In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
--by Wendell Berry
I.
The poem is important, but
not more than the people
whose survival it serves,
one of the necessities, so they may
speak what is true, and have
the patience for beauty: the weighted
grainfield, the shady street,
the well-laid stone and the changing tree
whose branches spread above.
For want of songs and stories
they have dug away the soil,
paved over what is left,
set up their perfunctory walls
in tribute to no god,
for the love of no man or woman,
so that the good that was here
cannot be called back
except by long waiting, by great
sorrows remembered and to come
by invoking the thunderstones
of the world, and the vivid air.
II.
The poem is important,
as the want of it
proves. It is the stewardship
of its own possibility,
the past remembering itself
in the presence of
the present, the power learned
and handed down to see
what is present
and what is not: the pavement
laid down and walked over
regardlessly--by exiles, here
only because they are passing.
Oh, remember the oaks that were
here, the leaves, purple and brown,
falling, the nuthatches walking
headfirst down the trunks,
crying "onc! onc!" in the brightness
as they are doing now
in the cemetery across the street
where the past and the dead
keep each other. To remember,
to hear and remember, is to stop
and walk on again
to a livelier, surer measure.
It is dangerous
to remember the past only
for its own sake, dangerous
to deliver a message
you did not get.
I have pondered this poem long and long since reading it over the weekend. I love it too much to weave my own impressions into it. It must stand alone, this poem, like the past it describes. It made me think of a special photo from that past, the one above.
The photo shows my grandparents' beloved home at 17th and Topping in Kansas City, Missouri. My grandmother, Nellie, is the woman standing in the group of three -- there in the middle -- directly behind the woman seated. My young uncles, Jim and Marshall, are standing on the porch. Their baby sister, my mother, would be born some years later after the family had moved to Berkeley, California.
Have you done this, GoogleMap former residences belonging to your family long before you were born? It fascinates me. Here is a screenprint of 17th and Topping as it looks today. The driving view shows an older neighborhood with someone walking on the sidewalk but even the older homes existing there now are newer than my grandparents' house, which is long gone, and the walker captured by Google has no idea the house or my grandparents ever existed. I do not know on which corner their home and acres of property were situated. I like to think that some of the trees are offshoots of those my uncles climbed back in the early 1900s....
To hear a portion of my Uncle Jim's recorded memories of his boyhood at 17th & Topping, click memories lit the corners of Jim's mind: the old home and a horse named Teddie.
But, as Wendell Berry's poignant poem cautions, we must be with the past for only a moment to hear and remember . . . to stop and walk on again to a livelier, surer measure. Now, if only I could believe that today will be that it would seem easier to leave this moment.....
.
