Farewell August

It is no joke to say:    "August,
you are a cruel month."   Heat
that won't quite quit, be cut--
rend through.      This morning,
its last, was already heated at
first light. Rain evaporated
before it had a chance to
settle on windshield,
road, or fingertips.

Tomorrow, September calls:
"Friend, there is always some
one who'll remember."   Cool
will come, breeze will blow,
fruit will fall, and crops, crease
& fade. The road that is always
the same will slow. The sun will
lengthen, later. This is my cue.

The past is never really gone.

Carlson's Last Day

This is not a sad story. This is a story that could have been true.

            Today, Tuesday, was Carlson’s last day.

            Or it could have been. Every day might have been Carlson’s last day. Any day now. He will know for sure when it comes. The day he walks out of the classroom, without his things, without his canvas bag, without his blazer, his keys in the pocket, his half-empty flask of coffee on his desk, his notebooks of lectures stacked in piles on top of the stereo, and book shelves, and countertops, his graded and un-graded essays in colored folders on the corner of the desk. He won’t touch any of them. He won’t call the absence reporting system or check his email. The meetings will go on without him and no classes will be cancelled. In the grand scheme of the public educational system, he doesn’t really matter. When he realizes this, he will walk out that door, marked with the arbitrary number, 321, the tattered cartoons, the ripped poems, the fading newsprint, and the gift postcards & stickers. He will not return, and yet he will still exist.

            I imagine that what he will worry about the most is that his friends will have to pack up box after box of books. Throw countless, meaningless scraps and reams of paper into recycling tubs. Take down and sort through all the accumulated rubbage and packratery of a decade of residence in a 600 square foot classroom. They will forgive him because somewhere in their most honest moments they admire his abandonment. And they will understand when he doesn’t answer their calls. Eventually, and sooner than you might think, they will stop talking about him. Stop signing his name at faculty meetings out of respect or for a joke. They will not forget him, his walking away means too much, but they will think of him less and less until he hides away in the part of memory where one stores, or temporarily loses, what was at one time a daily bread.

____________

I wrote this story last October during a particularly difficult semester as a public educator. I hadn't re-read it until now, nearly a year later, while cleaning out some files. In writing this story I was allowing the part of me that was Carlson to walk away so that the part of me that isn't him could stay. It worked. For now, I'm far from walk-about, but I thought I'd share anyway. It ain't great, but it sure was fun to write.

The Impossibility of Silence

"Holiness is a force, and like the others can be resisted."
      Annie Dillard, "A Field of Silence" in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)


1.

First thing in the morning
is the ringing of artificial bells
that once inspired H.D.T.
to cast aside "mechanical
aids" for wakefulness.

The daily glide & spin
creates a noise like
liftoff & sustains
through the hour
a tunnel's windy
rattle & hum.

Then there is the shouting
above the nonsense
of the braindead 
megaphone.

The internal
monologue always
warning that too much
talk might ruin even
the eagerest of ferns.

The click, the buzz,
the vibraphones
in every bag
& pocket
taking their
turns at
rippling
slightly the
delicate air.


2.

It is about this time
that one longs for the
desert's haunting emptiness
of sound, with footsteps'
constant pounding the only
sound external & the sole
saving thump of sanity.

To stop is to feel the heavy
drum of circulating blood
the hum of neurons firing.
leaping, gathering speed
to tips & return.

This terrifying solitude
is impossible to forget.
Nothing more frightening
than one's internal
holiness.

The only chance you have
is to run, and keep running
until sleep or its unruly brother
gathers the quietude around you
& hums the sound of a silent sea.


3.

But here, the gift of constant noise
keeps away the fearful quiet
(the voice of God?)
& headphones at the bedside,
a t.v. on the wall,
supply the soundtrack
of an always moving world
that spins us through
the night & at least
one more day.

For Ed Bedford

That time we fished below the dam,
the crane appeared, as white as Sunday,
and impressed me more than any fish,
and I didn't catch a single, slippery one
and you slow reeled the morning away.

Everyone knows you don't need to talk
when the thin line glides the water.
And at breakfast, talk's but a background
for a meal that's never rivaled by ones whose
starched white cloth might once have been nurses' hats.

This is friendship. It doesn't need a lot of wordiness.
For that reason, its poems often sing too much.
Take Dick's "Last Words" for J. W.,
a poem worth loving without praise because it makes
of friendship & poetry something stronger than critique.

But there is more (and less) to all of this. Time
makes its holes in everything, from memory to resolve.
Even on the good days it's simply that you catch the same fish twice.
A lack of fame doesn't hurt as much as it seemed,
and a lack of love would burn bitterness through & through.

The thing about friendship is it doesn't come & go.
Neither time's speed nor distance's slip avails
when we need a break from pretending we were someone else.
A friend always sees more than he tells and waits for the light
to break when a dark time is needed to avoid the mirror.

Of all the Eds I've known in adult years, it's only
you who'd accept the title.Though acclaim eludes,
poetry's always at the edge of what we say.
We only fished that once, and that without much luck,
but when the bird finally flies, I hope you'll be there too.

This is Your Life

"Geography is key, the accident of birth."

Annie Dillard, "Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos"

from Teaching a Stone to Talk, p.124)


It happens this way: you become

who you were going be all the while.

There are hundreds of possibilities,

most are out of your control,

but the details are in your hands—

like the network of crisscrossing

lines & curves etched into your palms

year by year. You may add scars &

decoration, but the body is determined

by time & by place: geography, genetics.


There is no such thing as the unexamined
life, but honesty is as rare as selflessness.

Though neither are recipes for happiness,

they are the control you have day by day.

Be careful not to confuse humility & pride,

these twins will catch you off guard just

when you think you've figured them out.

Minute by minute, choice defines you,

but it is difficult to avoid the accident of birth.

As the universe continues to expand,

we buzz around a shrinking globe

unable to escape who we were born to be.

Take heart, no matter what parallel holds you,

that it might always have been worse:

you might have thought all the time

that you were supposed to be someone else.

  _________________________________________
This hasn't turned out to be what I intended yet. I've been reading a bit of Annie Dillard every day lately and the above sentence hit me hard because it brought together several thoughts that keep coming back to me: 1) the idea that a life has a trajectory that begins out of one's control and although a person makes a life out of the choices that she/he makes there is still so much that cannot be controlled, 2) because of those choices, a person's life might have been so much different than it ends up (by the way, though I think about those other possible live sometimes, I am quite happy with the one I have!), 3) I get so angry when people do not understand that by "accident of birth" inequalities abound; therefore, those of greater geographical birth-luck should calm down a bit, curb the fear, and tone down the political anger! I wish that latter thought could have made it into the poem.