transitions

As summer is effectively here, let us come together in as many ways as we can, Stillwater being a hitching post. I'm eager to arrive the evening of June 27 and let the time unfold as it will. Still will try to make a poem a week, yesterday's about a resilient ant, last week's about a dear colleague who teaches German, leaving us for his wife's homeland of Latvia. His mother, Roberta Meyers, referenced in the poem, is a remarkable woman: surviving two bouts of cancer, she visited Prague and three of my classes to deliver original extensions of Taos-based folklore. Her son, David, has also been a folklorist in his own way. Ben made a complementary picture for the sketchbook we gave him:

                                             der Mensch

whose baritone refreshed his room an hour before the start of school,

whose mother sang to students stories of the desert, caliente, cool,

the Chaco Canyon, ‘Turquoise Dream’, what TCKs could be:

stewards of the spirits in each native land, and polyglots of poetry,

der Mensch among us smiles to see us through our days, bids adieu

in warm and Weltenschauung ways, and looks into the good of you,

unassuming, hearing first, sharing what’s contextualized and then—

with elephantine memory, follows up on how your journey’s been.

“It’s been…, indeed it’s been,” der Mensch would nod and understand;

wordsmiths know when terms are deeper than the tongue’s command,

when running paths and tennis courts are more the means to meet,

and family life informs the way that any passing time becomes complete.

May you prosper now in Riga, hold fast to Berlin, tether old New Mexico

and these bohemian friends, whose love cannot completely let you go.