Displaying the Fruits

i.e., Why we should answer our internal call to create beauty even though it won’t last forever and neither do we.

I had a friend. A good friend, named Kenneth Harrison, Jr., and he died almost three years ago. Of lung cancer. He was a poet. We went to grad school together at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, a perfectly good place to get your MFA. There was actually a group of five of us who were all the best of friends: Ken, me, Eve Jones, George Fortier, and Andrew Pryor. We called ourselves the Toughs—the Poetry Toughs—because after class, at night, we strode together across the grassy hills of campus in a group looking the opposite of tough.

Sometimes we got together on the weekends and did things like play The Sentence Game, which is an exquisite corpse-style parlor game where instead of passing around a tri-folded piece of paper taking turns drawing a head, torso and legs, you create a sentence. The folded paper is passed as the Sentence Caller says the parts of a sentence: adjective, noun, verb, object, prepositional phrase one more prepositional phrase. Then you unfold the papers and read them aloud, laughing uproariously at your sentences, with all their whimsy and inside jokes. 

Three of us--Eve, George, and I--all had little kids and spouses. Ken and Andrew were the bachelors. 

Ken had come from somewhere Northern and had, we could tell from his poems, had had a difficult raising. A father who was potentially a philanderer, potentially closeted and gay. 

Ken himself was never open about, well, very much in his life, at least with me. I think he was closest with Eve, and so she probably knows things about him that none of the rest of us did. Even just those few years ago, 2006, people were less open. Were they? I think so. But also, we met in the world of words and paper and were happiest as a group living there. Or I was.

Before we were friends, in one of our very first classes of our MFA, a professor embarrassed him badly by taking one of his poems apart on the board and inviting the class to rearrange it in a way that made “more sense.” This exercise was the height of hubris on the part of the professor, and made us all uncomfortable. Some of us, I think led by Eve, said it was wrong, and showed a desperate lack of understanding of what Ken was doing with his, which was to lay line upon line like tracks over a landscape. 

Each was its own moment coming at and from a different time a different place. Like if someone, in order to convey the concept of bird to you, had, instead of presenting a bird, had plucked a flock of birds, flayed them and, after pulling out vein, bone, heart, and claw, had arranged them in rows as if to say, Here, here is what makes a bird. Lyric poetry, yes, it pushed those bounds, I’d say. I can’t do it justice here. I would love to read a piece written by one of the other Toughs, who have a much better command of poetry criticism than I do. I’m too gushy, too inexact, too lazy to offer useful discourse. But, look, what I’m trying to say is that though difficult, Ken’s lines, when taken together, transcended. And his new version of a bird, or whatever else he wrote about, supplanted the old one.

So If I’m not taking you to his stacks of poems, what is this? Well, this is to say that there’s one line, one single line of his, that sticks with me day in and day out. I whisper it to myself when I am doing so many things: putting the dinner out for my family, putting up ferns on the two hangers on the front porch. I say: Making a display of the fruits. 

Here I am, again, I think, Making a display of the fruits. 

I don’t remember the whole poem, or what lines are stacked around it. 
It was about family. About the performance of wholeness.

How we something something (it says)

How we make a display of the fruits

Why is it so perfect? It’s that the, isn’t it. The fruits. It kills me.

Luckily, we had two other professors who got Ken, and his work. Completely. They loved him, and his poems. Ruth Ellen Kocher and Joy Katz, the caliber of poet-professors who UMSL should be lauded for snatching up, if just for a time. They elevated the MFA program dramatically, and their students benefited. Because we were a good little group of poets. We had talent, but could too easily be overlooked with Washington University, with its Howard Nemerov and Carl Phillips presences towering right around the corner.

I was diagnosed with stage-3 ovarian cancer in 2009. Immediately after I recovered, in a total tear, we moved to Portland, Oregon. For awhile The Toughs maintained an email group, but then my email address changed and I was out of the group.

I was on punishment, anyway. Self-inflicted. Had I made a deal with all the gods and goddesses to trade my art for my life? It sounds dramatic but yeah, of course I did. Wouldn’t you if you had little kids, a husband, and the barest whisper of success you had wanted a little too much? 

I found out over three ago that Ken had been diagnosed with lung cancer.  thought I had more time to get in touch but it seemed like practically the next moment Andrew was reaching out to say that Ken had died

I called Joy Katz and told her the news. Or else she heard it from someone else and asked me, and I said Yes, it’s true. Either way, we agreed we could feel him hanging around. 

We had this crazy idea that he would help us from the beyond, but that because he had gone too soon he expected that we would help him, too. 

Make a display of the fruits, he whispered to us. 

I talked to Andrew. And to Eve. Not to George, though I thought of him. I’m sure Andrew let him know. 

I want to play The Sentence Game again, all of us, together. We could do it, the four of us who are still here, and leave out a part. Adjective, noun, verb, prepositional phrase, second prepositional phrase—which one? Don’t say second prepositional phrase, please, because it was the second one where the magic lives. (beside the white chickens, for example, is a second prepositional phrase).

What Ken’s line living in my own mind shows me is that that, too, is  my own desire. That after I am gone, if I precede you in death, perhaps you will whisper into the air a line that I first whispered onto the page. In that way we will stack our experiences into the world. Brick by stone by wood by word by brick (by bone by feather by vein). And that you will write or say or paint or sing into the world your own lines, that others will build upon, s our ancestors have stacked for us everything that we now carry with us 

These lines, these circles, these all too human marks.

The fruit that is each human life does rot, and it does so far faster than we’d like, but making the display of these fruits, that, it seems, is eternal.