So I get the
Writer's Almanac sent to my inbox. Every day, there is a poem for me, and almost every day I read it, and once in a while, one gets under my skin and I think about it and think about it and wish I had a younger memory, so I could say it to myself over and over.
Yesterday was
a poem by Denver Butson. And I have been reading some more of his poetry
here.
I worry about copywrite, and if I am supposed to do this, but since the poems are already on the internet, and since I want you to go read more, and I will probably even buy a book, here we go, just so you can get a taste.
Beauty or Flight
by Denver Butson
The man who jumped from the highway bridge one afternoon
who drove his car along in rush hour traffic
then carefully pulled it over, fussed with something briefly on the dash,
so casually that another driver passing
thought he was looking for a map, or a cassette tape,
that had slid during the last turn before the bridge — that's all —
and then stepped out of the car, standing, stretching,
and closing the door routinely, a man in need of a break
on a long drive, a man untroubled by his next appointment,
a man who felt himself growing tired and thought
he needed some air, looked up the highway once
and then down at the almost frozen rows of traffic
under the haze that lingered above the bridge
and then broke simply and suddenly into a run, a dead run,
one motorist called it, crossing in front of his car
and not even stopping at the railing between the bridge
and the empty space beside the bridge, entering that space
and opening his mouth in what one driver called a scream,
though she heard no sound above the drone of traffic, and
other drivers saw as a gasp for breath, not unlike a child takes
when diving into a backyard pool, and he executed then
a nearly perfect, if a little rushed, swan dive out across the space
next to the bridge and into the water ninety-five feet below.
One fisherman in a boat a little upstream
saw the man who jumped from the highway bridge,
the moment he left the bridge and entered his dive, and the fisherman
swore he saw not a man but a large bird, a falcon or an eagle,
shot mid-flight by an angry driver, a large bird
who was trying to regain some sense of beauty, some sense of flight,
in its final dying seconds
I think the thing I like about the few poems that I have read thus far is that they paint a picture without telling the reader how she is supposed to feel about it. He has the words, but the rest is up to me. He wrote
a poem about his brother's suicide as well as the one above, but I can't quite fathom why they don't leave me feeling melancholy or depressed, especially considering I spent a lot of my life contemplating suicide. I don't think it is because he is an optimist. He isn't painting a rosy picture. He is simply observing what is happening, and showing that there are different perspectives, as in the poem above. I like the idea that there are different ways of looking at things, although this did used to lead me to tie myself in knots, trying to acknowledge everybody else's feelings - trying to figure out what my responsibilities were there.
The thing about poetry, (and I am not going to differentiate between good and bad poetry) is that if there is something in it that resonates within you, it can transport you somewhere. That sounds really pretentious, or just plain stupid, but I mean that if you take a minute, to read a poem, and then go where it leads you, visualise it, feel it, maybe think about it, it can change your perspective. Or maybe it just gets under your skin for a while, and then you move on.
