I
Sudden winter
shadows,
Slanting from
a glacial pole,
Invade the afternoon,
Treeing the heatless
light
And dragging
all distinction
Down to a common
ground.
The wild cat
risks one last lark
Before it turns
to seek a warmth
That. might survive
its sleep.
Our walls are
strong enough, for now,
To shield us
from the season;
But nothing stops
these piercing words,
My good friend
is dead.
Poised always
to study and to teach.
He would have
me learn from this. But what?
II
Childhood is a
mirror,
Everywhere one
looks he sees himself.
Childish studies
tell the names of things.
To see the world
beyond the names
One must efface
his traces there,
Transcend the
words he has by rote
So that, freed
from the kingdom of the mirrors,
He may see himself
as well.
When I first began
to teach,
Full of mission
and resolve, I thought,
To strum the
chord that was my mind --
Yeats and Stevens,
Wimsatt, Joyce --
Would stir mystudents
strings as well,
And that the
spectrum that I helped them see --
Shakespeare,
Coleridge, Aristotle, Keats --
Would swell the
more for quickening new life.
Serving as guide
through these spectral versions,
Prophet for the
vision they fleshed out,
I would tilt
the dread cliché:
We would know
the ring of truth:
Nothing would-be
lost on us.
Even this gathering
dark can't hid
How miserably
I failed, marooned
By the arrogance
of despair and its ruinous progeny.
Nor all
the fault was mine, of course.
Trapped within
the looking glass,
Most of my colleagues
were children still themselves.
Cowed by the
welter beyond their walls,
They forged preserves
they called their "fields,"
Or sterilized
that larger world
With the cant
of their "approach."
They dwelt on
dates and plots -- the names --
Because a poem
itself is hard.
Some espoused
the fashion of the hour.
Some read the
same notes every year.
All taught. on
good authority,
To children they
would reward the more,
The more complete
the echoes
Sounding through
their house of mirrors,
Their joyless
house of mirrors.
III
Turned beyond
the reach of light,
Yard becomes
tree becomes sky again.
I must stop this
bitter talk,
So unlike my
friend himself;
And yet it was
he that made the rest of us seem small.
More than simply
tolerant. he opened to the world,
Dismissing nothing
as irrelevant,
No person as
a waste.
Never pretending
to more than he was,
Still he stretched
his limits and his reach
Through the scholar's
rigorous discipline.
Though well aquatinted
with the night,
He didn't choose
to linger there.
Knowing that
the world was more
Than he could
see at any time,
He never mistook
its dark parts for the whole;
But with sustaining
wit and cheer
Quickened a lucid
return.
"You know," he
told me once,
"We all thrill
when we welcome a new star;
But, for me,
a new person --
Now that's discovering
a world."
That must have
been how he saw me
On the day we
met, the day he shared
With me his vision
of a promising new Place
Where we could
teach the habit of connection,
And each would
learn freely from each.
Drawn by his
example and his love,
We made his vision
work:
We practiced
our singular moves
While orbiting
one another in a harmony
As rare as his
own rare soul;
And we learned,
with joy how we learned.
What if we are
all, past and present, all facets
Of a single glittering
sphere,
Our lights both
composing and reflecting the whole,
Each center and
circumference, figure and ground:
Like the chalice
brought to being through the profiles' stare
Each himself
in being all the rest?
To the spectral
threshold where all I am
Becomes all that
I am not,
I must bring
no dead conditions,
Must have my
name and style from its protean authority.
IV
Study Warren.
then:
An open book
upon his lap,
He sits among
a circle of his peers,
Questioning,
encouraging, weighing possibilities.
The fitful swaying
of a branch
Against the fading
light
Casts random
shadows in the room.
Brightening to
the vision reflected in the man,
The class takes
note:
The book, the
man, the students and the shadows merge.
For this moment
and forever they are one.
