I must have listened to that audiobook, the poetry anthology, three times all the way through, then more for the parts I liked or didn’t get. There were a lot of both. I listened to it driving to work and then again driving home, until even the parts I didn’t understand, I knew by heart, a chorus of sounds that made words and words that made thought and feeling.

It was an eccentric book, though I didn’t realize it at the time. What did I know? It was arranged in purely alphabetical order, with centuries and nations all jumbled together. So that it began with Anna Akhmatova, followed by Maya Angelou, followed by W. H. Auden. Billy Collins came right before Emily Dickinson, and Dylan Thomas after Gertrude Stein. The book made it seem they might all be acquainted.

Each poet was read aloud by a different reader or voice actor, I guess they were called, so that there was a chopped salad effect, this that and the other poem coming at you fast and furious. It wasn’t a bad way to immerse myself, all those scraps of word and thought competing for attention. I didn’t have to consider them or render judgment, not at first. I only had to let them in.

At the very end of the book was William Butler Yeats, and I recognized the poem about the girl with the yellow hair that Oscar had recited the first time he’d seen me. I still wasn’t sure if Oscar had been making fun of me, just as I couldn’t tell whether Yeats hadn’t been somehow making fun of Anne Gregory, like he knew something about her that she didn’t know about herself. I tried to imagine what kind of a poem Anne might have written back, something about what a drag it was when old men tried to get your attention with words.

I wanted to read Viridian’s book, and I tried, but it was like trying to break a rock into gravel. Here was a piece of poem I could chip off and understand, and here was the mass of it I could not. She had a lot of poems with one-word titles, like “Fever” and “Bartender.” These started out in places I understood, then took a twist or turn that lost me. I thought about asking Aaron to read them to me, but he’d tell me to call Viridian. Which I was going to do, as soon as I got my nerve up.