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"But it's still happening, right? Like, there is still a meteor shower. We just can
't see it."
"Correct," he said.
"So, what would it look like?" I asked.
"Huh?"
"If it weren't cloudy, what would I be seeing?"
"Well." He took his phone out and opened it up to some stargazing app. "So, over here in the northern sky is the constellation Draco," he said, "which to me looks more like a kite than a dragon, but anyway, there would be meteors visible around here. There's not much moon tonight, so you could probably see five or ten meteors an hour. Basically, we're moving through dust left behind by this comet called Giacobini-Zinner, and it would be super beautiful and romantic if only we did not live in gloomy Indiana."
"It is super beautiful and romantic," I said. "We just can't see it."
I thought about him asking me if I'd ever been in love. It's a weird phrase in English, in love, like it's a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don't get to be in anything else--in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love. And I wanted to tell him that even though I'd never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere. When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. And I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something I couldn't describe before, created a form for it, but I couldn't figure out how to say any of that out loud.
"I can't tell if this is a regular silence or an awkward silence," Davis said.
"What gets me about that poem 'The Second Coming' . . . you know how it talks about the widening spiral?"
"The widening gyre," he corrected me. "'Turning and turning in the widening gyre.'"
"Right, whatever, the widening gyre. But the really scary thing is not turning and turning in the widening gyre; it's turning and turning in the tightening gyre. It's getting sucked into a whirlpool that shrinks and shrinks and shrinks your world until you're just spinning without moving, stuck inside a prison cell that is exactly the size of you, until eventually you realize that you're not actually in a prison cell. You are the prison cell."
"You should write a response," he said. "To Yeats."
"I'm not a poet," I said.
"You talk like one," he said. "Write down half the stuff you say and it would be a better poem than I've ever written."
"You write poetry?"
"Not really. Nothing good."
"Like what?" I asked. It was so much easier to talk to him in the dark, looking at the same sky instead of at each other. It felt like we didn't have bodies, like we were just voices talking.
"If I ever write something I'm proud of, I'll let you read it."
"I like bad poetry," I said.
"Please don't make me share my dumb poems with you. Reading someone's poetry is like seeing them naked."
"So I'm basically saying I want to see you naked," I said.
"They're just stupid little things."
"I want to hear one."
"Okay, like, last year I wrote one called 'Last Ducks of Autumn.'"
"And it goes . . ."
"The leaves are gone you should be, too I'd be gone if I were you but then again, here I am walking alone / in the frigid dawn."
"I quite like that," I said.
"I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that's what life is like."
