So Much Depends ...

How a disdainful recitation in a university cafeteria became the poem that followed me all my life.

We were in the university cafeteria. You sat next to me after your class and recited the poem, your voice learned, disdainful, as if you expected I wouldn’t understand. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe that’s what we both wanted back then.

I read it many times over the years and remembered you in the cafeteria — how you hated waiting in line for limp salad rolls or weak coffee. You’d hand money to one of your many friends, ask them to order for you, and then join us at ‘your’ table, the table where I had been reading alone or watching couples, staring too openly, too hungrily, while they talked and pretended I wasn’t there.

With each rereading, those memories faded, like a photograph from the seventies — bleached by the years, its image barely visible.

I gave a paper on the poem once, in my fifty-fifth year, to a class of twenty-somethings in thrall to film. The tutor said, “I’ve never heard a better analysis of that poem. Excellent work,” then gave me a score of seventy-nine. I considered asking, “What happened to that one telling point?” But your voice, the memory of it, stopped me.

The poem surprised me again today, in a second-hand copy of William Carlos Williams’ Selected Poems I found at a garage sale. I expected it near the end of the collection, but there it was on page fifty-seven. Williams wrote it in 1923 — almost fifty years before you recited it to me, over fifty years ago now.

I don’t see you as often as I used to. Your days are a multinational business of family, friends, lovers, Italian and German lessons, yoga, and — I imagine — avoiding queues. I spend mine reading, listening to the rain or watching the sun construct frames of shadow and light on my white-tiled studio floor.

I still watch couples in conversation, though I am more circumspect, and I no longer resent the intrusion of poems glazed with awkward memories.

By Janet Thomas
Tales from the Ether ✨