A Real Reason for Doing This

No matter what your measure of abundance, safety and well-being, it will probably falter, if not fail, before some private summit of meaning. Too many wonders in my world are marked "FYI." Every one of them was supposed to have been passed, or offered, like a peace pipe.

In any case, injustice, is defined for me this morning as living in a world which has permitted the work of poet Ed Dorn to go out of print, that forced me to buy a stolen library copy of his collected poems so he would once again be an active adjunct to my life. Injustice is the fact that Ed Dorn is not a more common moment in my life or a better known frame of reference like Rilke or Whitman.

This blog will try to be a corrective of such injustice.

Mind you, I ennumerate the injustices of world that does not lack for food or comfort. I have never starved but by my own volition. I have never been hungrier than the excesses of diet and voluntary fasting. Besides, I don't think the famished of Sudan will make it to Blogspot today. So I address the famished of my own land. And to them I say the following: It just seems wasteful, if not wrong, that you can't collide with a poem of reckoning as beautiful as this.

IF IT SHOULD EVER COME

And we are all there together
time will wave as willows do
and adios will be truly, yes,

laughing at what is forgotten
and talking of what's new
admiring the roses you brought.
How sad.

You didn't know you were at the end
thought it was your bright pear
the earth, yes

another affair to have been kept
and gazed back on
when you had slept
to have been stored
as a squirrel will a nut, and half
forgotten,
there were so many, many
from the newly fallen.

--Ed Dorn, circa 1960

It will be a day like any other, except it will be the last, or the marking of a new norm that makes it impossible to see time as an accumulation the way it was. I read recently that the only pair not on the ark was from Noah himself. The Mrs. stayed behind. Better to drown amidst what I've known, she reasoned, aloud. In this poem, Ed Dorn imagined losing touch with the familiar. Hey, it was 1960, nuclear obliteration was as real a prospect as it is today. Only then we found ourselves taking constant farewell in our dreams, our prayers, our poems. Today we believe our luck has lasted so long that we do not need to run dress rehearsals of that, or any, destruction in our minds. So we see the conservatives playing freely with the proposition of fire again.

I have decided that a miracle today would be if Donald Rumsfeld is shown this poem. And I am determined to improve its odds of happening.