One short short essay, one new poem, one from WHAT SHINES, my most recent collection
Still can’t get the poems’ formats right. Ah well… My son in law is due home for Chrtistmas. Tech whiz, he’ll help me… if I, 81 years old the day after his arival, can remember to ask him. No Magnum Opus is in couplets and Compensation in sestets.
Worries
I have a cherished friend who merges epical anxieties with small ones: our political life,
needless to say, but her archaic plumbing too, and the state of a friend’s shop in her tidy Midwest town. She fears that it won’t recover from the COVID scourge, which made recourse to online retail even more general.
I had some nerve recently to chide this friend for her copious concerns, despite my copious own.
For example, this morning, as I drove through a nasty blend of rain and snow to our village, my stomach churned when I spotted a near neighbor, a roofer, up on a scaffold. He was replacing some siding on an old house. Given the slippery conditions, that was just too risky.
And yet the world wasn’t ending, of course, and isn’t. At least not yet. And I remind myself, not every last thing’s awful or new. We’ve always had monsters, say, like the one from Cleveland, who lately posted videos of himself on YouTube, killing some random homeless man.
Since human beings started to draw breath, there’ve been evil, war, woe. What’s so patently different nowadays is that nothing is hidden, nothing’s off-limits, not even the raves of morons
who voice their opinions online, like the ones insisting that a nonexistent entity called Antifa was behind the January 6 assault on the Capitol– or that it wasn’t an assault at all but “peaceful protest.” That’s the same crowd, I suspect, including their traitorous idol Trump, who insisted that Mr. Obama was a Kenyan, his family all Muslims.
Our screen world plops the local ranter down at the very same keyboard as a modern-day Aristotle’s. Viewers can choose whatever claim turns them on. When that traitorous idol spoke of a terrorist horror in Sweden, for instance, the fact that no such thing ever happened seemed
unimportant to his backers.
My friend? Yes, she frets too much, but for whatever it’s worth I understand. I didn’t see that roofer today when I passed. What happened to him? I’m going to call him up. We’re among the few left on earth who don’t instantly resort to texting.
I’d driven down to pick up the newspaper, which of course was filled... no need to end that sentence. I suppose somehow the shopkeepers, roofers and plumbers will endure, while other matters, understood or vague, are more apt to lead us into disaster. As for me, I’m chiefly worried, despite my preachments against worry, that these days there aren’t enough like my friend who get it.
What, though, is it? Dear reader, let’s just be persistent, let’s do all we can to hang on, because a lot of this stuff will break your fucking heart if you let it.
No Magnum Opus
Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. –Montaigne
Do people still carry those mailbox-sized metal lunch pails?
I mean the ones I took to school, the black kind with hinges,
the ones too often with the bone-chilling rattle inside.
Oh Lord, I’d broken another thermos by dropping the pail!
My mother owned limited patience. What could I do
back when I took appropriate to mean don’t get into trouble?
I’d even lie when the truth would have been more expedient,
and, of course, more appropriate. To know as much left me untranquil.
I still can do it. I want people to like me, that’s all.
It was the treble tinkle of skim-ice early this morning
as one of our dogs crunched her way through a shallow puddle
that summoned the unkind memory of lunch-pail and shattered thermos.
And more. You live a long while and suddenly the past
starts rocketing into the present, in certain cases unpurged
of its pain. To be sure, I recall odd joy, as when
on my way to school I stomped through a puddle myself, creating
a network of lovely fractures. Now it’s ugly fracture
that strikes me as metaphor for our world, so much gone wrong.
I wish I were young enough for the barricades
as in the 1960s, but I’m not that strong anymore.
I’m aware as well that humans– especially old men–
have always despaired of civilization as their days wound down.
What’s new? Well, early this morning I saw a bird,
a ruddy duck, on what’s left of our pond’s open water. That’s new.
Such a duck’s more than rare around here. What’s not a bit rare
is November getting me down, which is why even seldom-seen ducks,
strange hawks or lynxes or otters or bears in daytime –
and whatever else the so-called nature poets dote on,
dragooning them into their purblind, overwrought worlds–
have lost their wonder. For now. They offer no expiation.
I’d be lying to claim that they do and that I know
why I so often feel this need to atone. They aren’t
in any case the stuff of a magnum opus
and I have other matters to tend to. I once told my mother
a bully had slammed my lunch-pail against a tree.
The details I gave her were vivid, so much so I almost believed them.
Today’s dejection will lift as ever, although
I do often find myself worried that time is running low.
Compensation: The Apple-Pickers
–in mem. Elizabeth K. Jordan
As ever, she steadied the paper
with her left hand, the right one wielding a nub
of charcoal. This time she worked on a sketch
for what would become her painting
of eleventh-hour apple-pickers– no, later,
too late. But she wanted November:
frost on grass, ghost-white,
fragile as silence, against which her figures
would be stationed, the pillow of leaves below
the tree: umber, gray,
subtle shades she rightly considered a challenge.
Everything challenged her,
Because, and she likely knew it,
the brute fact was, she painted poorly.
And thus, her grandchildren all believed it
a marvel, after the sketch
gave way to canvas and oils, that the picture proved brilliant,
as if it were crossed by magic.
It implied unseen things: for instance,
crows, which showed nowhere in what she produced,
could still be heard, nearby and raucous,
outside the frame. And we caught
the scent of windfall fruit. Or rather I did,
as I never told my siblings
for fear of being taunted.
All of us loved her– and laughed at her too.
We’d spy on her as she studied the easel
on her sunporch, biting her lip,
shaking her head, then dabbing again at the palette,
lost in thought, no doubt.
May our laughter be forgiven.
We were ignorant, not callous.
Like her, if only once in our lifetimes,
may we be gifted with something
that transports us beyond mere chronological measure,
as she was by her one good painting,
which compensated her
for ongoing griefs: losing a son
to the flu epidemic, and then soon after
losing her husband. The Apple-Pickers
seems to have been her stingy Muse’s gift
not just for her valor, but for her persistence,
for simply putting in time.