LETTERS FROM HOME: ABSOLUTE POETS, TAKING CARE OF UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Feb. 23, 1995

Dear Patty,

It's just after 5 a.m. and DC is asleep. I've been waking at his unusual hour often recently. She worries that I'm worried about something, but to me it just feels like energy seeking expression.

No horses are kicking their stalls at this hour, but soon Margie will be in the barn, doling out their special mixture of grains and molasses, and Expose will beat out his impatience on the wall. The dogs will be there, four overseers for one woman.

The big moon and the frost on the grass have set up a glow around the naked trees outside my window. They don't move but fill me with feelings of grace.

I'm sending you a new book by a Missouri poet named William Trowbridge. He was here for a reading a few days ago. He likes comedians, and (ital) grand mal (Ital) pathos of the Buster Keaton variety, the feeling you get when the train that is about to run you over switches to another track. I would call him an optimistic fatalist.

(ital) We stand, befuddled and alone, feeling more like the village idiot than a traveler with one foot in the absolute. ( no ital)

The moment I fell in love with poetry is as crystallized for me as the pictures of DC I keep in my heart. It occurred at the Galway Kinnell reading you and I went to in Laguna Beach. He in his janitor's shoes and white sport coat left over from somebody's 1954 prom, we sitting close enough to see, when he awkwardly dropped his stack of poems, the hand-written words, some of them crossed out.

The moment came at the end of the poem about the starfish. Do you remember? How the beauty of the image and the feeling in his voice converged on the last word to leave a theater of 250 people with no choice but to gasp, audibly, as one, then to clap as hard and as long as our hands would allow.

In years of (ital) digesting (no ital) great poetry in school, intellectual appreciation was all I ever could muster. I guess all love happens when you're finally ready.

The sun is up now. Margie's dog Lacey just stopped by for some pats and a dog biscuit. DC's watching cartoon in the bedroom. She's singing in the community choir, going to Rotary Club, trying to cure her California homesickness. These days when I ask her what she misses she says, "All of it."

I do too, but know we have business here we don't have there. Like all business, it's unfinished.

For instance: I interviewed a professor who had given me the only failing grade of my admittedly undistinguished academic career. It was shocking and richly deserved. I hadn't been to class for weeks and weeks and walked in on the day of the final exam like Bullwinkle, saying, "Watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat." The professor said no thanks.

This was my first recognition that I might not be allowed to wiggle my fingers through the chromatic scales of life. Of feeling like Trowbridge's village idiot, alone and abandoned in a world not interested in protecting my feelings. I secretly despised him for that.

I guess I've gotten over that loss of innocence, or rather that opportunity for understanding. Getting the lesson took quite awhile and often seemed to lead nowhere. But eventually you start completing your circles if you want to. Even glimpse the absolute.

I was a little nervous walking into the professor's office. maybe afraid I somehow could be judged unworthy again. The feeling quickly disappeared, couldn't find a toehold.

Listening to him talk I forgave myself for quitting his class, and secretly thanked him for the "F."

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.