Time, memory, poetry and mortality in Daydreaming on the Porch

Time
By Kevin

Time
Slow, lonely
Tiring, boring, stopped
Minute, hand, number, second
Lengthened, endless,
explored,
black, scary
Space

Poem written by one of my students in the fall of 1982.


I really enjoyed teaching and reading poetry when I taught English many years ago. Creative writing allowed my students to think for themselves, and it was so refreshing for my soul, and mentally stimulating, most assuredly, to see what they wrote. For instance in his poem, Kevin intuitively grasped, or at least found a way to think about, space time in physics.

I discovered that the best way to deeply dive into poetry was to teach it. Anyone can read it, but teaching it opens an alternative means of plumbing the depths of meaning in some of the best poetry published and with results you otherwise might never be able to achieve.

Preparation for teaching and discussion a poem in the classroom required time to think and meditate on the words, structured so differently than prose. This was 40 years ago, before the Internet scrambled and fractured our attention spans, and made it so easy and quick for students to look up online literary criticism of notable poems and poets.

As the Internet grew exponentially early in this century, it began to dominate our technology-obsessed world. Suddenly, this began to greatly diminish my time for pure reflection as I succumbed to the contents of the infinite treasure chest that had been discovered and opened at the click of a mouse or the tap of a keyboard. I think to some degree we all have done this over the past 25 years. .

But about 20 years ago, just as the Internet was starting to take over our time and consciousness, I took time to listen to the water still flowing gently in my mind, and wrote dozens of poems in the course of a year. I am not sure how or why I did this, looking back now in the early Spring of 2024.

What does this tell me? The time may be right to start writing poetry again, even as the number of poems I myself read by others is minuscule. That’s a mystery also, except for the fact that most poetry I try to read is either pretty and soothing — but too simplistic — or densely obtuse and indecipherable. Three poets who bridge that gap for me are Mary Oliver, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and William Wordsworth, whose poetry I first discovered and wrote about in high school and then again in college a few years later.

Here is one of the poems I wrote 20 years ago. It is the first part of a three-part poem.

Unalterable

I listen to the water flowing
really listening,
hearing, actually,
still listening,
consciously
Thinking about, hearing
the deeper cadences,
the unchanging rhythms,
Deeper and deeper,
if I can
Into pure timelessness,
feeling less and less,
knowing nothing.

The moving water joins the pool
In stillness,
barely visible,
eddies on the surface,
gone.

I am lulled
Into an oblique reverie:
emotionless,
neither happy, nor anxious,
not sad, just aware,
for there is nothing else
at the moment to be.

Back in 2001 I seemed to feel a compelling need to write poetry, even while knowing I was not agile at this craft, for it was something I had only briefly done in the past.

Writing poetry is very hard work because the process drags out strange emotions, thoughts and memories. By maybe that will be the point of it for me: to retrieve memories and write in such a way that I confront truths and realities of life today more honestly and viscerally than I do in prose.

I will conclude with a perfect example of what I mean by what I just wrote. Sometimes poetry is the best way for me to vent my anger, fear and feelings of hopelessness that come and go in our oftentimes frantic existences. Poetry lets me get it out of my system. That’s why I should write it as often as I can.

I wonder if Kevin’s ever written anymore poetry in all the decades that have passed since he put on paper a surprising revelation, fortuitously for me, in my English classroom.


Soundings

Past the steaming asphalt
And the heavy equipment roller,
the pile drivers,
the roaring motorcyclists
entombed in their own
pneumatic drills of pounding
indifferent chaos,
carried along on the exhaust
If the ill wind they produce,
and the terrible noise,
Inflicting pain on passersby,
shocking the senses
of the momentarily senseless
so often
It seems they are not capable
of feeling that type of pain,
mental and physical,
as I am, again and again
by these most ordinary
and customary assaults
in innocent bystanders.

Just now, an ambulance wildly screams by,
an emergency unfolding,
blasting the air with the urgency
of the dying or possibly succumbing
at that moment,
no one knows.
I should say a prayer
But I forget that
Is what my sister says she does.
Emergency.
I walk on the sidewalk,
fingers plugging my ears,
trying to obliterate
the momentary anger, futility
madness and fear
and tumult these
emergencies symbolize:
The wailing shriek
of death and mortality,
raw and unavoidable,
passing you by for now,
one of the lucky ones
at the crowded intersection
of life and finitude,
where there is no way
to deny death.

Last updated February 28, 2024