Brad Leithauser
Undergone
After his wife left him, he wrote
many mental personal ads ("Young prof on verge
of 60, 6 ft, newly single . . . ,"
and "Second-rate
academic, few publications
but big heart . . . ," and "M seeks F to heal
his soul . . . ," and "M seeks F for usual relations . . . ,"
and "Man seeks Woman who shares
his passion for marine environment and his
outrage at how nobody apparently cares
that it's all going Straight to Hell")
and sought to resubmerge
himself in his specialty: sea lettuces.
After his wife left him, he found
he'd find himself—having lost all track of time—
steadily pondering the whitecapped sound.
He'd sit in his low-tech, low-cost
prefab office at the lab and watch the sea, while bringing
to mind, with a vividness he'd feared lost,
the diner dinner where she proposed; or their unplanned
first night (aided by the small emergency
of a leaking tent); or the first time he took her hand
(a coastal hike; he'd helped her climb
a boulder's face and, back on the trail, kept clinging
to that hand, as if forgetfully).
After his wife left, he converted her study
into The Next-Week Room. He set up a folding table,
where he laid out his tasks so that anybody
could appraise them: a week's clothes, in daily piles,
a change of towels, a change of bedding,
upcoming lecture notes, relevant business files . . .
He printed up a meal chart
and bought a big old-fashioned wall calendar,
and all of this was good, it was smart:
there was genuine comfort in being able
simply to throw open a door
and see where your life was heading.
After his wife left, doors turned out to be
one of two recurring images in his mind's eye.
He could see it: how, totally silently,
the knob would start to rotate, and then—then she,
likewise breathless, would slip through the door . . .
The other image was drawn from the sea:
the way a diver loses colors, serially,
reds first (at twenty feet or so),
yellows, greens, at last blues. That's what he'd see,
Earth's deepest blue, easing to black, by and by,
in that journey all sea-dwellers undergo
to the lightless lost-and-found of the ocean floor.
Brad Leithauser, The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.