America: Coming of age on the cusp of irrelevancy (poem followed by a reflecion))

In the cave into which we have stumbled

We are met by hummingbirds

Who, we will discover,

Have a colony deep inside the mountain.

Let us follow them into the darkness.

Just follow them (and me), America,

Follow the whirring of their wings

And their urgent squeaking.

Some are lighting up like ornaments, self-charging.

After the darkness widens

And the worst of our fears release us . . .

America: Whoa, whoa, whoa! What?

None of this is acceptable.

Back up. What cave? Why hummingbirds?

If there is a story here, tell us!

Even if we appear ludicrous,

Dressed for a formal wedding

That no one can remember having actually attended,

Dressed in pink socks

That will never be pink again,

With sh*t to the knees. . . .

We deserve that much respect!

If there is a story, please tell us

Even if it doesn't hang together,

Even if we have heard some of it before

Or seen it played out by TV people whose lives

Are even more meaningless than ours.

OK, but just know that all the good parts have been excised

For the shorter attention span of an American audience

And very little remains of the original.

I am just the storyteller, a spinner of yarns,

But primarily an entertainer.

But there are stories I will not tell

Until the time and place are right.

This is one of those.

This noble epic made its way

Across oceans and over mountains.

Why, it barely survived being stuffed in a barrel once

In the back of a fusty wine cellar

Only to to be discovered by a

Drunk who sold it to a rag picker

But that was countless generations

After it had been badly translated

From language to language

And stained by the incontinence of time . . .

And now, with me, it has circled back to English,

American English with its ephemeral references

That only make sense to

People walking around with

The names of Disney characters

Sucking frozen culture on a stick.

But, then again, you might meet some random person

At a party named Moby Dick or Lord Jim

Who is trying to turn the thermostat up

To melt the ice of his guests

Whose names are all nicknames,

Like "bad boy" or "Turbo" or "Willy"

That will appear in quotes in their obituaries. . .

This is too much for anyone!

I know that I have lost the thread.

Forget the story.

I promise you that something will happen

If you stick with me and trust that

Eventually, someone will show up

Who is relevant.

But they will not come from the entrance

But from the bowels of this cave

Which is the only place left on Turtle Island

That has not been sold

To someone with a good Christian name.

.......................................

I have been reading Czeslaw Milosz (The Collected Poems"). I met Milosz in 1981 one year after he won the Nobel Prize for literature. I had self-published a book of poems (in '81), "The Blue Man: Poems for the late Nuclear Age", in which I quoted him. He was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at the time, so I put a copy of my book in his mailbox and a few days later he came to the bookstore I was clerking at, to find me. I, to my regret, never read much of him until a couple of weeks ago when I found his Collected Poems at a book sale and decided to spend some, way overdue, quality time with him. He died in 2007 at 93, which means when I met him he was 67. I was only 30, so, at the time, he looked very old to me. Turns out he was at the height of his powers and had hundreds of poems still to write. What is really interesting to me is he has unlocked something in me, at 74. He saw himself as both obsolete (on a bad day) and prophetic (on a good day), a Slav and a universal man, and, like me, what kept him alive was the conviction that he had something important to say to his times and that he had better say it because after he died, or so he was convinced, his name would be all but forgotten, sandwiched between Mickey Mouse and Miller. He was well aware that he was straddling worlds and ages as well as continents and cultures. But the world that was contemporary for him, that, let us say, as a straddler, his right foot was planted in, is the age in which my left foot is planted, and what I consider my contemporary age, or the world of my times, is a world that he never lived to see and didn't have a foot in. But, toward the end of the 20th century, he was trying to be a bridge for the ants to cross on, to stay relevant. He was well aware that he was not always relevant, that not all of his poetry was relevant (nor could it be!), but he knew himself as well as someone who has gone through years of Jungian analysis, because that's what being a poet for life can do for one. Poetry like Milosz's keeps us honest. I treasure my memory of meeting him and I feel lucky and blessed that he came looking for me that day in 1981 when I was just starting to take myself seriously, not just as a poet but as a human being. Rediscovering him has filled my sails with a fresh wind.