These
two poems are personal. Sort of. They were not written to or about me and
the poets presumably are totally unaware of my existence on the planet. But each provided an ah-ha moment of personal
recognition for me as a person of advancing
age in increasing decrepitude.
Sydney Lea is a poet,
novelist, essayist, editor, and professor, and was the Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to ‘15. His most recent
book is The Exquisite Triumph of
Wormboy, a graphic mock-epic poem
in collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka—how utterly Vermont to
have a Cartoonist Laureate. His
thirteenth collection of poetry, Here was
published 2019. He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines
including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The
New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Lea has taught for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College, and at Yale
University, Wesleyan University,
Vermont College, Middlebury College, Franklin University Switzerland, and
the National Hungarian University.
Reckoning struck me first
because it opens in the state of my birth under the vast starry sky of the West
that was such a part of my childhood and then because it shifts to the lights
of a big city—Gotham for him, the Windy City for me. I have no son, but daughters, I
hear their voices—the bored indifference to those same
Montana mountains and eagerness to find a mall—any mall—in the small towns among the pine smells. The children
of those two eldest daughters are grown now and one has a laughing toddler of his own. My third and youngest lives with us now with
her baby daughter. I wonder if Matilda will walk by the
hand with me to find the elf door
in a rotting tree in a remnant wood or a flop-eared rabbit in a cage. I, too, feel some sort of transgenerational connection.
Reckoning
Let
us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly
thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
—Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
Once, on the
steps of a cabin in wild Montana,
just before dawn
I stood stunned
by that delirium
of stars.
I’ve looked from
a friend’s apartment in New York
at nine o’clock
in the evening,
likewise
astounded by countless windows.
Light
everywhere. Light everywhere. And dark.
Coleridge opined
that the sublime
can make us feel
like nothing.
I’m sure I’d
have known as much without him.
The older I
become the less I aim
at epic
self-expression.
It’s best, I
think, as I didn’t always,
to keep my
counsel in face of sights and themes
that lie beyond
my ken, right where they’ve lain
lifelong, though
once ambition
obscured all
that. But I check myself:
I’m no more
nothing, in fact, than anybody.
My memory feels
boundless,
and if it
fetches no sublime,
still moments
may be fashioned into stories.
As randomly as I
might choose a star
or a single
light from some high-rise,
I summon a
time—or it summons me—
when I and my
son, then just three years old,
walked through a
patch of woods
to spy on a
hidden beaver pond.
I longed for
this adventure to unfold
exactly as it
did. The wind came right,
and just enough
of day
remained for
both of us to see
three beavers
swimming, a mere five feet from where
we crouched in
pond-side reeds.
Clear as
judgment in my mind,
the rasp of
roost-bound crows, thick August air,
that tannic
orange of the cruising rodents’ teeth.
My son appeared
transported
as we left the
place by early starlight.
“How was it?”
asked his mother back at home.
“Oh, Mom! You
should have seen!
There were some
bugs in the water! They all were swimming!
All of them were
swimming around and around!”
In my twenties
then, I didn’t know
how not to feel
let down.
I know some
things today, that is,
that compensate
for slackened aspiration.
That child is
forty-seven,
his children
much older than he was then.
I study my boy.
I’m lost in speculation:
I resembled him,
I hope, in intending kindness.
In my case,
though, vague zeal
distracted my
heart and mind and soul.
He’s taking his
daughter to ski this afternoon.
They’ll command
an epic view,
yet it may be
only the shape of a mogul
or cloud that,
come the evening, she’ll retain.
And my son? He
has perhaps already traveled
like me to where
all types of light are local.
— Sydney Lea
The
next poem was shared just yesterday
on Facebook by my best friend from high school, Jonathan Ben
Gordon, now a retired Cantor.
Camisha L. Jones is the author of the chapbook Flare published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. She received
of a 2017 Spoken Word Immersion
Fellowship from the Loft Literary Center. She currently serves as the managing director at Split This Rock, a national nonprofit that cultivates,
teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears
witness to injustice and provokes social change. According to the Deaf Poets Society blog Jones “lives with fibromyalgia, Ménière's Disease, and an adamant
commitment to keep her writing life
from scorching on the back burner.” She lives in Herndon, Virginia.
At
first glance it would seem that I would not have much in common with a young
deaf Black poet. Certainly I am not deaf but I am hard of hearing due to prolonged
exposure to industrial noise and
ear-bleeding rock and roll as a
young man. Before I finally got hearing aids I had plenty of those I’m-sorry-I-can’t-hear-you moments, especially
when clerking overnight at a gas station/convenience store to exasperated
customers whose lottery and cigarette requests I could not quite make out. Equally annoyed
was my wife who got tired of repeating herself over and over.
Things are mostly better now
if I “have my ears in.” But why the hell do they whisper on all of my favorite
TV dramas? And last week I must have
said “huh?” a dozen times to my fellow activists at a Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County
action. And don’t get me started on garbled phone calls.
Disclosure
I’m sorry, could
you repeat that. I’m hard of hearing.
To the cashier
To the
receptionist
To the insistent
man asking directions on the street
I’m sorry, I’m
hard of hearing. Could you repeat that?
At the business
meeting
In the writing
workshop
On the phone to
make a doctor’s appointment
I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-so-sorry-I’m-hard-for-the-hearing
Repeat.
Repeat.
Hello, my name
is Sorry
To full rooms of
strangers
I’m hard to hear
I vomit
apologies everywhere
They fly on bat
wings
towards whatever
sound beckons
I’m sorry. I’m
sorry. I am so, so sorry
and repeating
and not hearing
Dear (again)
I regret to
inform you
I am
here
—Camisha L. Jones
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