Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

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

I wish I could send a letter to Emily— Dear Miss Dickinson, Your life was sadder than mine. But hope only flies so far.

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.

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.

At the top of the library steps, Peter opened his romantically-worn canvas satchel and pulled out a heathered-blue sweatshirt. “Right now, at this moment, I’m your friend, Vivienne, not your instructor. You’ve had a tough morning, and you say you’re fine, but I can tell you might be unsteady. It’s chilly and you’re shivering. Please take this. Just leave it on the back of your chair after class on Friday.”

As it is, many things go as I predict, but some things fly up in my face out of nowhere, like bees (or closet ledges) which can sting you or give you honey. Or I guess they can sting you and give you honey. So: Painful things can be sweet and sweet things can be painful. I kind of hate that metaphor.

I am tired of this yellow notebook. I rarely feel as cheerful as yellow. It undermines the bleakness within me.

It was innocent enough that I could still see a line in my mind between us, but it was pastel-blue watercolor, not thick-tip black Sharpie.

Would I myself like to know more about you, the writer of your poems, or simply more about your poems’ constructed narrator, the “speaker”? I’ll be succinct: You, Vivienne. Every fragmented detail.

I’m a writer. I was written to by the human-equivalent of a meteor shower. I might as well cleave off my left hand than try to resist writing back.

“Come in here.” He loosened my hand from Maman’s necklace, pulling me toward him, into his office, the door snicking shut behind us, triggering a flash of image and idea: a splintered door swinging open, light filtering in. On one side, a before; on the other side, an after. Even if a person stepped right back through the door, that action would still be after; the body would be altered in some way for having stepped through—even if the alteration were as simple as growing five seconds older.

“It is terrifying to be a parent. To choose to behave one way with your child, and then watch what comes of it. It is like planting a garden with aster and dynamite, but you never know which, and either sprouts up at the oddest times to remind you of what you did well or poorly.”

The present we live in vanishes before we blink, let alone write it down in ink. I’m not sure that I want to remember that sentence, and not solely because it rhymes.

My chest shook with silent laughter. “Isn’t that something?” Sitting up, Vivienne turned, touched a hand to my sternum, her fingers shaky. “A person can be mired in sorrow, and laughter still finds you.”

The mere sight of her touched off a feeling of home, as well as hope—the difference between the two words just one letter—as if the English language’s linguistic ancestors understood that the words meant so much the same thing.