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Ars Vitae ..................................................................................................................... — for Ted Leeson All I’ve said — I made it up, including the Things that Really Happened. Outside my window now, above the autumn pond I’ve conjured, two dapper kingfishers start to flit as I dream them,
and in morning fog the trees of October show brightly because just now I’ve imagined a sun so sharp it could make you bleed. Once — think of the number! — seven lithe otters led me and my brother
downstream as we two fished the mighty Missouri. That’s a memory of Montana, which is “not a place,” as I’m reminded by a favorite western writer, “but the name of a place.” There are dogs I’ve treasured, quick
and lost, and horses and songs, and people, living and gone — although in fact they’re only what I’ve concocted from a life of talk. And yet whatever I’ve talked about is fact. It must be true
or else I only had some maps, I had no place. Nor did I know old woodsmen or their stories, to choose an example, but only read a book or two. I had nothing. I never knew
a soul, a thing. I made up the eagle I saw today as he stooped to the neck of a Canada goose. I made up the goose, which collapsed at the river’s edge, which I also devised. She fell close by, as dead
as if I’d shot her myself as I paddled. I intended to stop and watch that eagle, whose tail still showed dark stripes, which means I’d made him into a young one: I’d stop with an eye to beholding another dive
from a blighted elm that leaned at what I’d construed as just the proper angle. But I kept on moving northward, fabricating the umber and mauve leaves that floated upriver, counter to reason,
beside my gliding wisp of canoe. I invented the leaves so I could conceive that backwash of eddy, and feel it move me — like many of my visions, including those of Things that Really Happened —
as if my up were down, and my progress that fluent, easy, at least for moments. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Small Jeremiad I killed a catbird once when I was young. I’ll claim to this day I didn’t really mean to, Just noticed him and flung a thoughtless stone.
I’ve done much worse, so why would this live on? My cracked LP is Mulligan Meets Getz. I killed a catbird once when I was young
but why, awake at dawn, should I have turned from husky saxes chanting “That Old Feeling” to some poor bird at whom I flung a stone?
There seems reason enough: a catbird dropped to our lawn As I chose my old-fashioned record, a rare bird here in northern New England, and though I’ve cast no stone,
I’m sunk in lamentation. Things I have done. Ones I have left undone. And that old feeling.... I killed a catbird once when I was young.
My life’s the only life I’ll ever own. I own it all when memory flies in. I killed a catbird once when I was young. I noticed him and flung a thoughtless stone. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Flowering of the Farmer’s Widow, 1952 All sag and ache and threescore years of second-guessing, she has plucked the last gold rooster for stew. The Belgian horse nods in clouds of pollen blown from pines. At least the blackflies don’t come in the house, whose wallboards glimmer at night with phosphor.
It’s not as though she’s forgot his yellowed knobs of tooth as they ripped at bacon, rough wide hands, ear-splitting howls and contrariness of his damned Plott hounds — which she’s put down. She’ll never have to chase that horse around to pen him. He bobbles near
The stable flies have gnawed a nasty welt that shines like a bright new penny on the Belgian’s withers. He had one claim to grace, her husband: his eye for color. A bright new penny ... That sounds like the man. He was mumblng something about the purple in a raven’s wing
She was watching. The sexton took forever to dig his trench among back-lot rocks, her husband too cheap to buy a spot in the marble orchard. She’s got one, though. She won’t lie out in a field with him, all muck and dung. The granite chips flew off the digger’s pick.
She buried him with his pure-gold watch. She didn’t want to. But for every loss, some gain: she means to sell the body of the horse for glue and dogmeat. Let people call her the Devil! In her mind, the butcher’s big sledge falls, she sees blood flare, flow into a gutter —
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Vanishing ................................................................. you are like graves which are ..............................................................not seen, and men walk over them ..............................................................without knowing it. ..................................,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,.................................— Luke, 11:44 We all disliked him. And then he disappeared completely, never again to be seen. Of course there wasn't one among us to insist on a search. I’d known him too well myself, and I certainly wouldn't go to the law. He was nothing to me. And yet that categorical vanishing lends to the wind along our local river an eloquence after dark it never had before. What it may be eloquent of I'm not ready or able to say, nor can I tell you why that edgy articulation should echo in the sirens of cruiser or ambulance, of birds that cry in the night and even ones that sing by day, like phoebe or dove. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Winter Poet Again the full moon climbs, precisely on time. What else would it do? A shame that as it floats it fails to spark interior commotion. Or perhaps it does in its way, but what it produces is no less familiar by now than moonlight on snow. Fireplace wood, well aged, neither cracks nor hisses but makes a soft dull hum. He’s just come to from a doze, with someone’s book of poems on his chest — which he sets aside, still groggy. To open it now will only be to shut it. In time he’ll persist and read it through. He has little else to do.
He watches as shadows extend themselves on the lawn. Chimeras as well. He’s tired of tired old tropes that using shade and light. But what does he want at his age? He’s seen enough by now to prize what he’s got: the intelligent, ever tolerant woman he owes for what at its best is bliss, and even his cat, who after a nap of his own seems focused upon an angle of parlor baseboard. If he longs for his children to be children once more, for instance, he knows they’re gone to live with their children, and all his magical thinking will never transform them to rosy infants again.
Perhaps this is more than anything else what unnerves him: that memory’s his topic, that he can’t resist it and seek out something more vivid. This afternoon, inventing a chore to cure his idle brooding, he revised his ragged address book, which largely consisted of rubbing out names of the lost. He’ll be a witness to more funeral ceremonies now than weddings. Not that he’ll make memento mori his theme, since that’s as hackneyed too as a fat moon rising. He despises his incapacity to behave or express himself these days without ironizing,
to dream as he used to dream some absent lover and how he’d been wronged by her, by the world’s meanness, the witless incomprehension of those around him — dull, bourgeois like him now — of colorful pain. As if that kind of thing had ever been less a commonplace either than the dreary return of moonlight. He still can easils muster the risible sort of phrasing he once thought fresh: There you will sit, lonely, adjusting a lamp, as I step abroad into moonshine. He almost sees the lover pore over things that he could explain to her were frauds. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Home | The Books | Sampler | Awards Contact |
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