Alan May: 00:04

Welcome to The Beat. Today, we’ll hear Charles Douthat read from his new book, Again. The poems he’ll read are "Polk Street," "Mercy," "Sparklers," and "The Return." He’ll follow with a poem by Robert Frost called "After Apple-Picking."

Charles Douthat: 00:30

"Polk Street"

I don’t remember who chose the shabby tavern on Polk Street three blocks north of Market, only that we landed there afternoons after another tedious law school class, lounging at its lacquered mahogany bar near the square, filthy, street-facing plate-glass window and its neon MILLERS sign. There was the one ancient bartender coughing his smoker’s cough in the shadows, and an erratic overhead flickering from bare-bulb fluorescents, and liquor stocks shelved before a mirror reflecting both a second image of each bottle and our own two faces stenciled by the bar's tinseled, mirrored light. No doubt you know a place like it. There must be a thousand places like it. But no other with my sister on the high leather stool beside me, lighting up a mentholed Newport, sipping her vodka martini, still droll and sun-blonde, fresh and wicked-clever and cocky at twenty-eight for all her weaknesses. I’d complain about our dull professors. She would make me laugh as only she could, turning the hour privileged and superb, reducing our current troubles to brief stations we’d glide through effortlessly together. Carolyn would do good work in the years ahead. She would draft laws still on the books in California, and before drink took over her life she made the world better for people. For many people, those who know her work maintain. They say you can’t go back but I ask what matters more after everything that happens. My sister slips a Newport from its box. I strike a match and watch the red glow of tobacco igniting as her cigarette nears my half-cupped hand. Fruitless maybe, but I go back anyway if only to save the merest fraction of her liveliness, even just the match-light flaring her face. Though doubtless she’d argue, if she could, that I also return for last word in our life-long debate. Calling for a fresh martini, swinging on her stool back my way; Carolyn cheerfully tries to persuade me again—and seriously, as if to persuade us all—that nothing, neither she nor I nor anything else, can be saved.

"Mercy"

And afterwards, furnaced by midday Roman heat and tired steps away from St. Peters and the Pope’s golf-cart ride through the square’s adoring crowd, we were resting within an ancient arched portico when the two white pigeons winged down, settling on the t-shirt shoulders of our eight-year-old daughter. Cautiously—half-delighted, half-frightened—she raised arms and the birds stepped along them, perching finally on uplifted hands. Gravely Jeanne looked at us then, with a spirit that made us feel mysteriously taller, younger, fortunate, cared for...whatever word best describes that which we search restless worlds for, pry open resentful hearts for, drop to bended knees for, but which seems to come only as those pigeons came. When we’re worn. When we’ve all but given up on making more of our day or the year or ourselves, having lost faith that such finery will ever be bestowed on us again. Yet isn’t that how it arrives? Unbidden and glossed so abundantly that momentarily, like children, we don’t care if it never comes again.

"Sparklers"

It almost hurts to look straight at it...my sister’s outstretched burning sparkler, that white-hot spider of light where I must balance the unlit tip of my own or it will never sputter to life, and we'll never race down the evening beach, whirling them at arms-length together. Fog had slipped in off the Pacific. After muffled rocket-pops from the pier, the overhead murk would briefly blush crimson, silver or blue. But dashing into darkness, we owned all the light we needed. Heat-needles tingled hands. Greasy smoke trailed us like scarves. Yes, they would burn out soon and we’d wander back up the beach, find Mom tending our brother on a blanket and Dad smoking Winstons in his folding chair. Our parents loved us. They loved us equally, perfectly. So we felt as children. How fragile it all seems now. How fragile it seems from this distance. Sparklers reeling, electric against the night. Twin strikes in the mind's eye then extinguished, shrouded completely. A family. A childhood.

"The Return"

Years later, I entered their light on a Tuesday parked on a quiet, mostly empty, New Haven street. Nothing much happened. No urgent cars rushed by. No wind bothered the trees. Now and then a bird flew low, wings flashing. Also, over dry lawns, a few butterflies. And only gradually, like a warmth, it came to me that the dead don’t remain apart from the living, but after vanishing, return as light, distilled of old hungers, angers and joys. I felt them close then. Mother. Father. Sister. Three in brightness on the street. Each as lovely and distinguished as a single tree shading the parkway. Yes, they return to us. But only ever as light. No longer caring as they once did, as we still do for them. Yet somehow, freed themselves, freeing us. Or so I felt, as time thickened again and their shimmer on the street began to fade. They were gone for good. They light my way.

"After Apple-Picking," a poem by Robert Frost. My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree toward heaven still, and there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill beside it, and there may be two or three apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, the scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough and held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well upon my way to sleep before it fell, and I could tell what form my dreaming was about to take. Magnified apples appear and disappear, stem end and blossom end, and every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin the rumbling sound of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much of apple-picking: I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all that struck the earth, no matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, went surely to the cider-apple heap as of no worth. One can see what will trouble this sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, the woodchuck could say whether it’s like his long sleep, as I describe its coming on, or just some human sleep.

Alan May: 09:50

You just heard Charles Douthat read his poems “Polk Street,” “Mercy,” “Sparklers," and “The Return,” from his new book Again. He followed with “After Apple-Picking" by Robert Frost. Douthat was kind enough to record these poems for us at his home in Weston, Connecticut. Charles Douthat is a poet, retired litigator, and visual artist. Born and educated in California, he practiced law for many years in New Haven and began writing poems during a long mid-life illness. His first collection, Blue for Oceans, received the PEN New England Award, as the best book of poetry published in twenty ten by a New England writer. Concerning Douthat’s newest book, Again, the poet Alan Shapiro writes, “This book is impossible not to love.” Douthat lives in Weston, Connecticut, with his wife, the artist Julie Leff. Robert Frost was born in eighteen seventy-four in San Francisco. When he was just ten years old, his father died, and Frost’s family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts to live with his paternal grandparents. Though Frost attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, he never earned a formal degree. He spent much of his twenties and thirties farming and teaching. In nineteen twelve, he moved, with his wife and children, to England where publishers were more receptive to his work. But he moved back to the States in nineteen fifteen after the start of the First World War. He lived for the rest of his life mostly in Massachusetts and Vermont. Robert Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Congressional Medal of Honor. He died in Boston in nineteen sixty-three. You can find books by Charles Douthat and Robert Frost in our online catalog. Also, look for links in the show notes. Please join us next time for The Beat.