See You On the Other Side.
I leave in two hours. I woke up this morning feeling a bit queasy, in that way that fear, anticipation, and excitement can make you feel. Oh, and there was a four-ton elephant on my chest. So it goes.
I have been debating what to leave you all with for the four weeks The Nest here will be absent, and I finally decided on something contemplative…a poem or two. This poem, by John Ashbery, is one I’ve thought about for years. He’s a so-called ‘language poet,’ so isn’t really supposed to make logical sense…you just let the words and sounds wash over you and make grabs at meaning.
I like this poem because (for me) it speaks to that situation where people arrive in your life, having lived their life parallel but unbeknownst to you, and it seems as if they’ve always been there. Of course, that’s on my mind as I travel to meet The Bee.
At North Farm
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzard and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow
passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?
And here’s my response to Ashbery’s poem, which I wrote a few years ago (long before the adoption). I was playing with the idea of how seamless your life and someone else’s can become, even though there was a before time when you didn’t know each other:
Poem Coming On
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzard and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow
passes.
John AshberyAshbery’s sense of it—the stranger, always moving
toward you across the next rise, all the people
you haven’t yet met, don’t yet know,
but who are coming on. The sense of someone
out there, moving in a life, now washing the dishes,
now pruning the roses, now talking on the phone.
They cry and make love and laugh out loud
without you. Bury their mother. Stop for coffee
at the corner and glance at the morning
headlines. Show up at the family barbecue.When you do know them—when the point
of meeting finally does arrive—your life
and theirs no longer remember difference.
Perspective shifts. You see the two lives
as a painter sees the hay bales sitting in the fields:
black boxes against green. No dimensions.
See you on the other side–of the world, of parenthood.
(5)