ANOTHER SOLITUDE

In 1979, much dying lay ahead of me, of the usual sort in growing up, and I could have no accompaniment in that. But another solitude also haunted me, with a different silence that taught me, eventually, to take some pity.

This is not the sublime silence spawned by vacant mesas, nor the silence emanating from one engrossed by tying the last knot in a new fishing fly or translating ancient Greek. Partly, it's the silence that surrounds the windowsill or the pebble, the silence punctuating each of the lonely masturbator's breaths trailing from a uneventful orgasm on a sunlit bed. It's a silence in words that somehow can't change and better the mirror, the silence in the half-opener of doors.

I encountered it first, most profoundly, in Salt Lake City, in the presence of another graduate student-poet, Drummond, an enormous man—perhaps three hundred pounds—bearded and spectacled, who when he moved seemed about to bound down an incline as the last of his brakes burned away. Drummond possessed a voice as faint as the belling of glass broken at a great distance, and he sometimes used this voice to admirable effect. In a group gathered for Friday afternoon beers, someone could ask, "Drummond, why are you smiling?" and his reply, "Because I feel good," delivered on an ironically resigned whisper, could bring us all to laughter. Drummond's poems, which had been widely published, exhibited facility, perhaps even real talent. They were always "disturbing," as we liked to say in the workshop then, suffused with a self-mutilating disgust and a serrated rage at female figures—the inspiration of dismembered muses.

Everyone, I suppose, assumed the source of this art, but many ignored their assumptions, allowing for a distinction between the author and his creation. Nonetheless, the women in the group, who laughed at Drummond's occasional jokes, winced at his poems. They all veered from any likelihood of being alone with him.

Some months after Drummond and I had first met, I invited him out for drinks, an evening as single men if not exactly cruising for women, at least ogling them. On this and several subsequent outings, we ended up talking mostly of poetry, he sitting on the bar stool beside me like a vast black sack that held a groggy stirring. I took an interest in this and visited him at his apartment, three rooms vacant save for two chairs, a coffee table which he used for a desk, and a mattress. He smoked languorously, wearily, constantly, letting the vaporous coils, I now realize, fill the desolation that did not soothe. At certain moments of more personal conversation—about women and the past, for instance—he paused and did not, perhaps could not, continue.

At those junctures, he seemed about to reveal a great secret to me. And I began to fancy he saw in me one who could understand. But fear restrained him. Carefully, I urged him toward the verges of what I started to think was a necessary and useful confession—my strategy derived from coaxing childhood friends into confiding so that I might offer advice and appear wise. Drummond didn't belong to his surroundings, I surmised, just like the Japanese Sika deer or the Himalayan Tahrs caged at Liberty Park. He could tell me why, and I could help him, if only he would speak his silence instead of inhabiting it.

One weekend in the early spring, he and I went camping in the canyons in southern Utah. I recall us hiking along high red walls, streaked by seeping water, and my voice becoming as soft as his. We visited Dead Horse Point, a parched tongue of plateau bordered by sheer, eroded banks that plunge toward a river hundreds of feet below. The place earned its name because its geological character made it perfect for penning herds of captured horses from which the best could then be taken. One day, however, someone—thieves?—either fled the Point in a hurry or decided not to bother with the culls captive there and so abandoned them to stare at the sun and the river until they perished of thirst.

Drummond and I camped somewhere along that river. We listened to it long after its current faded into dark, and then we bedded down. Hours later, I woke to pee and found the tent faintly illuminated by the moon, and beside me Drummond's vast silhouette seated cross-legged. He muttered that he'd been insomniac for years and that he craved a cigarette but hadn't tried to go outside for fear of rousing me. I told him to light up, and he did, there in the tent, while I, uneasy with him in my waking, crawled out.

Later, we smoked beside the river, not talking. (It felt wiser not to speak.) We slept, finally, and when we returned to Salt Lake, I deemed the trip good, though I slumped before the view in my apartment window, oddly exhausted. Shortly thereafter, a poem by Drummond appeared on the week's worksheets. Rather than offering his typical imagery—disfigured secretaries, humiliated butchers and truckers, the resounding vacancy of darkened, reflective storefronts—it featured abandoned horses dying of thirst, the cruel taunt that was the river flowing; and its narrator struggled with his desire to murder his brother who lay sleeping beside him in the tent.

I left Salt Lake several months later, and the next year, Drummond withdrew from the University after he began stalking a graduate student, who reported him to the authorities. Mortified, apparently, he confronted her in front of several of their colleagues in the teaching assistants' office, yanking his voice into a unprecedented bellow, throwing his arms out wildly, lunging about as though he might strike her. Almost immediately, he packed and drove back to West Virginia, so I was told, and neither I, nor anyone from the workshop whom I've asked over the years, has happened upon one of his poems in even the smallest of the little magazines.

Drummond's eyes hovering over my sleep, the knife in his pocket (or at least in the pocket of the speaker of his poem)—obviously, I couldn't distinguish the man from his art. Without commenting on his poem in the workshop, I put a brisk, broad cordiality between us and never socialized with him again. Later, back East myself, beside stacked cardboard boxes I’d taped together to form an armoire, my memory sometimes banged against his remoteness, though it provided little more than a presumptuous comfort: at least my soul, like a wet, warped chunk of plywood splayed at the edges, was in better shape than his.

He was not, as I'd previously assumed, so nearly unreachable as he was, in his way, unanswerable. His art may have helped him, though it seemed then merely to cull him from nearly everyone else. Yet I didn’t escape his poem. His silhouette sits as one of the mountains I couldn't have fancied coming to when I'd fled home in pursuit of art. He persists in my West as much as tumbleweeds huddled in gullies, or dust that burns the nostrils and cramps the belly, as much as those stones on the dusk-lit path to Delicate Arch with which someone had spelled out Go Back!! and I, alone and suddenly scared by what in the sage around me might be watching, obeyed the warning.

Of all my muses, Drummond—coated with shadows—would recognize how much of the separating silence I still share, and do not share, with him. He is the one to whom I must not turn my back and doze.