(Though most of Richard"s men were just Fighting for the bounty when it"s over.) I loved the clash of weapons, splashing blood- I lived the meager promise of my name.
Saul promised that he"d tell me his real name When he was through with playing as a soldier.
(I said the same; we took an oath in blood.) But I would never know him but as Saul; He"d die before the long campaign was over, Dying for a cause that was not just.
Only fools require a cause that"s just.
Tools, and children out to make a name.
Now I"ve had sixty years to think it over (Sixty years of being no one"s soldier).
Sixty years since broadsword opened Saul And splashed my body with his precious blood.
But d.a.m.n! we lived for bodies and for blood.
The reek of dead men rotting, it was just A sweet perfume for those like me and Saul.
(My peaceful language doesn"t have a name For lewd delight in going off to soldier.) It hurts my heart sometimes to know it"s over.
My heart was hard as stone when it was over; When finally I"d had my fill of blood.
(And knew I was too old to be a soldier.) Nothing left for me to do but just Go back home and make myself a name In ways of peace, forgetting war and Saul.
In ways of blood he made himself a name (Though he was just a mercenary soldier)- I loved Saul before it all was over.
2.
A mercenary soldier has no future; Some say his way of life is hardly human.
And yet, we had our own small b.l.o.o.d.y world (Part aches and sores and wrappings soaking blood, Partly fear and glory grown familiar) Confined within a shiny fence of swords.
But how I learned to love to fence with swords!
Another world, my homely past and future- Once steel and eye and wrist became familiar With each other, then that steel was almost human (With an altogether human taste for blood).
I felt that sword and I could take the world.
I felt that Saul and I could take the world: Take the whole world hostage with our swords.
The bond we felt was stronger than mere blood (Though I can see with hindsight in the future The bond we felt was something only human: A need for love when death becomes familiar).
We were wizards, and death was our familiar; Our swords held all the magic in the world.
(Richard thought it almost wasn"t human, The speed with which we parried others" swords, Forever end another"s petty future.) Never scratched, though always steeped in blood.
Ambushed in a tavern, splashing ankle-deep in blood; Fighting back-to-back in ways familiar.
Saul slipped: lost his footing and our future.
Broad blade hammered down and sent him from this world.
In angry grief I killed that one, then all the other swords; Then locked the doors and murdered every human.
No choice, but to murder every human.
No one in that tavern was a stranger to blood.
(To those who live with pikes and slashing swords, The inner parts of men become familiar.) Saul"s vitals looked like nothing in this world: I had to kill them all to save my future.
Saul"s vitals were not human, but familiar: He never told me he was from another world: I never told him I was from his future.
Most of my poems are conventionally free verse, or they keep their rhymes safely out of sight a la c.u.mmings. But I do think rhyme reinforces story, and so don"t feel like apologizing for the use of it in these three tales.
"Saul"s Death" doesn"t exactly rhyme; it uses a variant of the Italian sestina form.
(Maybe it would rhyme in Italian: they say almost everything does.) The sestina takes the last words of the first six lines and repeats them in an inside-out permutation in each succeeding verse: if the first verse has the end words 1-2-3-4-5-6, then the next one goes 6-1-5-2-4-3, and the next 3-6-4-1-2-5, and so forth. It"s more complicated to explain than it is to do.
I had the story of "Saul"s Death" for a couple of years before I wrote it down. It was going to be my Elsmere poem; the plan was to go back to Wordsworth"s town and spend a month writing and hiking. I saw the poem as a long lyrical narrative along the lines of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"-commercially unpublishable, but I didn"t much care. (The model was geographically appropriate; Coleridge was a neighbor of Wordsworth"s.) What happened was that my wife, Gay, and a friend and I took off for a month of camping in Maine. Gay was driving toward our next campsite while I lounged in the back drinking beer and flipping through a new book of poetry. Suddenly I came upon Ezra Pound"s brutal and beautiful "Sestina: Altaforte"-and before I reached the last line, I knew I had my form. I grabbed a tablet and started sketching it out.
Our campsite for the next couple of days was to be Baxter State Park, a primitive mountainous area that"s rather difficult of access; the bears outnumber the people. It turned out to be the perfect place.
In those lat.i.tudes, in June, it starts getting light very early, which suits my const.i.tution. Ever since I started writing it"s been my habit to roll out of bed around three or four in the morning, and do the bulk of my work while the rest of the world is still asleep. The sides of the tent started to show light around three thirty, so I quietly struggled out of my sleeping bag and slipped out to say h.e.l.lo to the mosquitoes.
It was raining slightly, sort of a Scottish mist, bracing cool. I"d stowed wood and newspaper under the car to stay dry and in short order had a crackling fire chasing the cool, the coffeepot starting to perk. I roiled a log in front of the fire and sat down and tried to slow my thoughts to where I could start to pick out the lines of the poem. It was hard to do because the beauty of the place was like a loud song distracting.
Anybody with eyes to see and the luck to travel knows what painters mean when they talk about the "quality of light" that inhabits a given place. It can"t really be said accurately, but there"s a dry lambence that belongs only to Spain; a naked ferocity to the light that bakes the plains of Africa; an aching glister that"s dawn"s promise on the streets of Paris; a peculiar gritty kind of light that energizes Manhattan. On that mountain in the park, on a misty summer morning, the light came from everywhere and nowhere; the woods simply glowed. I"d never seen anything like it before and haven"t since, and it held me hypnotized. I sat in it for a moment that was probably an hour, heart hammering with the terrible delicate beauty of it, and when I was finally empty of thought and full of the light I wiped my face dry and got the tablet out of the car.
It was a big artist"s tablet, eighteen by twenty-four inches, and by hunching over it I could just keep it dry in the shadow of my shoulders and Stetson. I"d made notes the previous afternoon as to the key words and general outline of the poem; I threw out most of them. I wrote the last three lines and proceeded to work back-wards and forwards.
There"s a mechanical aspect to writing the sestina that"s attractive to me -like the satisfaction you get when you"ve done an accurate drawing, or when you jury-rig a repair to a machine and it works. That kind of fun aside, though, the form is unforgiving, and if you aren"t careful with your choice of end words you"ll wind up with something about as poetic as a grocery list. The beauty and challenge is to find words that do double and triple duty-verb, noun, adjective-and have them slam home at the ends of the lines in surprising yet inevitable ways. Not every line can be perfect, because of the tension between the logic of the poem and the necessity of using the required terminal words. But when it works it"s like the ringing of the bell when a strong man brings the hammer down hard enough at the county fair. When it works several lines in a row there"s nothing quite like it.
Which has everything to do with the way I want to end this book. I want to tell you why people keep writing when it would be easier just to get a job and live like a normal person.
When you start out writing, most of the kicks come from a succession of "firsts."
You send out stories and eventually get your first encouraging letter back from an editor. Then you get your first check and see your name in print for the first time.
You write your first book and, sooner or later, sell your first book. You see it on the stands in front of G.o.d and everybody. You get your first reviews; your first review in the New York Times. Your first five-figure deal; your first six-figure deal. First movie option. First time you hear actors saying your lines; first time you hear the audience laughing in the right places. Somewhere in there, your first talk show, the first academic paper on your work. The first letter from a reader and the first time a stranger knows who you are. There"s even a wry kick the first time someone thinks you"re important enough to vilify in print and (for me, at least) the first time a com- mittee of well-meaning citizens has a book of yours banned.
It"s all fine. But you know something? There"s no kick the second time.
You get a good review and the guy liked it for the wrong reasons. You get a pretty big advance and wonder if you should have held out for a bit more. You get an interview in the local paper and every jerk in town wants to sell you aluminum siding.
And writing doesn"t get easier with practice. It gets harder, partly because your standards mature; partly because you use up all the easy stuff, all the natural material, in the first years. You don"t want to repeat yourself even though you must know, if you"re honest with yourself and not stupid, that every writer has only one story, the one big story, and if he could live forever he would tell it a million different ways and never get it quite right. Yet you persist.
Maybe I"m breaking a code here, an unspoken lodge law. We don"t talk about this for the same reason that people who are really in love don"t talk about love.
You do it for the language.
n.o.body writes who wasn"t pushed and pulled by the language since childhood. If you didn"t have your heart broken and opened repeatedly by it-whether it was Shakespeare and Milton or Heinlein and Bester-you wouldn"t feel the debt that has to be discharged. You wouldn"t feel the need to pay them back by trying to beat them at their own game.
This is what it distills to, the real satisfaction. It isn"t seeing your name, cashing the checks, reading the reviews and fan mail. It"s loving the language and wanting to do right by it.
Most of the time you fail. The constraints and tensions I referred to in talking about the sestina are only more easily described than the different ones that wait hidden in other forms. Whether you"re tackling a villanelle or an adventure novel, the language is your ally and your enemy at the same time. You fight it and embrace it and come up with something. It"s almost always a bad translation of the thing that was in your head.
But often you come up with a word that is just the right word. Some golden times you write a sentence and you know-you know-that n.o.body else could have done it as well. Some rare times, a whole paragraph. A few times in a life, maybe a whole chapter without one word out of place. n.o.body has ever written a perfect book.
But you keep trying. That"s what it"s about.
JOE HALDEMAN.
Florida, 1984