of a bus. Of its rattle at the bridge, which he had rendered so tenderly that strangers in Ohio had read about it. The poem was bad. The second draft was less bad. Somewhere around the fifth draft it stopped being about him at all and started being about the specific loneliness of being loved next to, the way you can be somebody's whole home and never once be his subject.
I did not show anyone for a year... Then I did. That is a different story.
Here is the turn I did not see coming, and if you have been waiting for the part where he regrets me, this is not quite that, it is stranger.
Two years after we ended, a mutual friend texted me a photo of a book cover. Theo's first collection, out in April. I told myself I would not buy it, and then on a Saturday in April I stood in the poetry aisle doing the exact thing I used to do at his desk, running the index of first lines like a customs officer. Old reflex. No Clara. No dark hair. Relief and hurt arrived together, the way they do.
And then, page 61. A poem called Second Row.
It was about a woman at a reading, watching a man premiere a poem about a stranger's glove. It was about her face, which he describes doing arithmetic. It was about how he could not write her, not would not... could not, and then the lines I have not managed to forget, about how every poem he had ever finished was an elegy, how he only knew how to write things after they were gone: the grandfather, the heron, the peach, the year, the river as it was.
He only ever wrote about what he had lost. The whole time I was searching his poems for my name, I was the one thing he still had.
I stood in the aisle a long time. The bookstore played whatever bookstores play, something with brushes on a snare drum, and I read Second Row four times, and I understood two things at once, which is one more than I could carry.
The first: it had never been indifference. Putting me in a poem would have been putting me in past tense, and he was superstitious in the only direction that mattered. Every subject he ever chose was already a ghost. He was not withholding tribute.
He was refusing to bury me.
The second: it did not change my answer. Because I had needed to be seen while I was in the room, not commemorated after I left it, and a man who can only love you fluently in retrospect is a museum, not a house. I put the book back on the shelf face out, which is the kindest thing I know how to do in a bookstore, and I went home to my own desk.
The poem about the bus took me three years, on and off, which no longer strikes me as slow. Somewhere in there it turned into the thing I actually meant, and writing it did more for me than any conversation we never had, the way writing toward a wound tends to. When it was finally published, in a journal small enough that the acceptance email came from a person's first name, I sat with the news for an hour before I told anyone.
It is about the 46. About the rattle at the bridge, which he was right about, he was right about the bus all along, and about a woman who checked two years of stanzas for proof she existed and then finally wrote the proof herself.
Some afternoons I still ride that route, out of loyalty to the version of me who took it home from his apartment counting stanzas. The bus rattles at the bridge, exactly as advertised. I get off a stop early and walk the long way, and somewhere on that walk I usually catch myself doing the thing I do now instead of searching indexes.
Saying my own name to myself, quietly, like a first line.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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