Before the month of Easter ends, I wanted to get in one more post, so I’m predating this one by a half dozen hours. I wanted to stay in April for Easter’s sake but also to commemorate yet another great author who died this month: Peter Matthiessen, the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both fiction and non-fiction categories. In fact, with his first winner, The Snow Leopard, he won the award twice, once in 1979 for the brief lived category “Contemporary Thought” and then in 1980 for general nonfiction. The Snow Leopard is a wonderful travel journal about a layman explorer trying to beat the onset of a Nepalese winter in search of the rarest of wild animals, all the while freshly grieving the loss of his wife to cancer. Then in 2008, joining only two other three-time writers (Saul Bellow and nonfiction writer Lewis Thomas) he won the fiction award for Shadow Country, a uniquely styled murder mystery set in the early 20th century Everglades. This was my introduction to Matthiessen, and I liked the book so much I read it twice, hardly deterred by its 900 page length. He lived a full life, into his eighties, and then this year, a week before his last book was to be published, he succumbed to cancer. I am now in the middle of his last book, In Paradise, a fictional work that had started as another autobiographical travelogue about an odd assortment of pilgrims to Auschwitz — Jews, Buddhists, Christians; Germans, Poles, Americans; a scoffer of the whole idea of pilgrims to Auschwitz, an atheistic scholar researching a weary subject, a man in search of his roots — who have gathered for a weeklong meditation retreat.
About 40 pages into the book (and I’m not that much further as I write this) there is a compelling quote: “The point of life is to help others through it – who said that?” This, as it happens, parallels my recent very novice study of Kierkegaard’s three modes of life: the aesthetic, the ethical and the spiritual, and also my recent required advocacy (called on to write a report for our church’s annual congregational meeting) for social ministry. All of which, combined with a bible verse (Luke 23:43), prompted this work-in-progress poem, which I will title with the lead of the same quote from Matthiessen:
The Point Of Life
1 looks to the stars
turns to the east
leans on the powers
of reason & truth.
1 pays for the view
waits for the feast
contemplates beauty
& holds on to youth.
1 bows to the throne
flees from the beast
stands off alone
while one sets up
a booth.
1 searches within
struggles for peace
sees time begin
to grow long
in the tooth.
1 takes up the cross
suffers the sentence
‘s less where he is now
than where he
is going.
1 ‘s done what he’s done
comes to his senses
turns to the one
hanging next to him,
knowing
1 speaks of a presence
lives for today
lifts up the other
and shows him
the way.
And now I can continue on to May.
Hoping all comments go through to all Symposians, Happy Birthday, Anne, and blessings to all in the glow of Easter, 2014! Thank you, brother, for inspiring the month of April as you have done, and may all months be a cause for poetry! I received the first of the Poetry Foundation periodical this week and enjoyed every page, especially Karen An-Hwei Lee's "On Hierophany" and her query of how "the divine realm manifests--or the word intrudes-- / into our quotidian realm." Later, "I invited God into language. Or God existed / before language, while God is also the word." This poem, and yours above, resounds in the opportunity/obligation on us in the knowledge and grace of the cross, the infinite thieves on crosses that chide, remind, cajole, extoll, watch and wait for the Savior to invite. We live, die, and live in that hope.
ReplyDeleteHere's a poem I whipped up in light of this passing, one month to the next. May Day is a holiday here I've come very much to appreciate, not least of all to halt the avalanche of Spring. The working title is "Prima Facie":
Spring, prima facie, to say how friendships
unfold, day in and day out, in neighborhood soirees
with family dogs. There’s Jiri, his Golden quite old, and Adela,
who gibed that her witch of a Boxer deserved to be burnt this opportune
eve of May First. There’s Marek and Sonya taking due turns to retrain
their young Ridgeback, pacing and facing the world on three legs,
her cancer curtailed (vets so extend). And dozens of faceless
owners and dogs, all making denizen sense of relational
stands, no matter the shape or the status of limbs.
So when I left Oto and his oblivious Eddie, their nuclear
jaunt to begin, I pondered the potpourri paths we foraged anew:
discreetly, together, in mindsets uncharted, owners and canines and out-
of-the-blue a jackrabbit—bat out of hell—turning a corner en route
to the woods, and, chasing the story, a Misty-like mutt with nary
a care for the neighborly morn, his tender a miserable block
behind, and I clutched my dog to pretend to behave.
O, rabbit, run through us as long as you will.
Perhaps paving stones challenge your grip of our fleeting
foundation, our claim to the land that none of us, heart of hearts, share.
Perhaps Misty-like mutts from Oto or Jiri, Adela or me (not Marek
or Sonya—exempt let them be) will track you down someday
and make you a stew. God help us, and save your skin, too.
Surely today we can all get along—the cherries in blossom, the bees to
help groom. Whatever you offer, Bugs Bunny, will do.
There’s nothing more facile and full than letting the neighborhood in.