We adjust the background
so that I am still in a forest,
but the traditional kind,
not one made of cement and glass,
but composed primarily of wood
and auxiliary vegetal matter,
aerated with avian sonorities,
and partially veiled by “air products”:
innocuous mist or fog,
for there is such a generous
spacing between predators
that it would make our Paleolithic relatives,
wherever they might be watching from,
think that living in our world
would be a safe and wonderful thing.
I pause in the mist or fog, because
it is a good place for retrieving erstwhile data
to supplement the present with;
that is, what’s left of the present
after the morning news
finishes most of it off —
and here is something: When Phil Niekro
retired from the Atlanta Braves
there was no longer anyone
playing in major league baseball
older than I was. He achieved
this distinction in 1987
and will never relinquish it.
What has happened since then?
Honestly, I don’t keep track of him.
Oh, you mean to me? Well, lots of things,
really, but I’ll get to them later,
since I’ve often admonished myself
for living in the past, although
that was when I lived in the past.
The Phil Niekro discovery
came through one of the newspapers
I perused during the eons of down time
consequent to proofreading at Forbes,
where in two years my only noteworthy
“catch” was pointing out that Luxemburg
was not a principality — as written, a synonym
for minuscule polities — but a grand duchy.
In the following week, while
resting comfortably on my laurels,
I missed a typo so egregious that my luster
was tarnished beyond reclamation.
So back to the present, or what’s
left of the present after the evening news
has finished chewing on it —
and there was no word
about the Somali pirates
who attempted to seize my poems
and hold them hostage.
What were your poems doing
in the Strait of Hormuz?
You mean the Gulf of Aden.
You may well ask.
I wish I were at liberty to say.
*
So that’s as far as I got with the first draft on my laptop,
while sitting unnoticed for an hour in the shoe store
except by the guy in the chair on the other side of the aisle,
who was keeping an eye on me until my contact showed up —
2 o’clock was that approaching hour — and then he abruptly left
a minute before she, the no-nonsense-taking Mrs. Blackstone,
walked in from a long-past-due assignment,
and when I mentioned the departed observer, she said
that he wasn’t one of hers; and I looked down at my watch
to evade the stare that italicized my blunder,
and saw that it was quarter to three — I had just lost 45 minutes!
but in fact it was 55 years that I needed to go back and fix.
Those alterations will never fit in the space at the end of the file,
but they set off reflection enough to beguile the obfuscating eye.
from The Brooklyn Rail (April 2020)
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