{"id":1821,"date":"2009-11-07T15:14:12","date_gmt":"2009-11-07T20:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=1821"},"modified":"2017-04-01T23:02:12","modified_gmt":"2017-04-02T04:02:12","slug":"half-cracked-branches-of-trees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=1821","title":{"rendered":"Half-Cracked Branches of Trees"},"content":{"rendered":"

November 7, 2009
\nSaturday<\/strong><\/p>\n

Half-cracked branches of trees and the smoke-smudged sky
\nwere warning us. . .
\nthat hopes are always safer when they are not too great.<\/em>
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u201d Yevgeny Yevtushenko, b. 1933
\nRussian poet<\/p>\n

[Update: Yevgeny Yevtushenko died on April 2, 2017, in Tulsa.]<\/em><\/h5>\n

\"nablo096\"A few weeks ago I was talking to a young friend about the nature of love, about what makes us fall in love (or think we have), or fall out of love (and know we have), about lost love, abiding love, love hidden and unspoken, love gone wrong, love destroyed.\u00c2\u00a0A line of poetry about forgiving love’s end floated to the surface of my thoughts. I couldn’t remember it precisely, only the gist of it.<\/p>\n

The next day I went in search of it. Neruda, I thought. I pulled my two\u00c2\u00a0Nerudas from my neatly-arranged and perfectly-alphabetized\u00c2\u00a0poetry shelves<\/a> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair<\/em>, a slim volume covered in bright red, and 100 Love Sonnets<\/em>, larger, in pink, both of them with numerous Post-It flags marking my favorites.<\/p>\n

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved<\/em>, I read. Love dragged its tail of pain<\/em> . . . I go from loving to not loving you <\/em>. . . Tonight I can write the saddest lines<\/em> . . . . I read all the poems I had marked, even though I determined quickly that the thought I was looking for, which I had been certain was in the poem that contains the last line I quoted, was not indeed from Neruda.<\/p>\n

I went about my business, still trying to remember the line. The source came to me the next day, triggered by a passing reference on some television news report\u00c2\u00a0on Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenkov. “Yevtushenko!” I said aloud, and went back to the shelf for that book.<\/p>\n

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, born in Siberia in 1933, was one of the most well-known poets of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. Both his poetics and his politics were controversial, and he had both champions and detractors for each. Dmitri Shostakovich used Yevtushenko’s epic poem Babi Yar<\/em> as the setting for his Symphony No. 13.<\/em> Once barred from travel outside the Soviet Union,\u00c2\u00a0Yevtushenko regained some favor and was a prime player in the world arts scene in the 1970s, experimenting with poetic forms and working outside poetics in prose, cinema, and stage. He was on the cover of Time<\/em> in 1961 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I don’t remember that \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and on the Dick Cavett show in January of 1972.<\/p>\n

I do remember that. And maybe I mentioned it the next day, maybe I talked about it in the faculty room, maybe my boyfriend, a math teacher who had little interest in poetry, heard me and filed that name away in his head. Because Stolen Apples<\/em>, the book the poet was likely making the talk show rounds then to promote, the lone volume of Yevtushenko’s work that I have, was a birthday gift to me two months later from that boyfriend.<\/p>\n

It would be the last gift he would give me. We’d had two Christmases (a trip to Colorado was the highlight of the first one) and two birthdays (a small television was the offering for the first of those). We broke up, or rather, he broke up with me, not long after school started in September of 1972, a grievance aired in this space for Festivus 2006<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I don’t have much interest in Yevtushenko. I have not followed his career (he teaches now at the University of Tulsa) nor sought to make myself aware of when he might be giving a reading nearby. (He had a brief residency at the University of Maryland in 2007.) I keep Stolen Apples<\/em> in my personal library solely because that long ago boyfriend gave it to me. But it was not until my handling of it recently that I thought about the fact that this was a gift from a man who did care for me and does still, at some level. He put some thought into its choosing, making an effort to get me something I might like, something I had expressed an interest in.<\/p>\n

Some people reading this might think I should have seen the signs. He’s your boyfriend and he gives you a book<\/em> where once he gave you a ski trip? Haven’t you seen the Seinfeld episode where Jerry gives Elaine cash<\/em> instead of something personal, and she knows it’s the end of their romantic involvement?<\/p>\n

Well, yeah, I have seen that one, and I know that the bench Kramer gives her, along with a card inscribed with some poetry, is much more personal and intimate and indicative of the giver’s regard for her than the cash her supposed boyfriend has handed her. A book, chosen with care to say something about the one to whom it will be given, can be every bit as exciting as jewelry or personal electronics.<\/p>\n

I give a lot of books for birthdays and holidays, and I always sign a gift book. I usually put “To _____” and the date on the flyleaf, followed by “see p. _____,” a direction to a particular passage I think reflects the nature of the relationship being celebrated with this gift, and there I write something more personal.<\/p>\n

My boyfriend did not sign the copy of Stolen Apples<\/em> that he gave me in March of 1972, when he probably had already become interested in the staff member who would become his next girlfriend. (They began dating in June, while I was in Vermont.) Most of my volumes of poetry have dozens of Post-It flags sticking up, marking my favorites. Stolen Apples<\/em> has none at all. Instead, tucked in at page 36, is the birthday card that accompanied the book. “Your heart’s in the right place,” says the front, above a drawing of a very\u00c2\u00a0Seventies girl in Marlo Thomas hair and a bell-bottom panstsuit, “and so is everything else. Happy Birthday, you livin’ doll.” How many cards did he have to peruse before he found one that said something nice but nearly neutral, something almost personal but certainly not intimate? Again, some care must have gone into the choice. He wrote only his name, in the black Flair pen he habitually used.<\/p>\n

And what’s on page 36? The end of the poem whose first lines are the epigraph for this piece. The title is “I Fell Out of Love With You,” and page 36 contains the lines I thought of during the conversation with my young friend:<\/p>\n

I no longer love you; for that I do not ask forgiveness.
\nI did love you. That is what I ask forgiveness for.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

During my last ten or so years in the classroom I had a letter writing assignment that was very popular, because it was engaging and almost impossible to get a bad grade on. It called for the writing of ten letters that were essentially personal essays. One prompt was “Think of a gift that you particularly liked. Write an additional note of thanks to the giver.”<\/p>\n

The word “additional” implies that the recipient has already performed his or her social duty with the original thank-you note. I’m certain I never wrote the bestower of the Yevtushenko a thank-you letter. Such is not common between intimate partners, especially when the gift is offered in person. In a sense, this essay has been a thank you note. I still have this volume, E., and the half-cracked branches of trees tonight remind me that though I did indeed fall out of love with you, eventually, as you had with me, a part of my heart retains a deep and abiding affection for you that remains a kind of love.<\/p>\n

*********<\/p>\n

The NaBlos of the Past<\/p>\n

2008: That Girl<\/a> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Lynn and I arrived in New York late this afternoon,\u00c2\u00a0parked by reservation in a garage on West 72nd Street, and then walked the two blocks to our hotel, the Comfort Inn on West 71st. It is the smallest hotel room we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever seen \u00e2\u20ac\u201d about 8 by 10 feet with one double bed and almost no room to turn around. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clean, quiet, safe,\u00c2\u00a0and, at $115, a real deal. (I highly recommend it, and you know how I can be about <\/em>accommodations<\/em><\/span><\/a>.) It was a balmy autumn evening, so we walked the seven blocks to Lincoln Center to meet up with Lynn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s classmate Bethany, now a real life That Girl.<\/em><\/p>\n

2007: ‘Burbs<\/a> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Like many INFPs, I spend a lot of time thinking rather than doing, keeping my options open, and being afraid to close doors on any alternatives. I need to focus on completing the tasks required to cover my absence at home and free me to enjoy my time in Wyoming, so I can then focus on my writing, rather than writing about my writing.<\/em><\/p>\n

2006: Bright Lights, Good Chicken Soup<\/a> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d As soon as I finish this piece I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be heading over to the Pheasant Ridge community center to vote. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m timing this to get there just before lunch, because the best part of voting day is the chicken corn soup and baked goods that are offered for sit-down consumption or for take-out. I remember elections by the desserts I got \u00e2\u20ac\u201d apple dumplings for Gore-Bush in 2000, shoofly pie the first time Ed Rendell ran for governor.<\/em><\/p>\n

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