Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

I resent my parents for insisting I do everything early, as if early is better. I am tired.

she has pointed me away from pending mishaps, treated my figurative wounds with candy, bad jokes, and music.

to dwell on the origin of pain is to become trapped in a loop—to circle the trauma as if in a semi-truck, until the tire grooves grow so deep, you can’t turn out to drive forward.

And it is a fact, though I cannot cite statistics, that most people who die did not actually plan on it.

I could look at your eyes all day, I am relieved to report I did not actually say.

Haha inner thoughts can be so embarrassing.

“A poet is a sort of cartographer, wouldn’t you say?”

He says that a poem must serve as a map to a world outside itself—it cannot be just a cute story or lovely images. It must guide readers to what feels like a shared experience.

And then Peter Breznik started talking about metaphor—how by comparing the abstract to the tangible, like happiness to honey, omitting “like” or “as,” a writer could give a reader immediate access to taste, smell, sight, texture—even memory—and convey personal ideas and feelings in ways that resonate among varied audiences—people who might be separated by cultures and continents.

But poetry can change a life, too. If I ever did teach a poetry class, I would point out that poetry isn’t too difficult; it is simply a vast and overlooked country. If you want to understand it, you need to stay a while, explore, and visit regularly. I guess I would like to be what Peter Breznik might call a poetry cartographer. Not on a very large scale—just often enough to point a handful of students to words that might guide them through a day. Or a lifetime.

Peter continued, “My brother could move here, my parents. Hey, Vivienne.” That’s really how his sentences went: my brother, my parents. Hey, Vivienne. It felt sort of intimate, as though I were connected to his people, a thread in his fabric.

I leaned down to extract a pen from my backpack, because honestly, I think a spell is attached to his eyes—if you look for too long, you’ll start unbuttoning things in slow motion.

When he smiled again, I realized that his lips were just as dangerous as his eyes—the pale pink of a crayon box, with the faintest bow along the upper lip.

My mind tangled into a knot of questions: He had been thinking of me thinking about poetry? He had imagined my brain and what might be inside it? He had imagined himself inside my brain?

The more I write, the more I think of to say, and the more space I need to say it.

How do you read my soul like a book?

One should proceed slowly, and when two people make contact, they should walk a long way together.

How do details of home needle their way into everything?

That’s right: A.J. and me. I mean, A.J. attended. I attended. I do not like my pronoun sharing sentence space with his name.

Some people are just the worst!

I suppose, that no matter the degree of ardor some people profess to feel in their souls for poetry, most of them would stay home to watch Seinfeld before they’d lose an hour looking up published articles on metaphor.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t claim anything. I shape memories as poems and trust that a reader will take larger ideas from them.”

“Well”—I pressed my index finger to a small knot in the wood table, trying to escape his gaze—“a cookie can be . . . sophisticated.” “Like a plainspoken poem.” I gasped before I could stop myself. I’d never connected baking and writing in exactly that way. I closed my mouth and swallowed. “Yes.”

When I write, my whole mind goes quiet. I can hear a slow heartbeat in my ears.

I’m not sure he tiptoes around anything. I think he likes to say what he means. I think I like him to say what he means. You could say, Peter, are you feeling unwell today? and however he answered, you’d believe him.

Yes. Wittingly or unwittingly. And now I had a crush on his vocabulary.

A body wants another person’s arms to hold it. It does not long to hold as badly as it longs to be held. Here, it wants another body to say, rest here a while.

For a split-second he’d held me, and it felt exactly how I’d imagined it would: like stepping into a cottage warmed by a fire as lightning flashed out the windows.

I was almost brave enough to wear it to bed, but somehow that seemed too intimate, and wrong, in that it felt like I’d be taking advantage. When at last I lie down with a handsome man’s sweatshirt, I want the man to willingly be there, wearing it.

But after the cancer, her tenderness abated—not because she didn’t feel it, I think, but because she couldn’t bear its ache. She had to detach in palpable ways to believe the rest of us could survive if we lost her.

I wish human beings woke up to announcements like that: In today’s chapter of your life, thus and thus shall transpire. Fini.

I guess they can sting you and give you honey. So: Painful things can be sweet and sweet things can be painful.

After I read, he said, “So for you, Vivienne, grief is loneliness,” which, unsurprisingly, sounded self-absorbed when I heard it out loud, but I realized that, yes, grief is loneliness for me, but not the kind you feel after being alone for a few hours, or just wishing you had friends on a weekend. I clarified. “The loneliness one feels amid a loss or a death, or after a length of suffering.” “I felt that,” he said. “A sense of an empty afterward.”

I love when he waxes passionate like that. I feel like he is speaking poetry about poetry.

Truly, Peter Breznik coaxes poetry from even the least poetic among us.

I guess that more than wanting to leave a token of thanks for Peter, I wanted to reveal a small thing about myself. I suppose the cookies were a kind of metaphor.

How can Maman infuriate me so fiercely, yet be one of the few people on earth I would never agree to let die?

I might cry myself a small koi pond in which all the fish glow a melancholy blue.

I am losing my sparkle.

It is sort of an intimate exchange—me giving him poems and him writing responses.

Everything you (as in you, my instructor) say makes me want to be smarter and braver, more worldly and more talented.

I folded the whole page so that it fit in my skirt pocket, and I just kept it there at my hip, like a kiss, all day.

I want a man like Peter Breznik to hold me. In a tree swing, at the coast, on a blanket over grass.

So much happens to and inside every human being on this planet—it’s as if we are all small infinite worlds. And how do we connect? How do we come to see each other’s constellations? Peter Breznik (many thoughts lead to him) says poems are one way to connect. I say food is another. I think every baked good and poem is a world. When you create one, you hand a person a view of the stars within you. When you eat someone’s bread or read someone’s poem, you walk the roads inside them—their memories, their joys, their sadnesses.

I just look at him while he talks and think, Close the distance already.

Love, I have never been loved the way I want you to love me—

I wanted to run from the café and turn cartwheels in the street, but also lie down and brace for a truck to run over me.

Someone would have to cut out your tongue if you wanted to stop sharing insights. Poetry flows out of you . . . Why should you silence that just to escape notice of four rows of twitterpated would-be academics, who take themselves way too seriously?

Just exchanging poems we both love would be like gifting our hearts to each other.

It is truly a testament to the tightrope I walk between child and adulthood that the major themes of this journal are fear of my mother dying and a crush on my instructor; or, speaking broadly, in more adult terms, death and sex.

I reached a hand to a bookshelf to keep myself balanced. To hear my own words spoken by his voice so easily, as if they had a home in his brain—as if he’d cleared room for them there, kept them close and set them apart.

I might catch a Greyhound to New York, because I have a hard time existing amid uncertainty and loss and the possibility of emotional exposure.