Repetition

I have come to the age when I repeat myself.

Let me try that again: I have come to the age when I realize that I repeat myself.

No, I must try that one more time: I have come to the age when I realize that I am repeating someone else.

I am not making any of this up.

That would be blasphemy.

I was standing on the Kaw River Bridge.

I heard the train a comin’ – a rollin’ round the bend.

And then, through the leaves of a tree, at something like more than a 100 yards away, I saw that beveled, blocky orange Burlington Northern and Santa Fe locomotive appear, rounding that last bit of bend and begin to bear down on me, toward a spot well beneath my feet, to be precise. For long, glorious seconds it powered right at me, getting larger, and larger, and then it was just one container car after the next for an age in train years until the tracks were empty.

Mr. Cash said part of that, so memorably, so long ago, in my years.

But as I was saying, it is the words of others that I am writing.

Someone said it sooner. Someone said it more memorably.

Ah, there’s the crack in the universe.

So you don’t forget, language goes back a long time, beyond the tower of Babel, beyond the first writing, beyond the first word. I’ll not elaborate, but reputable sources trace all things back something like 15 billion years.

I frankly cannot imagine who could have made some singularity - some call it that - containing so astronomically much potential - ex nihilo, as some say.

But then how?

Why?

But I will not now elaborate on that much repeated and disputed tale.

I am interested in the blink between the moment of my birth and the inexorably approaching moment when my eyes will never open upon this earth again.

There has been some expansion in the universe since the Big Bang, some expansion in language since the first word, but Ecclesiastes said it memorably, so very long ago in cultural years: there is nothing new under the sun.

Without going back over a lot of thinking and writing that has gone on in my own time, in the time I am interested in at this moment, I seem to be writing in a time of repetition.

Sure, I put words and phrases in different orders, and at the pace we read and listen we may not realize that we’ve read and heard this all before.

That’s the crack.

Our memory.

So, I am not playing on saying something new, something never said before. Only something you’ve never heard before.

I aim to play a note so sweet that it will ring in your memory for perhaps as long - and maybe longer - as it took for me to hear that whistle out well beyond my sight and then I waited, waited for that train to come round that bend. And then I felt what I felt. And I wished I could put it into words.

Maybe one day, with practice, I will repeat someone’s words, maybe some I have echoed myself, having long forgotten the source, so memorably that you will walk out on that bridge and wait – to discover if they are true.

Life at the Kansas Relays

If I tried to tell you she had an exquisite face,

I could only fail.

It was perfect like a pearl.

It was young like the dew at sunrise.

It was animated like the brook just burbling from the glistening snow bank at midday.

It was smooth like Mary’s Lake at dusk.

Her eyes were her eyes.

Her every feature and line were her’s.

And then she half-turned towards me.

And then she was laughing and waving at the jumbotron.

Her face,

there,

next to this much older, puffy, red-faced ogre.

If I were her grandfather,

I might have reached out my hand and touched her mocha cheek.

I might have asked her how her race had gone.

And then, like a fawn, she skipped away.

I licked a lime once

I licked a lime once.

Full across its face.

Always used to be a Kroger’s frozen concentrate additional pulp orange juice guy.

Now I’m wondering:

Is there anything else I should have tried all these years,

or:

was it the waiting all these years, drinking that orange juice, day after day, that made finally licking that lime so remarkable?

Not that the sensation was so very special,

I still prefer orange juice.

But the impulse -

Doing the deed I hadn’t done before.

I’m considering walking backwards all the way across the Kaw River Bridge…

maybe on my sixty- sixth birthday…

unless I tipple over the railing the day before…

from sheer giddiness.

T.S. Eliot considered whether to eat a peach or not.

Robert Frost took a lesser-used path.

And I,

I licked a lime once.

Poets walk slowly

In the film, Il Postino, the postman asks Pablo Neruda, the character playing Neruda, how you become a poet. 

Neruda replies, You walk along the shore, slowly. Then there is further discussion of expressing what you feel. And metaphors.

This, mind you, is how I remembered it. It was a film. There were close-ups of the actor’s faces. The sound of their voices in Italian. Me, reading subtitles. Shots of the beach. People walking along it. It was very expressive. And music.

I can hardly expect you to watch all 108 minutes of the movie for a line or two that will almost certainly not be precisely as I have noted it.

And perhaps you will be more struck by the white foosball in beautiful Beatrice’s mouth, another character. A shot of the moon. The postman’s face and the circle he draws on a page in a notebook.

The postman asks Neruda if all that you see is a metaphor for life. In the film. 

As I am remembering it.

The character playing Neruda says he will take a swim and think about the postman’s question and answer him tomorrow. Then he walks into the sea.

The film maker cuts to another scene.

Of course, I was interested in this story. I have made my own attempts at becoming a poet.

I walk to the river.

But how to select the words that will express what you feel. How do you even discover what it is that you feel? Is feel even the right word?

It takes something less than 108 minutes to walk in a straight line to the river and back. I have walked it countless times with countless pauses and asides.

Words. A film of words.

There is a scene, the sky is reflected in the river. I should be able to make something of that.

And Beatrice.

And me. Who’s face could you get to portray the searching look on my face as I stare out my window not finding the words?

And then the music swells and there's a long shot of the river.

Roll credits.

Zen Dawn

I didn’t used to be a morning person –

when I slept better.

But it’s something to watch the stars fade into the brightening sky,

to hear the day break,

the birds in the trees,

the incessant hum – sometimes near,

sometimes far –

of rubber on pavement,

the crush of the city trash trucks

compacting garbage just over the canyon rim,

hydraulics whining,

heavy metal banging on metal.

It’s a magical time,

abundant parking,

the sidewalks clear of all but last night’s debris

and the occasional walker or jogger.

I smelled bacon frying as I walked past the Eldridge this morning.

Let me be clear, I added only a whiff of irony to this poem for effect.

Morning is a magical time.

Downtown Lawrence isn’t the only magical place in the universe,

but it’s one of them –

if you’ve learned how to be.