Theme
by: Billy Collins
It's a sunny weekday in early May
and after a ham sandwich
and a cold bottle of beer on the brick terrace,
I am consumed by the wish
to add something
to one of the ancient themes--
youth dancing with his eyes closed,
for example,
in the shadows of corruption and death,
or the rise and fall of illustrious men
strapped to the turning
wheel of mischance and disaster.
There is a slight breeze,
just enough to bend
the yellow tulips on their stems,
but that hardly helps me
echo the longing for immortality
despite the roaring juggernaut of time,
or the painful motif
of Nature's cyclical return
versus man's blind rush to the grave.
I could loosen my shirt
and lie down in the soft grass,
sweet now after its first cutting,
but that would not produce
a record of the pursuit
of the moth of eternal beauty
or the despondency that attends
the eventful dribble
of the once gurgling fountain of creativity.
So, as far as the great topics go,
that seems to leave only
the fall from exuberant maturity
into sudden, headlong decline--
a subject that fills me with silence
and leaves me with no choice
but to spend the rest of the day
sniffing the jasmine vine
and surrendering to the ivory governance
of the piano by picking out
with my index finger
the melody of "Easy to Love,"
a song in which Cole Porter expresses,
with put-on nonchalance,
the hopelessness of a love
brimming with desire
and a hunger for affection,
but met only and always with frosty disregard.
I think all poets dream of adding to the pantheon of great themes, whether it's love or death or lust or eternal beauty or headlong decline. The difficulty is finding something new and surprising to say about any of those topics. Otherwise, the poet risks sounding like a Robert Frost or William Shakespeare cover band.
I took today off work. Shocking, I know. You see, I really enjoy my job at the library, so, a lot of the time, work doesn't seem like work. However, I've accrued quite a bit of PTO and need to use it or, literally, lose it. So, I used some of it today.
A good portion of the morning and afternoon I spent revising poems. I also sat at McDonald's reading and, eventually, went for a walk along the shores of Lake Superior with my wife. It was a perfect Upper Peninsula July day, not too hot and with a robin's-egg blue sky. The beaches were packed, and tourists were out in force. I don't particularly care for large crowds, so I avoided the densest areas of activity.
And I did a lot of thinking about love and aging and time. The biggies, as Collins writes. I'm not sure any of my meditations were earth-shattering or revelatory. They were, however, honest. I know that I have experienced lots of love and loss in my life. I know that my daughter, youth and hope personified, is on the cusp of leaving my close proximity to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. My son won't be far behind her--just a couple more years. And I know that I've become one of the "elders" at family gatherings, even though I still feel like a teenager who knows nothing about the ways of the world.
That is what having time off does to me--it makes me contemplate the inevitability of change and my own mortality. I know, I know. Most people spend their days off doing fun things, like swimming or taking in a movie or having lunch with a friend. That's not the way my mind works. I tend to gravitate to dark meditation when I have time to kill. What can I say? I'm a poet.
And what has this day taught me? I need to have a better plan for my vacation days. Or a strong antidepressant. Probably both.
Saint Marty is now going to watch a movie--Dead Man Walking or Terms of Endearment. You know, something uplifting.
No comments:
Post a Comment