The Keyhole Opera Read online

  The Moon is an eye for the Goblin King

  And watches all you do.

  When you pout or cry or shout or whine,

  The spiders tell on you…

  The moon had risen outside my window. In the dim light, all I could see were the whites of my father’s eyes and the flashing of his teeth.

  When Mother pulled the covers back,

  Here is all she found:

  As he recited, my father grinned a wider and wider grin. His teeth took on a light of their own, and his eyes grew huge. The rest of his body faded away until I couldn’t tell where the darkness ended and my father began.

  He finished reciting, then tousled my hair and said what he always said before he left me alone with the poem’s words still hanging in the black air.

  “Be good,” he told me. “Be very, very good.”

  Aftermath

  JUSTINE CAME INTO THE dining room, cupping her hand beneath a spoon that dripped yellow sauce. “I’m glad you didn’t have to work late. Aren’t those flowers great? Four dollars for a bouquet, can you believe it? And I found a bottle of that Petite Syrah that you liked. Take your coat off, dear. Did you wind the clock?”

  Howard did not look up from the newspaper. His car keys lay on the tablecloth next to his crystal wineglass. “Later,” he said.

  “Please? You already read the paper at breakfast.”

  He looked up. “Watch the spoon. You’re going to stain the carpet.” It was a cream-colored carpet.

  Justine looked at the spoon as if she were surprised to see it in her hand, but what she said was, “It chimed seven. Didn’t you hear how slow it was?”

  “You just dribbled.”

  She looked at her feet. “I caught it.” She showed him her cupped hand. “See? You’re going to love dinner. Now would you wind the clock?”

  He took in a deep breath, then exhaled loudly. “All right.” He closed the paper. The headline read, “Death Toll Rises.”

  After she had gone back into the kitchen, he read the headline story again. Then he stood and put his car keys in his pocket where they belonged. Everything in its place, whether it mattered or not. He went into the living room. He took the clock key from its drawer, then went to the mantel where the clock sat among ballerina figurines. He opened the crystal. As he fitted the key into the clock, his hand trembled. He hesitated. He took another deep breath, let it out slowly, and without winding the clock put the key down.

  Howard looked toward the kitchen, bit his lip, then took the clock from the mantel and brought it over to the oak secretary where he opened a drawer and found a paperclip. He unbent the clip, then hooked it over the balance wheel. The clock stopped ticking. He replaced it on the mantel and wound it.

  He returned to the table just as Justine carried in their salad bowls. “Did you wind it?” she asked.

  “Didn’t I say I would?”

  She put the bowls down and turned back toward the kitchen. “I’m fussing, I know. The house just doesn’t feel right to me without that clock chiming the quarter hours.”

  Howard folded his newspaper, and after she had again left the room he said, “I know.”

  She came back in with their dinner plates loaded with steak and pilaf and asparagus drizzled with the yellow sauce. The steaks were garnished with a lemon slice and a sprig of rosemary. “How was your day? Mine was marvelous. Business was slow all over the store, but I had three big ring-ups. Bianca said it’s all about attitude.”

  He took up his fork and knife. He cut his meat.

  “So how was your day?”

  “My day.” He shook his head.

  “Not so good? Tomorrow will be better.”

  “I’m not counting on it.”

  “Well, your job has always given you a great deal of satis—”

  “It’s not about my job,” he said. He nodded at the paper.

  She followed his gaze. “You can’t let that get you down.”

  “Can’t I?”

  She twisted her napkin in her hands. “It doesn’t have to touch us.”

  “It’s better if it does touch us. It’s touching everyone.”

  If the clock had been running, it would have struck the quarter-hour by now.

  He said, “There are times when it is obscene to be cheery. Obscene!”

  Justine’s face was white. She threw her wadded napkin onto her plate. She knocked her chair over in her hurry to stand and leave. He heard her feet on the stairs, heard the bedroom door close. If she cried, she did so too softly for him to hear.

  Later, he would take the clip out of the balance wheel and set the clock to chiming again. Later, after she had been miserable for a while.

  His hands trembled again as he worked the fork and knife—cutting, biting, chewing. He was miserable, too, but felt the satisfaction of misery that was, at least, the right thing to feel.

  The Minor Poets of San Miguel County

  IT WAS MORE FLYING THAN he had done for years, from Urbana to Chicago, Chicago to Denver, and then from Denver over the mountains to Montrose on a little plane that shook and bumped and left him feeling his age. Not that it took much to make him feel his age. Not since his wife died. He picked up the rental car, then checked his watch and the map again. The letter had told him to pick up a key at the library in Telluride by six. If he drove the speed limit—and he had no intention of driving any faster than that—he would just make it. There was no provision for what he might do if he happened to arrive late.

  His calculations did not allow for cattle on the highway, but twenty minutes into his drive, he joined a line of cars waiting behind a state patrol car as the officer and a few bystanders waved their hats and yelled, herding a dozen brown and white Herefords onto the shoulder and down toward the river, back through an open gate. The delay was only ten minutes, but it was ten minutes that he’d have to make up. He calculated how much faster he would have to go, pushed the speedometer needle higher, and then a little higher as he realized that the speed limit would likely drop once he drove into the canyons.

  By the time he passed the first ski condominiums, it was twenty past six.

  The town wasn’t much. Four or five streets paralleled the canyon with perhaps a dozen cross streets. The library was easy to find. He tried the doors. Locked. No movement inside. He rapped on the glass.

  “Hey!” called a voice from across the street. “You the professor?” A man wearing an apron stood in front of a restaurant’s open doors and invited him to use the restaurant phone. There was no answer the first two times he called. When he did reach the librarian, she asked if he wouldn’t mind showing himself to the house where he’d be staying. The key would be on the lintel.

  The house, a small Victorian gingerbread painted green and yellow, perched on a steep side street. Inside, shelves made of weathered wood were decorated with old books and rusted tools. Floorboards creaked as he explored the two bedrooms with cast iron beds and gingham down comforters. Hand-lettered signs in the kitchen and bathroom cautioned that the plumbing was delicate. Decaying, in other words. He returned to the front room where he now noticed a tilt to the floor. Year by year, this house and the houses around it were creeping downhill. Year by year, everything dies or falls down.

  Beyond the wavy glass of the front window, at the head of the canyon, bare massifs of granite and melting snow towered in the east. Tomorrow they would block the morning sun.

  What was he doing here? A man or woman with a whole career to look forward to could make better use of this honor. Such as it was. Speaking to the Poetry Guild of San Miguel County would hardly be the featured event on anyone’s curriculum vitae.

  Months ago, as he sat reading in his living room, the president of the Guild had called him. Her frail and ancient voice faded in and out as she seemed to forget now and then that she was holding the phone. Would he come to Colorado to give a talk about Rilke? Based on his paper?

  What paper could she mean? He had specialized in Soviet poetry, mostly, with
some forays into Polish and Czech. He’d written on Spanish poets, too, and Romanian. He hardly read any German at all. Then he remembered the piece. He’d written it graduate school. What was the name of the little Princeton journal that had published it?

  “That was a long time ago,” he said. “I’m retired.”

  “We’ve all read it,” she told him. “I made copies. I hope that was all right. Should I have written to the publisher first?” Her last words faded as she spoke them. She said something else he couldn’t hear.

  “I’m flattered,” he said. He wondered if he would even have a copy of that paper anywhere. “But I’m afraid—”

  “We have a grant for the airplane ticket,” she said. “We can bring in one speaker, and we voted. May I say that you’re…” The last word was inaudible.

  He looked at the base of his phone, as if he would find a volume control there, and his gaze happened to fall on his wife’s portrait. He hadn’t been out of the house much lately, and not out of town for a long time. Magda had always insisted that they travel in the summer. What will we do here? she would say. Watch the corn grow?

  “All right,” he heard himself say to the caller. “I’ll come.”

  He hadn’t been able to find a copy of the journal, but his files held a yellowed manuscript of the paper. It wasn’t structured very well, and the thesis was superficial and vague.

  Now in the front room of the house in Telluride, he took out the manuscript and read it again. Carrying it halfway across the country hadn’t improved it. As a young man, he had been a muddled, over-emotional thinker. Yet this was what they wanted from him tomorrow, not something more disciplined and mature.

  He opened the book of Rilke translations and made some notes. He drew up a better outline of the paper’s points and recopied this in large letters that he could read at the podium. It was dark by the time he had finished.

  He walked back down to the main street and had dinner at a noisy bar, apparently the only choice open. He drank three beers, which he regretted as he walked back up the hill to his temporary home. His heart hammered. He had to stop twice to rest. At this altitude, one beer would have been too much. Before bed, he drank as much water as he could stand to drink. Then he was waking up all through the night, negotiating the sloping floor to the bathroom.

  Morning found him bleary eyed, but mercifully not hung over.

  At nine, he walked to the library, where the Guild president—white-haired, palsied and dressed for church—pressed into his hands a poorly reproduced chapbook of her doggerel. One by one, she introduced him to the members. They were ranch wives, mechanics, waitresses, carpenters. By nine thirty-five he was at his place at the podium. Arrayed before him were members and guests of the Poetry Guild of San Miguel County. The president sat alone in the front row. Behind her sat a young man in grease stained blue jeans. Next to him, a girl with a silver stud in her nose waited with a purple pen poised over her notebook. A man in a cowboy hat leaned against the back wall, arms crossed. About thirty people in all, mostly too young to have anything worth writing a poem about. As Rilke himself had observed, writing poetry in one’s youth was a waste. Only at an advanced age might one manage ten good lines.

  So here he was, before what he now thought of as The Minor Poets of San Miguel County. Of course. What else should he have expected? A better paper would have gone right over their heads. In fact, his youthful gush over Rilke was probably just right.

  He hadn’t known he was tense until he felt his shoulders relax. He looked at his notes, looked up, and began. Many of Rilke’s best poems, he said, depended on a concrete main image that flowered into revelation with the last lines. In this way, their movement was a bit like Shakespearean sonnets.

  He read some examples. The meticulously washed corpse that in the last lines, “gives commands.” The light pouring from the statue of Apollo, telling us that we must change our lives. And as he spoke, he felt himself standing a little straighter.

  “Rilke helps us to see his subject,” he said, “and then twists our perspective. He gives us the image, then hints at its meaning. But it’s never a simplistic or over-determined meaning. He gives us little mysteries to contemplate. The flamingo poem, for example, turns on a single word.”

  He read the flamingo poem. In the last line, the birds “stride into their imaginary world.”

  “Why ‘imaginary’? There’s a reversal here, the exotic birds and their ordinary zoo enclosure. Because they are in a zoo, the flamingos could be striding into the natural world that they remember and imagine. But I think that the imaginary world of the poem has more to do with the power of our imaginations, startled into action by the sight of these improbable birds.”

  He read the poem about the woman going blind, walking as if some obstacle were always before her, an obstacle that she might overcome, at which time “she would be beyond all walking, and would fly.” Into the terror of going blind, the poet admits a spiritual dimension. But not a spiritual dimension that transcends the physical realm. It is the spiritual dimension of the physical, closely observed.

  He put aside his notes, opened the book of poems, and read some more examples, letting them speak for themselves. “Let me conclude with this. The technique of observing the world and teasing out a revelation is a great technique for writing memorable poems. But if all we learn from reading Rilke is to write like Rilke, then we’re missing his point.” He paused. He had more notes, but he might end right there. The man in the cowboy hat was smiling. He, at least, understood. And for those who didn’t, perhaps it was best to leave them with a little mystery, something to keep them thinking, something to get them to read the poems for themselves. He said, “Thank you.”

  In the questions and answers, no one said, “Then what is the point?” And they didn’t ask at lunch, either, when he ate an elk steak at a restaurant with the Guild officers and any members who cared to come along.

  After lunch, the Guild president thanked him, shook his hand, and gave him an envelope with his honorarium. “That was just the talk I was hoping for,” she said. “These younger poets need to have a better idea of what poetry is.” She offered to walk him back to the house. He declined. He didn’t say so, but he thought that the walk up the hill might kill her.

  The girl with the silver nose stud and the purple pen was waiting for him when he crossed the street. She wanted him to look at one of her poems.

  “My area’s not really creative writing,” he said, hoping to deter her.

  She took this as his modest assent. “The lobby of the Sheridan would be quiet,” she said. He found himself following her there, then sat across from her in one of the overstuffed chairs as she rummaged in her knapsack for her poem. Her fingernails were bitten short; her clothes, self-consciously tattered but clean. Her round face was still a girl’s more than a woman’s.

  It was a love poem, short lines of a single verse paragraph running down the center of three pages. No address. She said she hadn’t gotten as far as sending her poems out. The metaphor for her lover, for what she wanted from her lover and what she wanted to be for her lover, kept shifting every few lines. A sparrow. Sunlight on sheets. The smell of grass. Wet moss. Split wood. A stone hidden in the earth.

  The poem lacked strategy. Its transitions were abrupt. The metaphors, rather than building, were just piled up, one expression of her deepest feelings after another.

  He looked at her, met her wide eyes, and had to look away, the poem had made her so beautiful.

  “It’s…” He thought of the young man she had been sitting next to. “Whoever you wrote this for should feel honored.”

  She smiled, revealing nothing. “But is it good?”

  He took a breath, considered. “Aesthetics are at least partly a matter of fashion,” he said. Then he pointed out the things that would probably keep the poem from being published anywhere important.

  “So it sucks.”

  He grimaced. “It doesn’t…suck. You have some things t
o learn, yes. But it’s an authentic poem. It really comes out of who you are. That may be the most important thing about a poem.”

  “I should keep writing?”

  You should keep living, he wanted to say. But what he did say was, “That’s entirely up to you, my dear.”

  When she had gone, it was still early afternoon. He didn’t feel like returning alone to the little house, so he left his book and notes in the care of the hotel clerk and went to walk along the river, upstream. The path took him out of town, then joined the road to take him past a working mine. The road became stony and steep. He stopped at a switchback to rest, to look at the town below, at the mountain peaks and waterfall above.

  At his feet, mountain dandelions flowered profusely, hurrying to set their seed in the short season. The air smelled of beeswax. He didn’t know why. He sniffed the white blossoms of some shrubs, but their scent was different.

  A hummingbird whirred to a stop in the air above him, drew a triangle of short flights, then whirred away.

  He continued, resting at every switchback. Near the waterfall, he heard a crack and a thump, then turned to see rocks tumbling down the cliff face. Pebble by stone by boulder, the mountains were falling down. He sat and listened to water and wind while clouds gathered. Briefly, a few big drops of rain fell, carried on the wind so that he could see some of them fall almost all the way to the jumbled boulders below, then rise up in the current of air to fly up again, toward him. One drop landed on his forehead like a kiss.

  On the way back he walked through the cemetery. He did the usual calculations at the headstones. Eighteen-eighty-seven from 1916. Eighteen-seventy-nine from 1904. Miners had died young. He read the engraving on one particularly showy monument:

  ERECTED BY

  16 TO 1 MINERS UNION

  IN MEMORY OF

  JOHN BARTHELL

  BORN IN KOVJOKI WORA, FINLAND