He was a Poet
by Joshua Minton

I had almost forgotten where I was going until she asked me. My granddaughter, Erin, asked me what a poet was. I had told her before that I had once dated a poet when I was younger. I tossed that word out as if it were common knowledge that everyone should know what a poet is. I didn’t know what to say to her. How could I explain? How could I even scratch the surface of what that man meant to me?

I said, “Baby, a poet is someone who uses words to show their feelings.” She seemed satisfied and went back to coloring. I looked in the rearview mirror at my older granddaughter, Rebecca. She had just turned seventeen and her mother made her come with me on this trip, because she wasn’t trusted to stay home alone. Rebecca had been caught by her stepfather sneaking out with her boyfriend and smoking marijuana. He found them in the park. My daughter, Donna, said that they started to tape Rebecca’s phone calls when they found a pipe in her drawer.

Rebecca had headphones on and her eyes were closed. I wonder what she was thinking about. I tried to remember what I thought about when I was seventeen. Then it occurred to me that I was seventeen when I met Taylor. I was just a young girl, knaive and trustful. He was raw and brazen. He represented everything my parents hated about the youth of that time.

It was the fifties, 1957 to be exact and I had just turned seventeen. One of my girlfriends took me to a soda shop for my birthday. There was a poetry reading going on, and there were saxophone players and drums along with bearded men reading aloud from leather-bound diaries. He was sitting in the corner, half-listening to the speaker and half-reading a Henry Miller book. I think it was Sexus. We got our milkshakes and sat down. I looked over and he was staring at me over the top of his book. It was one of those looks that seems to exert no energy from the one giving it; just a lazy gaze and he turned back to his reading.

He was very plain looking. He had on a flannel shirt and a goatee that was neatly trimmed. He looked like one of the poetry readers, but then again he didn’t. Something set him off, something made him different from the rest. At that time, I wasn’t perceptive enough to recognize it. Behind that casual look, there was the experience of something greater, something deeper that I’m still not sure how to define.

When I got up to go to the bathroom, I walked past the table where he was sitting, and when I came out, he grabbed my wrist and asked me to take a seat. He asked my name and I told him it was Gianna. He asked me what I loved to do most in the world. I told him that I didn’t know. Nobody had ever asked me that kind of question. Usually guys were only interested in talking about themselves. I had never even thought about what I liked to do. Since I was twelve my mother had been grooming me to be the perfect wife. She taught me how to cook and how to treat a man that was courting. My mother was a product of the Gone with the Wind generation, raised in Georgia; she felt that a young woman’s place was at the side of her beau.

He laughed when I didn’t have an answer to his question. I asked him why he was laughing. He said that the question was one that I should never stop asking myself. I didn’t understand this until years later. I was cleaning the bathroom one day and realized that I hated to do it. Then I started thinking that I didn’t know what I loved to do. This made me think of Taylor, and I started crying.

The first time I brought him home, my father really liked him at first, until they spoke. My dad asked him about Russia, and Taylor said that no one could win a war of ideals. My dad was a Marine in World War II. He saw what the Russians did to German women and children and so he took offense at Taylor’s comment. They got into a big dispute that ended in my father telling Taylor he was no longer welcome in his house or with his daughter. The thing is, that I agreed with Taylor and I realized that my parents were wrong about some things.

We had to meet in secret the whole summer. He would read me his work and I would act like I understood everything he said. The truth is that I had no idea at all. I just loved to hear him speak. When he talked, it seemed like there was nothing in the world that was unapproachable. His voice curled around me and put me in some kind of verbal stasis. He had an opinion about everything and it all revolved around poetry. He could discuss the holocaust and make it sound like a beautiful thing that people suffered so bravely and still remained rooted in their beliefs.

Rebecca’s voice jilted me back into the nineties. “Grandma, can we stop at the next rest stop? I have to pee.” We pulled in and unfastened our seat belts; the girls went to the bathroom. I didn’t have to go and sat outside instead. We were approaching Ojai. I could smell the orange trees in the breeze. I thought about all the great people who lived in this valley, Henry Miller, Krishnamurti, Taylor. Except Taylor never became famous. He was a genius, but he was deathly afraid of becoming famous or being in the public eye at all. It was a subject of which he almost never spoke. I think he was afraid of his art becoming something pornographic to himself. He didn’t have any money and I was the only thing in his life that he considered beautiful besides his art. He told me this, but the truth is that I really wasn’t that beautiful. I was just a little nuclear-raised white girl that didn’t know a damn thing about beauty or the real world.

My father followed me one time when I caught the bus out to Ojai to meet Taylor. Taylor had rented a wooden shack from one of his college professors. It wasn’t much, but there was a beautiful view down into the river from the back yard. We would kiss and talk until the Sun went down and it was time for him to take me to the bus stop. Those were the days when a kiss meant something. My father caught me on the way home. My parents sat me down and told me how dangerous subversive thinkers like Taylor were. They talked about drugs and senseless poetry and said they were only worried about my future.

None of their arguments made any ground, so they bribed me. They knew that ever since I was seven, I had wanted to go to the Sarah Lawrence school for girls in New York. The first time that I saw Martha Graham dance, I had wanted to go there. Joseph Campbell taught mythology, and his wife Jean-Erdman Campbell graduated from there and become one of the best dancers in the world.

I didn’t like to dance myself, but I loved to watch the dancers. The truth is that I was afraid to dance. I was afraid to dance for the same reason that Taylor was afraid of becoming famous. I was scared that I would lose the part of myself that I held sacred. To me, the will to dance clashed with my desire to observe beauty.

I was afraid that my dancing would not be as beautiful as the desire to dance itself.

I got my granddaughters back in the car and started down the dirt road that led to the shack and the river. The groves of orange trees started peeking over the horizon and eventually overtook the whole scenery. It was breathtaking. I thought about the last time I saw Taylor. It was the day that I told him I was leaving to go to school on the other coast. He breathed deeply, put his head back and closed his eyes. I could tell that he was trying to fight back tears. I never told him that my parents bribed me to get me away from him, but I’m sure now that he knew it.

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I took my clothes off and gave myself to him. We had never really talked about sex, although I’m sure it was on both of our minds the whole time. It was a beautiful first time for me, but was also very sad. I lied to my husband and told him I was a virgin. Taylor gave something to me and I took something away from him. He trusted me. He opened up to me and I ran away at the first offer of something better.

After we had finished making love, he stood up and looked down at me, then turned and walked away. We didn’t speak a word on the way to the bus stop and the goodbye was half-hearted. He kept silent and I never heard from him again, until years later. It was after both grandchildren had been born and my husband had died. I loved my husband, but it was in a completely different way than I loved Taylor. Taylor touched something inside me that wasn’t put there by my family or my education. He touched something eternal in me, and I feel really stupid using that word but it’s the only one that I can think of to describe it. My husband was a companion, but Taylor was a lover and the only one that I would ever know.

We pulled up to the shack and I looked at my two beautiful granddaughters. Erin was still coloring and sipping her coke through a curly straw. She smiled at me. Rebecca was writing in her journal and listening to her headphones. I told them that I would be right back and they nodded, uninterested.

I saw the headstone in the backyard. Taylor died in 1985. He named me as his sole beneficiary and I was in charge of the care of his body and personal assets. He had purchased this land and lived here until he died. He left me all of his original poems and stories. I was approached by NYU to start a small library dedicated to the preservation of Taylor’s work. It seems that he gained a small cult following during his life and they wanted to keep his work safe and allow it to be printed. I couldn’t object. When I got the boxes of papers, I found a hand written scrap addressed to me. It said, “I never stopped loving you. Taylor.”

I had him buried on the same spot that we made love that day. I discovered that I had found the two things that I loved to do. I loved to observe beauty and I loved to be with him. I thought that having him buried here would be appropriate and what he would have wanted. I could never get up the nerve to come and visit the grave, but I promised myself that I would do it before I died. I owed that much to him.

I ran my fingers over the engravings. “Taylor Dorin (Poet) 1937-1985.” I started to cry. I felt so stupid, like I was seventeen again. I realized that this was the spot that my childhood ended and my life began, and now that I was back here I felt like a child again. It was a complete circle and that made me smile, it was the same smile Taylor had that day in the soda shop when we first met. It was the smile of knowing something through pain, through experience. He was the storm that tore down the bridge between my childhood and becoming a woman. I wiped my eyes and walked back to the car, where my granddaughters were waiting.

©1997 Joshua Minton

LINKS:

• The BGSU Creative Writing Program (my Alma Mater)
  
• Wendell Mayo (the greatest fiction author I studied under)
  
• George Looney (the greatest poet I studied under). Buy this book">this book and this book--you won't be disappointed.

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Fiction Short Story Joshua Minton