Two Poems by Dan O’Brien

The first time I saw him was after he’d survived. This was meant to be a lecture but there he was sitting sidelong in a chair beside the lectern describing how Christ appeared at his bedside in the hospital after surgery for the kind of cancer I would have one day too. The sunlight hit him evangelically. I was still lightheaded from the laughing gas, half-numb and -dumb and -slobbering after the placement of a dental crown earlier that morning. “You know, there’s a tradition of good writers with bad teeth,” R— would console me later that day, before launching into another disquisition about sentimentality on the porch of the inn where the faculty were staying. All week long I’d been contemplating jettisoning everything for a short-haired older woman (she was nearly thirty). But that morning watching B— I felt shaken, then embarrassed for him, then embarrassed for some reason for myself and for all of us in attendance. Then a few years pass and he’s flown over the mountains in W—’s light airship to perform a reading in an almost Elizabethan, oak-paneled hall, dreary with suits of armor and reproachful paintings of Episcopalians in Oxbridge-style gowns, where he rhapsodized about writing, “the party at the keyboard”— No other reason exists, he seemed to be pleading. At the reception we shook hands briefly and I said something awkwardly complimentary; he smiled uneasily, greasily as if I were a liar. He died of a heart attack not long after. I’m glad in the end he went quick.

I was supposed to get married in the summer despite all the drama and I’d just had the flu, it was foggy and snowing lazily, when I was invited to a mandatory fine-dining event on the mountain in a mansion built allegedly by Al Capone, replete with escape hatches to the roof and tunnels for bootlegging. We took our seats: a promising young novelist next to his new wife, a poet; and a middle-aged writer of short stories, visiting as I was for the semester, gray-haired but simultaneously youthful like many of the childless I’ve known (we’d often go jogging around the same time of day, wending our solitary ways through a web of fire trails in the forest, until one afternoon in an unexpected clearing along a ledge of mud, beside a scummy pond humming with the carcass of a stag: without a word the middle-aged writer and I passed each other and high-fived). I’d been told, before that evening, that he was a pariah on campus for seducing the young wife of a white-haired professor now many moons ago. Who knows what we discussed over dinner because nobody wanted to be there. The only thing that stuck with me was when this older writer asked the three of us: “But why would anybody choose to get married?” We laughed but he didn’t. He wasn’t genuinely asking a question. I wish I could remember what we said in response; maybe we didn’t have the answer yet.