I walked to a cafe that caters to dogs wearing sweaters and ordered a cold coffee. I sat outside with a collection of poems by Wislawa Szymborska, the Nobel Prize winner from Poland. I wanted transportation away from the cluttered city of my mind to somewhere more languid, but not lazy. No news today, only nuance.
Across the street, a homeless woman sagged against a real estate office and drank three cups of coffee of identical size but with different logos: Starbucks, Dutch Bros, Dunkin Donuts. She was surrounded by her possessions stuffed inside pillow cases and talked angrily to the sky, something many of us do, but typically in silence to our ulcers or headaches.
“Clochard” appeared before me, published in 1962, about the poet observing a homeless Parisian man who sleeps sprawled like a knight in effigy in the garden of a cathedral.
This image certainly surpasses one of a homeless man sleeping in median of an Interstate Highway but surpasses it how? Did the poet invent a distinguished dignity that didn't really exist?
No homeless man asleep or passed out I've ever seen has ever sprawled like a knight in effigy. More like a refugee wiped out by a strafing run.
I found this poem by a random perusing of the collection I found randomly resting on the parqueted floor of a pack rat book store I had entered a half hour ago after watching a homeless man slide from his wheelchair and rig up a tablet (with external speakers) to play a movie he will watch sitting on the sidewalk once he locks in a signal.
More from “Clochard:”
He earns his red wine
by trimming the neighborhood dog,
precisely the same arrangement (except substitute malt liquor for Bordeaux) of a homeless man in my neighborhood.
And yes, this Oregonian man also,
sleeps with the air of an inventor of dreams
his thick beard swarming to the sun.
He's told me his dream of writing a novel of Eve and Adam (a story of role reversal) and never stops imploring me to give Dune (the novel) another try.
Szymborska must have known the knight, unless she made it all up.
It's so much easier making it up rather than finding out but somehow a Nobel Prize is better than a Pulitzer Prize. How about a Prize for writing that falls somewhere in between? A prize for the writer who bolts the cafe and chases after the homeless man riding two bicycles at once while carrying a bag of cans and singing along to a country song playing through his phone with a line about your beautiful eyes.
That happy man just rode past me as I was reading “Clochard” and I didn't chase after him to get that poem of the country song crooned by a homeless man in the city riding two bicycles and riding them well.
I was with Szymborska and her Parisian man, and then she lost me with bloodlessness, as so many poets do, but rarely this poet.
The poems I like are like transfusions to replenish my interest in discovering new ways of looking. The homeless country singer riding two bicycles past me was just such a poem that filled the tank.
Or I like poems that make me laugh, something almost unheard of in modern poetry.
Drizzle began to fall. I read more poems at random and then landed on “Warning” and its opening stanza:
Don't send jesters into outer space,
that's my advice.
I laughed. Szymborska wrote that in 1976.
Now the jesters send themselves! And that explains exactly why a homeless man sits on a sidewalk two blocks away and watches a movie on a tablet propped up on the seat of his wheelchair.
What in the world is that movie? I must ask on my return trip. Surely the title will provoke a poem.
I thumbed on and discovered “The Joy of Writing.” The first stanza read:
Why does the written doe bound through these
written woods?
I read the stanza three times but couldn't fathom anything. I read the entire poem and that didn't help, either. I tried reading the woman across the street drinking three different brands of coffee, but it was useless.
I closed the book and sipped my coffee. My attention drifted, then took flight:
I recalled seeing a doe bound through the woods near Mt Hebo, and the crazed man living in a van who almost killed it with a bow and arrow, a murder thwarted by my nudging the rear bumper of his van with my truck.
I recalled seeing a doe bound down a beach on Nestucca Spit that spooked my dogs and the coyotes that followed us.
I recalled seeing two elk rut on a beach the Japanese shelled during WW II and that Elkton High School in Oregon boasts a mascot named the Elks, even though elk cannot be plural and I've now used that grammatical error in about half dozen pieces of Oregon writing and know I am the only writer in American literary history who has commented on the beautiful absurdity of The Elkton Elks as opposed to the correct usage of The Elkton Elk, which is so much better because the name would be eternally teaching grammar at sporting events and reminding us all of those weird and fantastic animal names with no plural, such as deer and quail.
These recollections brought me great joy.
So I forgot poem “The Joy of Writing” but not its title. What is the joy of writing about the New American Diaspora?
Seeing the country singer, the three cups of mismatched coffee and the sit-in movie and no one else was and committing them to words.
And also because reading a poem somehow worked the Elkton Elks into this piece.
Elks would be correct if you were including all the subspecies, and in that case a mascot named Elks would be correct in that it would encompass all the different types of elk that make up the team. I'm just having fun here. I wonder if those who named the team agonized over this. :-)