Well, here with under four weeks
to go until commencement, I’m feeling the annual end-of-spring-semester
doldrums, and I’m groggy from a brief but sweaty nap to boot. So I’m feeling simpatico
with Henry’s touch of self-doubt and his lapse of inspiration. This Dream Song was
written on New Year’s Eve, as 1960 rolled into 1961, as far away now in the
past as King Henry VIII or Brachiosaurus, it’s all the same. I was 2 years old.
I actually have a couple memories from that near that age, but they’re not
relevant here. I have no memory of the 1500s, so maybe those two ages are
different after all. And, no, time doesn’t run backwards, but it’s a cool
enough poetic project to imagine so.
One thing Henry has going for him
is that he is “desired.” I have friends and family, and I’m grateful for that,
but word from the farthest West hasn’t spread much on my account. But perhaps
with diligence that’s not yet out of reach. I just want to be a working writer,
like him, write books and stuff. I will keep singing, for what it’s worth. I
would like my poems to be fresh as bread, still as a cat in a window, a crow in
the snow.
It’s a nice Dream Song. I don’t
like all of them. This one is human and approachable, there’s a melancholy
about it, and I’m down with melancholy. Joni Mitchell wrote that there’s comfort in melancholy. New Year’s Eve is
supposed to be a party moment, a celebration of the new, but I’ve never gone
with that, and clearly Henry wasn’t in that mode on his New Year’s Eve either. Quiet
gatherings at home are best. I feel that melancholy in new beginnings. Rather
than New Year, spring right now is in incipient mid-April flower and coming on
fast. An April spring and New Year’s Eve are two of the beginning moments in
the yearly cycle. (The new school year in late August is the third.) Eliot
claims that April is the cruelest month, but that’s mean. But the breeding of
lilacs out of dead ground, conventionally la-la time, does have this sad
underbelly. Like when you look at a newborn baby and think, don’t worry about
it for now, Sweetheart, but you started dying today. Enjoy your span, that’s
all. Make something of it.
I’m outside on the front porch, the
light is just balanced between blue twilight and gold lamplight flickering on
up and down the street. The traffic noise rises and falls, and it just went
full quiet in its ebb. No clattering air conditioners yet. Robins are
squabbling in the silence, and there are assorted others songs and chirps. There
is rain in the warm humid air; a quilt of gray clouds is oozing forward. The
irises I planted last fall are pushing upward. Irises care nothing for
melancholy. The rain is pushing a breeze forward, that just this moment
arrived. Time to go inside.
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