If anyone wants to know how I am, the following verse should shed a little light on that:
Being
#1
Save for her, yourself and me,
There’s no one here that I can see.
I need you, Lord, I plea, I shout;
I need you, Lord, without a doubt!
And yet when all is said and done,
There’s no one here, not anyone:
Just the silence of a tree,
The whisper of the mystery.
Writing this verse I was a bit like blind Milton in that I would go to bed, start thinking of lines, and try to memorize them before I fell asleep. Then I would think about them again in the morning, frequently very early in the morning. When the final two lines occurred to me this time, I had to get up, struggle out of bed, go to my lift chair and type them into my “notes” app so that I wouldn’t lose them. There’s nothing worse than getting the wording correct in my head and then not being able to remember it later.
The thing about this poem is that it is simple, but I think I got it right. I did not know what the end two lines would be, but when I found them, they seemed absolutely right. Writing, I think, ought to be about discovery as much as anything. Six of the words in the poem are loaded and carry a lot of weight: save, yourself, doubt, silence, whisper, mystery. There are at least two literary allusions at work here: one to a Herbert poem where the poet smacks the “board” and says or yells that he has had enough; I think that’s “The Collar,” with the nice ambiguity in the title. the other is to the prophet in his cave listening for God’s voice in the passing wind. Everyone knows the reference to “the still small voice.” There is nothing quite as satisfying in writing, essay or verse, as the feeling that what you’ve written is exactly the best that it can be. It’s like putting the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle into its proper place. Done! Table cleared! Time for a treat!
The other matter, non literary, the goofy one.
I used to take my iPad over to the bed, but I have bad dreams from time to time which usually end with some violent activity that awakens me. At times I woke up to find that I had either punched out the iPad and knocked it off my metal tray that I slept under or knocked it to the floor.
Without the iPad to pummel (we wisely leave it and the metal tray on the other side of my room), I have taken to hitting other things. Last week, for example, I woke up to a metallic clang only to discover that the dream where I was smacking a person in the kidneys was false. The kidneys turned out to be the small refrigerator that sits on a table next to the head of my bed. I still have the two scabs over the small wounds on my left hand. I never used to dream like that, but the heart doctor has added some potent drugs to treat my A-fib; as far as I am concerned they are the usual suspects.
For a while I was having falling dreams. I would be on a high diving board, but instead of diving I would fall and wake up. I hate falling dreams. They scare the crap out of me. I hate heights; I hate movies where people are perched precariously on the side of skyscrapers. Fortunately, after the refrigerator incident, I haven’t had any bad dreams where I fell or punched out someone, or any other kind of dreams for that matter, as far as I remember.
I don’t know why my dreams, the ones I remember, occur as they do. I loved to watch boxing on TV, but I don’t think I was ever a particularly aggressive person. For a good while I had a body bag in my garage in Berea and liked to work out with it, but all that was long after the last fight I was in physically. And that fight was three to one, three of them and one of me. The first guy, the big one came alone and we wrestled to no avail, as I remember. When the other two started coming, I left the big guy, probably uninjured, and surprised the next guy by running at him, smacking him in the eye as I passed, at which point I kept on going. I knew the neighborhood; they didn’t. They left hurriedly too! Exciting times. I think I was 21.
The other memorable “fight” occurred with my best friend at the time. It was night, a group of us were on a field behind one of Heidelberg’s dorms. I think there was a fire in a trash barrel. It was a chilly weekend evening probably. We were drinking beer, of course. We always seemed to be drinking beer. All of a sudden my good friend drew back his arm and tried to hit me. I saw it coming, blocked it and returned the punch, but by that time our friends separated us and the night was done. Someone else drove me home.
The next Monday he picked me up for college classes, and all was as it had been. Mostly. The problem is my failure of courage, not in the physical encounter but in the moral and personal one. I never had the courage to ask him why he tried to hit me! It bothers me to this day. He was a really good friend, and he still was after, but it was never quite the same, of course. Maybe I was afraid I might lose it all, and I wasn’t willing to risk that. Now he’s dead and I am not. Not yet anyway. I will always regret not asking.
