[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Poem
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2008 14:59:35 -0700
Some who walk among us feel a force in floors and chairs,
calling our attention to drops on tulip leaves,
or the rate of first day of slaughter in fields with archers' sheaves.
Do not fear them; they are harmless casualties of education.
In possession of a terminal degree, a Ph.D. in history,
I am certified in some situations to talk a lot about a little,
or quite a bit about a lot; to describe how past things happened,
or occasionally did not.
Back in graduate school we came to command,
knowledge of the sans culottes, and also of the fronde,
to come to terms with human mirth, and the costs of being wrong;
to learn by straight drop, and by diversions imparted.
We filled our brains to the brim with Ethelreds and Finklesteins,
gauds and gallimaufry,
Darien, Darius, the hells of Audie Murphy,
but that was just the start, the slim part;
learning's bulk developed in curious tension between humility and vim.
Years later we find this fine life comes with at least one common
handicap:
a brain which, like Christ's inn, has signs outside of welcome,
swinging in the wind,
but which inside, time and again, sends scouts all a'scurrying, to
grasp at any straw,
when outfield inquirers come asking, what 'what's 'er name' is called.
Fortunately there are often at hand folk to whisper answers,
or at this fundraising party we'd stumble on whether this thou should
be a thee,
or we've now confused him or her with some other person,
basalt rock, prime export or tree.
Absent this advice, however, we may launch our most desperate
discourses,
awkward navies of corracles which capsize into flowers,
notes from naked travelers at the borders of their powers,
words of duffers in the rough speaking praise of grasses they once
hoped to reach,
songs of stranded whales, salting prayer flags on the beach.
For this we apologize.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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