page. It seemed he had lost his place, so he started again.
April is not the cruellest month.
The cruellest month is July,
Bringer of drought or deluge,
Gray rainy afternoons when brothers leave.
A startled look crossed Ernest’ face. I don’t think it had ever occurred to him that during all those weeks, the long drama of Mark’ exile, his younger son might actually have been listening; taking in every word.
Ben read on. The poem is very long, and divided into four sections, the first concerning (mostly) Southern California summer, and rainlessness, and “my father’ hose nosing soil / The thirst of which is never slaked.” Much metaphorical fuss is made, in the second section, over the Datsun’ lack of a reverse gear:
As if in kidnapping him
It was promising a one-way journey
From which he would never come back.
In another line, Ben writes that “Assuming there were no delays / They would arrive in Vancouver on time.” (That sort of redundancy, I am sorry to say, was typical of his poetry.) Part three brings the travelers to San Francisco, where they stop for the night, and encounter some rather ill-tempered mermen off of Aquatic Park. It turns out that they are suicides who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge:
We are the dead, we are the lost,
We are the mer-people of San Francisco Bay!
Entwined by seaweed, scales climb up our arms.
We watch for the next body to fall, always eager
To add another to our tribe!
At last, in part four, the travelers arrive in Vancouver. That Ben had at this point never visited the city, and knew nothing of its geography, seems not to have been any kind of deterrent to him in describing a rather fantastic landscape of hills and lakes and bridges, the sole occupants of which, apparently, are draft dodgers who spend their days staring through telescopes across the border at an America going about its business without regard to the suffering of its exiled sons:
In the supermarket, the housewives
Load their carts with canned cranberry sauce,
Canned pumpkin, canned gravy, frozen turkeys,
At school the children cut turkeys
Out of construction paper,
Make turkeys from clay,
Turkeys from papier-mache . . .
The poem concludes with a scene of such bathos that even the memory of its being read makes me grimace: In a bizarre ceremony that defies all laws of realism, brothers shake hands across a national frontier as clearly demarcated as a child’ drawing of the Berlin wall:
Ignoring the frowning guards,
He holds out his arm
And I take his hand, and in that squeeze there is Defiance of unjust laws, and a refusal to weaken.
I wish I could pull him across to me, but I know
That if I did, he would be shot.
And so I stay where I am,
Until he lets go, and walks
Sadly back into Vancouver.
Behind me Mother weeps.
We stay until he is out of sight,
And then we go home.
Ben stepped back. “Thank you,” he said. I looked around myself. To my amazement, Jonah Boyd began to applaud. And then Nancy applauded too, furiously, and Ernest, and Daphne, and then everyone else. I don’t know whether they were simply following Boyd’ lead, or responding to some imaginative vigor that the poem revealed, a vigor of which, curiously enough, its imprecision and ragged sentimentality and obliviousness to all rules of structure and concerns about accuracy might have been the ultimate proof. For there is this to be said about “Vancouver": Bombastic though it is, there is life in the thing. Alas Ben’ refusal, as always, to accept (much less contend with) the interfering laws imposed by logic, form, and the real world in the end shipwrecks him, rendering the poem, like all his poems, unpublishable and probably unreadable. But that didn’t matter to his audience on Thanksgiving eve 1969. After all, he was only fifteen. What they saw was an unsuspected promise, albeit one which it would take him many long years to fulfill.
The applause died out—and then, to my surprise, Anne was the first to stand. “Ben, that was wonderful, just wonderful,” she said, stumbling up to him and taking him in an embrace that opened Nancy’ mouth, as there was in it more than a touch of salaciousness. Anne’ breasts were squashed flat against his chest; she might have been grinding her hips. I wasn’t sure. In any case, Boyd saved the day. “Yes, wasn’t it?” he echoed, taking his wife’ hand and leading her back to the daybed, away from Ben. “Very exciting. Have you sent it to your brother?”
“No.”
“I think you should,” Nancy said. “Mark