A poet I knew long ago became a tee-shirt millionaire.
Some of us broke our hearts at the loss of talent and hidden
art.
This old news haunts me, as if I had found a brown letter in
the attic, lamenting lost love.
I wonder where he is now, wondering whether his head is
still full of sublime verse.
Or, his other gifts of mathematics, new formulas, never seen
before except in the Mind of God.
His people send silk-screened shirts across the world from a
nation in the Southern Hemisphere; people whose ancestors drew drew dogs and
symbols on sandstone and ironstone.
Now, these descendents talk of mussels and wine sauce, or
salmon and dill for lunch.
Busy talk-talk, but no poetry comes out of the factory, and
the wife sits with her ladies, now all wearing the animal prints, from the
up-market part of the company, in red and yellows, which some think look good
with Capris and stilettos.
She delights in theses lunches and dances through her dreams
in her new line of muumuus, which look like ‘60s leftovers. Her old
Phantom-Watts rusts in the garage, while she skips across the land in a Spider.
“Our years shall be considered as the spider.” But, mom and dad have forgotten
that.
Mom, too, forgets her only daughter and pretends she does
not have a thirty-something child. And, dad is too busy selling tee-shirts to
notice that his baby does not have a cell phone. She threw hers in the ocean.
The old tribe sighs at the loss of this star, the blood
watching the end of an era. No grandchildren, not lasting heritage, no poetry.
All is dried-up like the red river bed; all perishes of
success and all is blown away in a tropical wind of the material.
The young woman walks the hot trails in boots and shorts,
with few resources, except for pen and notebook, moleskin, her one passion. She
sits in the shade and writes poetry which will be seen by no living person.
She thinks of the veil of the spider’s web as her own
interior life, a delicate thing, reminiscent of the words of a psalm—where did
she hear that or read that one about man’s transitoriness, lives like grass,
like a dream, like things that bloom and wither, dry up and blow away?
In the hot shade, she begins to write, and the black words
flow like water in the desert, cleansing her soul, her mind, her heart. The heritage
springs back to life, like a small rivulet pouring out of the hills,
practically unnoticed.
The heritage is for her salvation, her eternal life, and she
chooses the hard way not sought by her parents, who will never understand her.
The tribe sighs again, whispering across sandy red hills, “We have found the
wordsmith, but she is alone, and she is the last.”
