The mad poet's stump speech or ...

If you elect me to be your next president,

the chickens will finally come home to roost

and there will be poetry in every pot.

I will guarantee that there will be free

verse from pre-school through university

and a state-supported poet

in every coffee shop in the land.

The bankers will scribble nonsense on cardboard signs

and the generals will tiddleywink their medals on street corners

and rhyme and reason will finally and forever rule

And then comes the screech of tires

and a needle scratching across vinyl grooves

and the chalkboard chalk breaks into two, too.

If nominated, I will not run;

If elected, I shall not serve.

I choose poetry, not more volume.

Poetry is in the cracks, the spaces between things, the silence within the sounds. Poetry is the mystery that surrounds the tangible. Poetry lives in our imaginations or not at all.

We human beings should look for beauty, for wonder – and for love. Even that chicken in the pot and a carrot in the stew are more than protein and vitamins and a little salt - more or less. Our politics is hollow. So much empty talk. And are we, fellow citizens, becoming husks?

These, too, are just more words, after all. Measure them against your own perspective on reality. But it is hard to find anyone who thinks our politics are healthy. And almost no one reads poetry. This is only a correlation, but of course, cause has not been established.

I will vote in November for the better or against the lesser of the candidates running for office. I look elsewhere for poetry.

Let me begin again:

I was nearly half-way back across the Kaw River Bridge when I saw the bald eagle descending from a perch in the tree near the Bowersock South Powerplant. As it approached the surface of the river, talons were extended. How far ahead must that eagle have been tracking? It skimmed the surface, dipped and came up empty. The eagle turned and flew off downstream, low over the water relative to the sky, slow beats of wing, but steady. I followed the white spot of its tail as it passed in front of the blur of reddish-brown bare branches on the far side of the river. Then ascending gradually, the eagle passed in front of a fuzzy patch of bare gray branches heading towards the gray-white sky. The sun’s light was diffused through clouds and some scattered rain drops.

At that moment, a flock of seagulls appeared from downstream. Let’s say that there were fifty, but they were merely of a feather, aware of each other, flying together. Not in tight formation, but staying close. I lost sight of the eagle in the flapping of gull wings, the eagle apparently on its own course down steam. The gulls all turned and flew up and across the river, passing over the riverfront building and heading over downtown Lawrence.

I was left, with a few pigeons perched, facing into the breeze, on the cable arcing slightly downward over the dam that spanned the river. I was leaning slightly against the railing, watching the water flow down towards the Missouri, then the Mississippi River, and on out to the sea.

The apparently endless repetition of rainfall, river, evaporation because of the energy of the sun, the spinning earth and cycling winds, and then rainfall again upstream – it all had a beginning and moves toward an end. At least, that’s my perspective.

I recall the words of Heraclitus yet one more time. No one steps into the same river twice. What I have witnessed today didn’t have to be as it was and it will not repeat exactly this way again. And I am grateful to have been alive at this place and at this time. Somehow what I have seen  strikes me as beautiful – and that I care about being a small part of everything.

Everything has always been beyond my reach, but I look out anyway. What I can touch with my eyes and my other senses is my home. Me, standing at this railing on this bridge is my time and place, for now, only.

Songs and poems tie these things together. What we know is always relative to something else. The beat of the eagle’s wings is about the same as the beating of my own heart. My heart and my brain are organs of flesh and blood of about the same size. That is, they are about the size of my hand. Which is about the weight of a seagull. And then, not infinitely smaller, but tiny, the neurons inside my brain turn and fly across a patch of brain, conveying part of a message that my mind’s eye can read. Yet together, this all seems to mean something that I find beautiful.

One old song counts by hundreds: Lord, I’m one, lord I’m two, lord I’m three, lord I’m four, lord I’m five hundred miles away from home. If that tune is in your brain, you are hearing it with me. Turning, flying across.

Or Mr. Frost pauses on a snowing evening and has miles to go before he sleeps. And Mr. Eliot repeats: “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” Or Annie Dillard says this in her essay about the present: “You do not run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.”

Each time is the only time, and I believe that poetry ties the times together. Sometimes we can get something down in words, often we only feel that the poetry is there. From one perspective, the river is only very many molecules of hydrogen with two oxygens attached. Countless, but finite numbers of them, flowing by gravity’s law. And add an eagle. Some number of gulls flying in a flock. A man from the species, homo sapiens, standing on a bridge.

And one day, as the planet spins, twirling around the sun, that star, in its death throes will lick out a tongue of flame and dry up every bit of moisture on earth, leaving a cinder. And, perhaps, someone will be standing on a bridge on a distant planet, looking up at the night sky and see a spot of white and think very nearly the same thought that I thought I just thought. How beautiful it is - and to be a part of this, now.

And then I turned and finished crossing the bridge. I saw faces along the sidewalks that I could not identify as I walked on towards faces that would smile into mine. What is the distance of recognition? And each time I catch a glance of that feeling that I’m so very close to home, it is the same and different. That’s time.