This poem is fairly flat, written quickly, I’m sure. It continues
the series that came out of that “heading for Ireland” moment. A moment of
complex emotions to be sure. This one also has a fairly snotty sentiment poking
its head up: “A sorry pass, / when the best are so dispersed one has to chalk /
up thousands of miles for one crack / or canny reference.” So, “the best”, huh?
Not buying it—there are millions of educated, clever drinking partners
everywhere one turns. If they’re not all poets and English professors, well that’s
too bad. Get over it. Just a rankling bit of tossed-off elitism there. Well,
some of the more highly accomplished and educated academic elites are still
awfully damn insecure and need to set themselves apart. I think I haven’t seen
all that much of it, but I have seen some, and little of that goes a long way.
There has been more than enough of it to last me a lifetime.
Imagining pints of Guinness with his new green friends to come, his heart’s
not in it. This puts a whole new spin on that great, stale old aphorism, “the
grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” You get to Ireland, where
the green grass is really green, and figure you'll
find yourself pining for what you left behind anyway. This is what comes, I
swear, of not being in place, of not paying attention to now. It’s always
looking forward or backward with this one… Hmm… Didn’t Yoda say something like
that to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s ghost when he was talking about Luke Skywalker? “This
one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away…to the future,
to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, hmm? What he was doing, hmm?
Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.”
All right, so John Berryman was no Jedi Knight. Yoda stepped
into popular culture some thirty-five years ago and maybe brought a touch of
wisdom along with him. I’ve heard this wisdom of his before from a variety of
sources—there’s nothing new about it. It’s all a question of whether you’re
ready to act on it. In this case, acting
is simply a matter of appreciatingwhat is in front of you, or what will soon be in front of you. John Red Feather, a Lakota elder I met some years back
in South Dakota, made it clear to me: “You can’t preach the Great Spirit, and
you can’t force it onto anyone. You can only lead them gently to it, and when
they’re ready, something will happen. Something always happens.” “When they’re
ready,” is the key. If insecurities, wounds, addictions keep a person from
being ready, then that’s a tragedy. Life is certainly profligate with its
tragedies. There are the infamous major ones, and still big but more focused
ones like a suicide, and there are smaller ones, like sitting in an Irish pub
over a pint of Guinness with good, welcoming people, and all you can think of
are the wives of colleagues back home. Might as well stay in Oklahoma. Well that's right where he's at at the moment. But, traveling is not an emotionally simple endeavor.
Guess some people didn't come to his going away party.
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