Jo-Ann Mapson

How to Like It

Up here on the hillside, as the world turns gold, and birch leaves flutter to earth in a slow-motion spiral, I sit typing with one hand. My post shoulder surgery instructions were no typing, but I doubt they'll arrest me for using my right hand. Henry the Italian greyhound manages to drag a spruce branch twice as long as he is in through the dog door and spends an entire afternoon happily dismantling it on the newly cleaned floor. I let him, because he gets to be a dog and I get to be amused by him and that is our contract. Long after he's done, the sharp smell of resin lingers in the air. I hear seedpods rattle as I deadhead the columbines. The wind comes up, the trees wave their branches, and this is fall, my fourth here in Alaska.

Truthfully, I'd rather fuss with flowers or clean up Henry's mess than write this column. The enthusiasm and confidence I had for my new book project has been swept out with the remains of Henry's branch. My publisher turned down my epic. Should I feel wounded, or humbled? Ashamed of my ambition? What's hardest, I think, is writing about something I once felt so sure of now dismissed.

Of course they know what sells, and they know how to sell it, which is why they are the publishers and we are the writers. But what happens when the pins are kicked out from under one's last idealistic notion? If writing isn't art, something pure and deep, then what is it? A job? I mope around for a day or two, begin thinking up characters, and before long I'm at the keyboard, giving them lives. And it occurs to me, who's to say that this isn't the same project, simply recast in a different outfit?

Every day I sit at my computer and search for the story I left unfinished the day before. All those threads come across the loom of the page, and more often than not, I tease out the wrong one, and the day is lost to a false start that must be abandoned. I'm used to that. It's part of the gig. And taking time out for the blues is letting great story material get away.

I arrive at my Rx when I remember poetry, how much I love it, and the fact that if I read it daily, I feel centered. It's like dark chocolate to me-rich, satisfying, its own food group. It's fat free, it starts your day off right, and without leaving your room you can travel to just about anywhere. And it's magical. Each time you read it, it evolves.

Once a year I drag out Stephen Dobyns's Cemetery Nights . His poem, "How to Like It," features a narrator and his dog on one of those indigo nights when the world seems sure to tear free of its orbit and spin out into space. The man, dog by his side, opens the fridge, and looks inside. Between that moment and the decision to make a sandwich, a lifetime's worth of Big Questions are asked, and answered. Read aloud, it's one of the most ordinary, casual, yet moving poems I know, and somehow it always comforts me, as I let it do now, a small map to consult on the larger journey.

How to Like It:

These are the first days of fall. The wind

At evening smells of roads still to be traveled,

While the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns

Is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,

The desire to get in a car and just keep driving.

A man and his dog descend their front steps.

The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.

Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.

This is how dogs deal with the prospects of change.

But in his sense of the season, the man is struck

By the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories

Which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid

Until it seems he can see remembered faces

Caught up among the dark places in the trees.

The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just

Rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.

Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud

Crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,

He says to himself, a movie about a person

Leaving on a journey. He looks down the street

to the hills outside of town and finds the cut

Where the road heads north. He thinks of driving

On that road and the dusty smell of the car

heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.

The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff

People's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.

In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.

Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,

Where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,

Shine like small cautions against the night.

Sometimes a passing truck makes the whole car shake.

The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down

By the fire and put our tails over our noses.

But the man wants to drive all night, crossing

One state line after another, and never stop

Until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.

Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before

Starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill

And there, filling a valley, will be the lights

Of a city entirely new to him.

But the dog says, Let's go back inside.

Let's not do anything tonight. So they

walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.

How is it possible to want so many things

And still want nothing? The man wants to sleep

And wants to hit his head again and again

Against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?

But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.

Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.

And that's what they do and that's where the man's

Wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator

As if into the place where the answers are kept-

The ones telling why you get up in the morning

And how it is possible to sleep at night,

Answers to what comes next and how to like it.

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