Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Rochester, New York, July 1989" is a meditation on time, presence, and the sensory details that fill the space between life and death. The poem unfolds with a quiet, almost cinematic quality, capturing the slow, fading moments of a summer evening as they filter into the space of a dying man. The poem’s title situates us precisely in time and place, but the way the poem unfolds makes it clear that this is more than a mere recollection—it is a memory held in suspension, rich with scents, sounds, and small, everyday movements.

The opening lines present a familiar scene of summer: "Early summer evenings, the city kids would ride their bikes down his street no-handed, leaning back in their seats, and bump over the curb of the empty Red Cross parking lot next door where Joe’s car was parked, and John’s white Honda, broken and unregistered…" The boys on their bikes introduce a sense of motion and effortless vitality, in contrast to the stillness inside the house. The juxtaposition of Joe’s car and "John’s white Honda, broken and unregistered" subtly foreshadows the presence of illness and immobility. The contrast between what moves freely outside and what is stalled inside quietly underscores the inescapability of time.

The natural world in the poem is rich with sensation—"everything blooming, that darkening in the trees before the sky goes dark: the sweetness of the lilacs and the grass smell…"—suggesting that the environment is alive and full even as the poem’s central figure lingers between life and death. There is an awareness here of how the world continues despite personal sorrow, and how grief itself can be embedded in sensory memory. The transition from light to darkness is slow, lingering, much like the process of dying, where time seems both weighted and stretched. This evocation of twilight serves as an in-between space, neither day nor night, neither life nor death, but something that exists between them.

The movement inside the house shifts to something more enclosed, private, and heavy with quiet significance: "And the sound on the front porch steps was wooden and hollow, and up the narrow stairway stuffy and dim, and the upper door maybe a little open—and into the hall and left into his room: someone might be sitting there reading, or sometimes only him, sleeping, or lying awake, his face turned toward the door, and he would raise his hand…." The measured rhythm of this passage mirrors the act of slowly ascending the stairs, preparing to enter the room of a person on the verge of death. The vagueness of "someone might be sitting there reading" conveys how time inside the house has blurred—what is constant is the quiet waiting, the space that has become a threshold.

One of the most poignant details in the poem is the woman downstairs playing piano. She is a music teacher, and "sometimes we’d hear that stumbling repetition people make when they’re learning a new song, and sometimes she’d play alone—she’d left a note in his mailbox saying she would play softly for him." The image of her struggling through a piece, repeating mistakes, becomes a kind of metaphor for the slow process of learning, for the imperfect but persistent attempt to create something beautiful in the face of pain. Her note is an act of anonymous care, a small offering of comfort to someone who is suffering, suggesting the ways in which kindness can be both intimate and distant, felt but unseen.

The final lines capture an extraordinary moment of quiet transcendence: "And those evenings, when the sky was sunless but not yet dark, and the birdsong grew loud in the trees, just after supper, when the kids wheeled by silently or quietly talking from their bikes, when the daylilies closed up alongside the house, music would sometimes drift up through the floorboards, and he might doze or wake a little or sleep, and whoever was with him might lean back in the chair beside the bed and not know it was Chopin, but something soft and pretty—maybe not even hear it, not really, until it stopped —the way you know a scent from a flowering tree once you’ve passed it." Here, Howe masterfully merges time and sensation, describing music in the way one might describe a fleeting fragrance. The long sentence slows the reader’s pace, making us feel as though we, too, are in the room, listening but not fully aware of the music’s presence until it ceases. The reference to Chopin, whose compositions are often melancholic and tender, reinforces the theme of impermanence—music drifts up, fills the space, and then fades, much like life itself.

The poem does not explicitly name John’s illness, but it is understood through the details—his room, the presence of someone always near, the way the outside world continues as he fades. There is no dramatic declaration of loss; rather, Howe captures the slow and measured presence of death through the textures of a summer evening, the passage of sound, and the lingering presence of something that has just been lost.

"Rochester, New York, July 1989" is a meditation on presence and absence, on the way grief is absorbed into the ordinary and made manifest in the smallest details—the smell of lilacs, the sound of piano music, the weight of summer air. It is a poem that asks us to notice the things we might otherwise overlook, to recognize how life continues in the spaces where it also disappears. Through its quiet, understated beauty, it achieves a depth of emotion that lingers, like the fading scent of a tree in bloom.

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