from “A Field of Telephones”

Zach Savich | A Field of Telephones | 53rd State Press | March 2025 | 180 Pages

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THE WILD KINDNESS

During the time I was in Seattle, researching Roethke, they thought my newest tumor was scar tissue. I had friends feel. It felt like muscle.

. . .

I wanted a scholastic diversion. I thought of Geoff Dyer’s motive, in Out of Sheer Rage, his book about and not about

D.H. Lawrence, to produce a “sober, academic study.” He writes, “I can remember saying that word ‘sober’ to myself, over and over, until it acquired a hysterical, near-demented ring.”

. . .

I wanted that scholastic rectitude to counter a certain wild feeling that has preceded each diagnosis. I could now diagnose a tumor by it, I think. It’s probably a sign of general toxicity, comparable to the irregular heartbeat, disorientation, and fatigue of holistic renal strain. It produced a slight mania. We might think of dogs, ahead of a storm, trying to surge, senselessly, while they can. They might leap from the window to escape the thunder. Like yours did in that apartment in Holyoke that one winter. Pushed out the screen. The neighbor across the street would scream while snowblowing. He must have thought its sound would cover him.

. . .

It looked like running literally toward a blast, one afternoon. Like hearing a woman shout for someone to stop stop outside our apartment, some argument, and going outside with the long hammer. Waiting for those excuses, give me a reason. Like taping windows at the first hint of rain. Weeping at bees. I pulled over to help someone gather bales that had fallen from his truck, traffic whizzing, wanting the hay on my good shirt.

. . .

I don’t often hear people talk about it, that wildness. Maybe that’s because a lot of people don’t survive, and others worry that reporting it could make them seem—or feel—erratic, unreliable, unrecoverable. I knew it from waiting rooms. My name was called, and the person next to me clutched my arm, made me promise we’d have dinner one day, one day, this place they knew.

. . .

I liked the emergency room doctor who said, “This isn’t an emergency. You could’ve waited another hour.” Then stabbed a thing into my lung.

. . .

I liked when M. showed up with a pineapple and a six-pack. “I always forget if you’re allowed to drink in hospitals, like when someone gives birth, champagne,” he said, opening a beer.

. . .

One night, looking for language that could stand when I couldn’t stand language, the wildness led me to some lines by Roethke: “What book, O learned man, will set me right?

/ Once I read nothing through a fearful night.” His poetry had helped me as an undergraduate, at that campus where he taught from 1947 to his death, Seattle. I thought it might help me again.

. . .

I love that “once” in “once I read nothing through a fearful night.” It implies that every other fearful night, he read.

. . .

He was often manic in ways I’ve never known, running “from exhaustion to exhaustion.” In and out of institutions. Thought he was a lion, went into a diner, ordered a raw steak.

. . .

 “Try to imagine an elephant conducting Mozart superbly,” a colleague said about him, a eulogy. I like to think of that conducting as electrical.

. . .

The wildness also made me sentimental. Or: in need of something, and it showed. I didn’t know the drink the person in front me had at the Café Allegro. A new astringent concoction, espresso, seltzer, ice, tinctures, cream. I felt a surge of wild gratitude, to be alive in this year, after everything, to have survived to see this. I think she understood. “You have to try it, it’s addicting,” she said. And—unreasonable, thoughtless generosity of the pre-pandemic world, to be so received, regarded, for her to want me to find it addicting—this stranger offered a sip.

. . .

I started to say, “It means the world.” I started to say, “Thanks for all time.”

. . .

It also made me tired. Lunch with a friend. Told him I was crashing each day around 2 PM. He said, “Maybe tomorrow it will be 2:01.” He didn’t say the next day would be 2:02. The next day could be 1:50, the next could be darkness. That is, he wasn’t suggesting optimism, improvement. He was suggesting endurance.

. . .

Dressing well in case I pass out on the train, thoughts like that. A bath takes a day to recover.

. . .

A feeling of sufficiency, sufficient displacement, hiding out, in my scholastic haunt. Washed my socks in the sink each night. Stored leftover rice in the half-finished yogurt tub: yogurt rice. Walked each morning to the archives.

. . .

My apartment was near the bar known as Roethke’s bar. One of those places where, until recently, a friend said, you could pay with an advance on your paycheck but not use a credit card. Roethke was a legend there. A magisterial oil painting of him on one wall. “Roethke STD’d here” in the bathroom. A short recitation when someone saw what I was reading: “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones.” He’d memorized it while working at the university, alone in a booth, making audio versions of textbooks. “It’s hard to believe a poem could embrace so much,” Jay Parini said.

. . .

One of the regulars (a ghost, or quoting a ghost) told me he didn’t want to be rude but he’d never thought of Roethke as a regional poet of the Pacific Northwest. Rather, he was a regional poet of all the “non-regions” of the U.S. Anywhere that’s rural but not necessarily agricultural, or not productively. Same songs on the radio, hits neither current nor classic. Same chain stores. He didn’t want to be rude (I realized he meant it like “rudimentary”), but the main thing about the northwest, he said, is a non-thing, that “there’s always a winter sky.” But hardly any snow. Non-sky, a remove. “If I had to guess about Roethke,” he said, “he was the kind of guy whose only interest in Mt. Rainier was that he might write a poem about it.”

. . .

The mountain is framed, fantastically, above the fountain on campus. But you can’t see it, most days—that “winter sky.” And then it’s there. I never would have written a poem about it in college. It would have seemed too obvious. But now I’m interested in the exactly-obvious. Assuming most early work fails for being under- or over-obvious. “Describe dogs,” Roethke wrote in a notebook, “usual dogs.”

. . .

The fog of illness. The fog doesn’t dissipate but lifts. Is lifting. It is not uplifting, but it lifts you. You’re in it. Thereabout.

. . .

Since I’d last been there, they’d installed ramps on the rim of the fountain. So ducks could get out.