a beginning and a funeral

Herein begins my blog.  I imagine that in the end I will write most about the poetic process, or  things that could lead to poetry,  as it is the thing that in my scattered life that I do most consistently, besides having a home made chocolate chip cookie just before bed every night.  For me it is just that, a process.  A captured thought...and these are easier to lose than car keys... a reflection, and then sometimes, a poem.  It contains elements of how I have taught kids to write; head down, don't censor, and let's see where it leads you.  I am a habitue of Poetry Daily, and often spin off something I have read there; seeing the good contemporary poetry prods me into the right frame of mind; into wanting to capture briefly the ephemeral and hard to nail down.  But it is also a kind of dialogue, a response of sorts, to what I have read, that triggers something in my own life.

That is my first recommendation; read poetry.  Do not be deterred by how envious it makes you.  There is room in the world for every single person to be a poet. (Though I am momentarily stalled in my thoughts about what a wonderful world this would be when I remember recently hearing  Slavoj Zizek, the Slavonian philosopher, declaring that if you look into the past of many monstrous dictatorships you will find a poet).

But I will start with a death.   I went to the funeral yesterday of a twenty year old odder than any I have been to.  It was like a novice poem in a way, in which everything that might have mattered was kept hidden.   We were adjured, ordered even, by the pastor not to think of his death, but only his life, and only a tiny fraction of that.  A life recorded in mostly smiling photographs with no hint of who he might have been between all those snaps. It seemed to me that the boy I knew, who struggled bravely against, in the end, overwhelming odds, was lost somewhere in this memorial.

In life he shambled, as if his head and limbs had all been assembled by an apprenticed toy maker.   He looked like a young man set loose by Dickens; one brought up by hand, his hair flinging out from under a baseball cap, and the plaid shirt hanging off his skinny body.  His blue eyes were what you saw, though, always full of hope that this moment would turn out all right for him.

Someone whispered to me that they did not see his birth mother in the standing room only crowd.  The photos showed him as a baby with a very, very young father.  I wondered about all that we could not know about his life.  I remembered kids I had worked with in the 80s who found themselves with babies, and how they looked at them with feelings that mingled pride and fear.  They always hoped to build families like those they could imagine, but had never had, and in the end, they could not, and the babies were taken into care, or absorbed into the homes of their grandparents.

I wondered now if he might be such a one.  It is quite true that he was optimistic and loved everyone.  It was what made him so appealing.  But he struggled every day.  He was learning disabled; what a multitude of troubles that covers.  For him it meant he could understand everything, could see it, could imagine it all, but could never hold anything; knowledge and habits that might have been combined into something useful for him slipped through his fingers and was taken up by autumn winds.  He would forget everything except that he wanted to be good, and to be loved.  Whenever he got in trouble at school, or couldn’t get to school because he was still in bed and forgotten where he needed to be, he was terribly sorry.  It was so clear that he was, genuinely, deeply, terrifyingly sorry.

 The latest pictures still featured his astonishing eyes, but they  seemed sadder, more tired.   At what moment did it fall inwards? At what moment did his imagination show him a future where all the pieces would never come together after all? 

In the end I was sad that we were turned away from his life; it seemed to me that this forced him to be alone with his suffering even in death.  I wanted to know that those who knew him best did not block out what they could not help him with;  that those closest to him understood about the afternoon he died, and that it mattered in that disembodied moment, that in his real goodness, he took no one else with him out of this life.