Dear Louise by Spencer Reece

Dear Louise,

My garden thrums with bird calls. Canada goose and American robin, mourning dove, northern cardinal. Ruby-throated hummingbirds! A hawk’s claws clench the golden cross on the steeple; the hawk kills a bird every week, eviscerating bodies on the tops of telephone poles like a serial killer. Birds making melody, a concert kind and cruel—a call-and-response rough with rapture—a poetry with wings saying, Nourish, sustain, attack! All contained in a white picket fence—my garden adhering to the pressures of a sonnet.

The pickets on the rectory lawn have finally been fixed by a young man headed to Connecticut College. Took three years here before I could find anyone to address this, as people walked by and complained about the state of the fence. Finally, a Roman Catholic attorney who I received into the Episcopal Church sent his son to do the work. Thank God for the Catholics, I say. From this garden, I’m waving to you on the American literary real estate of John Updike. Updike wrote in The Witches of Eastwick, based on this town: “You must imagine your life, and then it happens.” Indeed. I write from the porch of this rectory from 1798; I write a letter to you—letters, the slow art I’ve watched grow extinct in my lifetime.

Henri published a book dedicated to you, The Other Love. He writes there: “I feel sorry about Adam and Eve, / but I cannot fix things. Inside the walls of my abode, / I am a novitiate to the Art of Poetry.” That got me thinking about all the things I cannot fix, which, turns out, is just about everything. Except apparently the picket fence. Got me thinking about Adam and Eve and all our trouble with communication from the start. How quickly things go amiss. How wildly we cancel one another. And how, sometimes, we don’t. There is that too. Told him I was writing to you. He misses you.

Jonathan took me to the Century Club this past May after I was being awarded, of all things, the John Updike Award, from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and in between telling me about the delicacy of New England shad, both fish and fauna, he told me about the Virginia magnolia tree you gave him; he planted the tree in Orient and the branches bloom wildly, blossoms opening as your poems once did before him; there he thinks of you, hears you speaking to him between his cup of coffee and morning conversations with his love.

New Englanders now walk briskly past the picket fence, and if they talk at all it is quickly, or to themselves, or are they on phones? They don’t notice me and admire more the irises, the butterfly bushes, the hydrangeas, the weeping French pussy willow trees. How did I get here? A Yankee lady intercepted me on the street the other day and said, “You’ve got a funny accent.” Where am I from? I ask myself this when I rise from my bed with my dog who has slept with me under the covers of the tattered quilt my mother bought somewhere. The dog offers solace in my busy vicar days and warms me when grief can overwhelm. Grief has come more than before. I suppose that comes with age, along with the curious pains. Above my head where I sleep is the exact same Central American crucifix that was above my head when I first started to get to know you. I didn’t mention that to you right away. I got the flamboyant cross at a religious trinket store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The original paint has come off the wood now. Time! The store went out of business.

I am in my sixties now, Louise. Jonathan said I’m in my prime when we had lunch. I’m grateful to have arrived at the decade simply in one piece, more or less. More comfortable in my skin and bones, certainly, than when we first met. Much has happened in the world of poetry since you’ve left. Already. The world turns and gravity keeps the garden and the house and the sea in place. I am the age you were when we met. My parents warned me time would start to race. Boy, they weren’t kidding. The pace has quickened. Out my window, ships sail, waves open and close like books.

Spoke to you that last September, from my office, where I am the vicar of Wickford, at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Rhode Island. The sailboats in the harbor bobbed as the heads of parishioners do when they genuflect, and the water was a deep inky blue. The ocean humbles me, so it’s good to have it close. I read that the sea turtle eats jellyfish all day in order to process the salt it takes in. A turtle cries nearly all day as it eats, using its tear ducts like kidneys. The turtle cries to eat and it eats to cry. Like poets.

Much time passed between us. Our last call, you were vexed. A poet you had encouraged and supported had spoken uncharitably about your work in a public setting. One of your readings was canceled. You were disappointed. I said, “Just because you do a kind thing for someone doesn’t mean they’ll be kind in return.” A bromide, I know. Who isn’t Adam and Eve unable to get back to the garden? How to fix things? You returned to your disappointment. The disappointment a branch that shook as you flew from that last phone call. I said: “I love you.” You said: “I love you too.” That was the last of you with me on this earth. The branch shakes still. The hawks on the cross circles.

Twenty years ago, in my forties, I had submitted my book more than three hundred times to national competitions, lost every time. I had folded cashmere sweaters as much as I had made drafts of poems. I had rearranged floor displays as much as I had moved the ordering of the poems around those sixty or so pages. No one seemed to care. No one seemed to listen. The response to my aspirations a resounding: So what? I lived in Palm Beach County, Florida, worked in the mall. I kept calling from the Miccosukee swamps without any hint of a mate.

My decades of work at Brooks Brothers counted for little, or so it seemed to me at the time. Ironic, of course, that retail catapulted me, the joke of me the victory of me. Feelings not facts. You were about to impress upon me some facts: a call-and-response that saved me.

This was the last competition I was ever going to enter. I was done. Quitting. Didn’t know anyone in poetry. Who paid attention to salesclerks? Out of one thousand books. Out of cartons. You sifted and sifted, a hummingbird in your second-floor condominium on Ellery Street, and found my book. We did not know each other. Then for twenty years we talked, met, ate in a restaurant called the Hungry Mother, joked, laughed, wrote, sent books, sent flowers.

In those first ten years of knowing you, there was a wild intensity, a passion of the mind close to mating. The last ten years we spoke less. Passion replaced by celebrating fledglings, our mouths full of twigs for nests.

I’d left the country, lived a decade in Spain. When I told you I was returning to Rhode Island, you said, “Oh, great, come have dinner with me.” You’d stayed in touch while poetry led to priesthood. Your response? “You’re churchy.”

All through the twenty years I knew you your new poems surprised. Unexpected colors, new materials. David Hockney comes to mind. God your poems encouraged me. Courage embedded in the word encourage; your poems gave me courage.

Once, in a phone call, early on, I recalled from memory your poem “Memoir.” You said you didn’t like “Memoir” as a poem; you weren’t impressed that I memorized it either. I felt like a jilted boyfriend. I felt like a young man with pimples, slicked up and arriving at your front door with a bouquet of flowers.

The poem, written in the middle of your career, signaled a change, I thought.

“Memoir” as a title was ironic; you wouldn’t be caught dead writing one. Yet your poems came from the center of you: all your poems leave us with the memoir of a great mind unzipped. Years of psychoanalysis informed the work. Your poem “Memoir” begins:

I was born cautious, under the sign of Taurus.
I grew up on an island, prosperous,
in the second half of the twentieth century;
the shadow of the Holocaust
hardly touched us.

Ingmar Bergman spareness, your love of astrological signs, fluted lines, specific and sharp as stalactites in the cave of your analyzed head, a gentle reference to your Jewishness, and gentle seems the right word here, your privilege, a word we were coming to understand the more time went on—sound to me like you’re back on the phone with me.

Your poems are intimate prisms. Held up to the light that shoot off in all directions with their illuminations. Something of T.S. Eliot inspired you with regard to intimacy; when we talked about Eliot you gushed. “His voice is so intimate,” you said, with a nuance of gratitude that came perhaps from desperation, for at times I heard that lonely girl who barely survived anorexia.

Lines hewn and lathed from a brain that wanted clarity at every turn. You didn’t care much for strict forms, feeling they fell into unnecessary swerves. Elizabeth Bishop? “I don’t like her.” James Merrill? “He didn’t care for me.” Sylvia Plath? “She still holds up, doesn’t she?” You were bold in thought and line, the poems lining up like a pristine picket fence.

Later poems flipped the switch to expand a voice that was antimemoir. By the time you got to A Village Life you wrote the memoir of a village: “On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.” I loved that line. Ordinary and extraordinary: the voice pierced me and your “point of view” had disappeared. I said: “You leap-frogged over Plath.” You said, “Write that down.”

After The Clerk’s Tale was published, I showed you new poems: you paused, looked out the window on Ellery Street, past your dried milkweed arrangements. Your speech unparalleled: sentences fully cast with ancillary clauses and no “ums,” you said: “These are outtakes from your first book, you can continue to write poems that imitate your first book: or you can wait for a new sound.” Your eyebrow signaled the comma, a pause indicated the colon. My ambition, the awakened ambition of the newly seen, to publish feverishly withdrew. Love is best when direct and sharp as a beak. Twelve years later my new book didn’t sound like the first.

Louise, I was in Cambridge not long ago. You were dead now and the world without you was a different world, an absence where once there had been a clarion voice and laugh. I wrote a third book, poems published after you died. After another ten years. I drove up from Rhode Island to read on Veteran’s Day at eight o’clock in the evening at the Blacksmith House. November 2024 and Halloween’s orange glints were around the corner. The trunks of the trees were the buttresses of cathedrals and the red and copper leaves stuck randomly to shopwindows like cast-off poems. I drove into town; I hadn’t been back in that fair brick buzz of a place for twenty years. I had been a young man when I lived in Cambridge attending divinity school. I had dreams. I wanted to be a poet.

I parked. Was hesitant. Older now. I wasn’t sure anyone would come to the reading. There were no posters. But then I thought to myself, Silly, they don’t make posters anymore. Cambridge grew a midnight blue; everyone had somewhere to go and I moved in an unconscious manner like the upside-down teacup on a Ouija board. A man at the ticket counter opened the door and said, “Well, it’s Veteran’s Day. Not sure anyone will come tonight, so we’ll let everyone in for free.” His affable generosity mixed with pity for the forgotten made me grow realistic and stoic. I envisioned giving a reading for one or two people. I thought that would be acceptable to me. I shoehorned my feet into my dress shoes.

The host came through the door, solicitous. The host apologetic, a face I knew from funerals, scanning the empty room. I hadn’t forgotten Cambridge, but had Cambridge forgotten me?

Then people did come. Surprise crossed with relief took hold of me, perhaps the way a dead person feels when he sees who comes to the wake. Perhaps you’d encouraged them from wherever you are? Whispered in their ears? A gentle congregation. The lights went dark. There was a spotlight. The host introduced me. Dressed in a suit and a black turtleneck, I’d forgone the priest collar that night. Who was I? Where were you? I was tumbling into and through the world like the radiant orange maple leaves outside.

Before I read the poems, I heard your voice distinctly in the séance of the silence before a poetry reading starts. Eerie. I’m not making this up. Curious that I would hear your voice at a reading: you said many times how you hated readings, which was ironic—you gave excellent readings. You spoke to me like a mother or like a lover, or both: “Everything is going to be all right.” You repeated the sentence several times like a charm; a calm came into me. The calm of Cambridge. The calm of Adam in the garden.

The vision of myself young, running over the bridge with a Walkman, flashed through my brain; then I saw myself older, looking for your house on Ellery Street in the spring, lilac blossoms between you and me like windshield wipers; then older still, on my iPhone, on speaker phone, talking to you that last time, your disembodied voice filling my vicar office. A xylem and phloem of poetry flowed between us since my forties and that had fortified my life and now was no longer in physical form. This memoir of you alive before me—the very voice of you, your brain shared with me—I keep forever and a day.

Louise. September. Evening comes now falling into our houses. I imagined my life, and then it happened. The last of the New England leaves turn gold and flicker like votives until they go out. Henri’s new book is open on my desk on top of a monthly desk calendar covered in the hieroglyphics of a daily vicar schedule. Henri writes to us: “At dawn, the pure sweetness of the hermit thrush calls to me. / For all I know, the rest of my life is taking flight.” Church bells ring above my head, cold and long and singular. The ambitious squirrel returning to the bird feeder a harried penitent. The garden dies again as it has since Adam and Eve. From my darkening vicar office where I sit all alone, for often the vicar is the last to leave the building, at the back of the church overlooking the harbor from the desk where I last heard your voice on this earth, the clouds rise now like smoke and the sun sets over the harbor in retreating sheets of the palest oldest yellow like the paper we wrote letters on and the large plane trees have no clothes on and they stand out nude against the blackness like X-rays in this empty Eden that emphatically announces how final death is. Canada geese depart. I think of you.

 

Spencer Reece is the winner of the 2025 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his significant contribution to American literature, given to an artist for their entire body of work. Reece is the rector of the historic Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island. Love IV: Collected Poems will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the fall of 2030.