Poetry: "That Mythic Brink"
This is related to the entry I posted half-an-hour ago, which included the text and reading of my sonnet "All Too Brief."
This poem deals with the same matter, and it is both old and new. The original version was written almost fourteen years ago under the title of "Empty Seat" and printed in the 26 November 1997 issue of the Hatboro-Horsham High School student newspaper, The Hat Chat. The poem included here is almost entirely new.
That's because it's a composition that Michael Everett delivers ad hoc at the Tetraplex grand-opening in the Danger of Being Me. And in the interest of sharing some of the intense work I've been doing writing this novel over the last month, I'm presenting the poem in its literary context, excerpted straight out of the book. The following passage runs 1,125 words, and it was a night's work all by itself.
I had written five dozen poems in my short career, including more than thirty sonnets.
Some of them were good, a few of them were great, and most of them were trifling drivel. But as I looked from one face to the next across a small bookstore crowd, every word of every one of them went scattering across the desolate wilderness of my mind like the dead leaves of Fall. I might as well have never written a poem in my life. And now I stood mute before two dozen friends and strangers, casting about for anything to say to them, and all I knew was that the greatest man I had ever known lay buried on a hill overlooking the Firth of Forth.
I saw Michelle, saw a look on her face that was equal parts compassion and curiosity. She thought I had frozen. But then I saw something else, something out of the dark recesses of my memory, an image I had seen that morning and would never, ever forget.
I leaned over the podium, gripping onto its sides. Hot fury flashed like heat-lightning, and I spoke to be heard. "Four rows back and eight rows in is an empty fuckin chair."
The room went silent like someone had hit the mute button. Maybe it already was silent, but now I felt the pulse of that silence, smelled its breath, looked into the yawning cavern of its soul as it looked back into me. It was silence like peace. Silence like rest. Silence like death.
"I didn't see it yesterday," I went on, remembering, "because it wasn't there. Its raging orange plastic surface rapes my weary eyes with barren purgatory glee," I paused, briefly, and found what I needed. "With terrible surprise. This madness shouldn't happen here, to such a brilliant mind," I said, "`cause now he'll never get to live the Life that he designed."
I didn't look at the crowd, but I saw them anyway. I hated what I found in their wounded eyes, but I suppose that's the price for the truth. Winnie and Ben and Emma and Phil and Gale watched me like they didn't quite recognize me, and that might have been true just then.
But Michelle recognized me, and in my words she seemed to recognize her own monolithic anger. I felt myself tumbling crosswise into her chartreuse eyes as my mind broke free of its temporal bindings, and I went back. Back to the roof of the high school where Ethan still is sitting, still is sitting, perched upon the rampart with his back to the three-story drop.
I looked at Ethan as he smoked his herbal cigarette, and I said to him, "How can this fraying world survive in this young prophet's wake? Can we persist when everything so easily can break?" He twitched a grin, and looked at me through smoke drifting off his cigarette. "There's no more deep, insightful thoughts, and no more words to say," I told him. He nodded. He knew it was true. "A senseless fucking tragedy has taken you away. I see an unimagined pain in that empty fuckin chair, and I contemplate the things that prove your parting wasn't fair."
I left the roof then, carried on the flighty winds of memory, and went back further.
Back to the beginning.
Back to the bleachers of Keller Vale Middle School's gymnasium, where nearly a thousand children huddled in the seats still bundled in their coats at seven o'clock on a February morning. Ethan was there, up in the bleachers where he still is sitting. Still is sitting.
"I flip the yellowed pages in my mental catalogue," I told him, and he smiled at the memory, because it was his memory too. His as much as mine. "And I find the oldest memory, that early dialogue between two boys, just twelve years old, that helped me make it through that frigid Winter morning back in 1992." A bell rang through the glacial gym, and we joined into the surge of a thousand miserable children climbing out of the bleachers. "His fluid Scottish dialect had fascinated me, and he was captivated by my baseball history."
I left the gym, and even though I didn't know I could, I went back even further. All the way back to Philadelphia International Airport, and of course that wasn't possible because I had never been to the airport downtown. But Ethan was there, of course he was there, because this memory belonged to him alone. Except that he was sharing it with me tonight, and letting me see.
A procession of passengers emptied out of a terminal, and I saw Ethan, no more than eight years old, walking between a man and a woman that I recognized as his parents. I walked along side them as they navigated the concourse, hauling their luggage. "I think of all the knowledge that will now remain unfound," I told this young boy who was destined to bleed to death on an abandoned highway. "And your depth of boundless wisdom that would have been profound."
Ethan had his mother's crooked nose, but it was his eyes that really radiated across the years. He had his father's eyes. "I think of all the women that he'll never learn to love," I told Ethan's father, and he seemed to know, even from the dark recesses of this memory, how the story had to end. "And how they lost the chance to know this man they're dreaming of. I think of all the best laid schemes that rapidly dissolve, and how this greatest story could so terribly resolve."
I opened my eyes. I didn't remember closing them, but it was probably somewhere around the time that I went back to the roof. I saw the audience, saw the sympathy and the tears and the pain that I knew well enough myself even if I could never understand it. I felt the culmination of this agonizing exercise approaching, and so I said, "I couldn't guess what lies ahead, or if a world exists where those who conquer Death will meet, and where the mind persists."
Winnie was watching me, her grief so fresh that it broke my heart. Her eyes begged me to stop, needed me to finish. So I said, "I'm searching for a language that might properly convey my hope, my wish, my need to hope that I'll find a fuckin way to step across that Mythic Brink, and find him waiting there." I saw more tears, and felt my own, and spoke to be heard.
"But I just can't make myself believe when that fuckin seat is bare."
There was no applause, and that was just as it should be.
This poem deals with the same matter, and it is both old and new. The original version was written almost fourteen years ago under the title of "Empty Seat" and printed in the 26 November 1997 issue of the Hatboro-Horsham High School student newspaper, The Hat Chat. The poem included here is almost entirely new.
That's because it's a composition that Michael Everett delivers ad hoc at the Tetraplex grand-opening in the Danger of Being Me. And in the interest of sharing some of the intense work I've been doing writing this novel over the last month, I'm presenting the poem in its literary context, excerpted straight out of the book. The following passage runs 1,125 words, and it was a night's work all by itself.
I had written five dozen poems in my short career, including more than thirty sonnets.
Some of them were good, a few of them were great, and most of them were trifling drivel. But as I looked from one face to the next across a small bookstore crowd, every word of every one of them went scattering across the desolate wilderness of my mind like the dead leaves of Fall. I might as well have never written a poem in my life. And now I stood mute before two dozen friends and strangers, casting about for anything to say to them, and all I knew was that the greatest man I had ever known lay buried on a hill overlooking the Firth of Forth.
I saw Michelle, saw a look on her face that was equal parts compassion and curiosity. She thought I had frozen. But then I saw something else, something out of the dark recesses of my memory, an image I had seen that morning and would never, ever forget.
I leaned over the podium, gripping onto its sides. Hot fury flashed like heat-lightning, and I spoke to be heard. "Four rows back and eight rows in is an empty fuckin chair."
The room went silent like someone had hit the mute button. Maybe it already was silent, but now I felt the pulse of that silence, smelled its breath, looked into the yawning cavern of its soul as it looked back into me. It was silence like peace. Silence like rest. Silence like death.
"I didn't see it yesterday," I went on, remembering, "because it wasn't there. Its raging orange plastic surface rapes my weary eyes with barren purgatory glee," I paused, briefly, and found what I needed. "With terrible surprise. This madness shouldn't happen here, to such a brilliant mind," I said, "`cause now he'll never get to live the Life that he designed."
I didn't look at the crowd, but I saw them anyway. I hated what I found in their wounded eyes, but I suppose that's the price for the truth. Winnie and Ben and Emma and Phil and Gale watched me like they didn't quite recognize me, and that might have been true just then.
But Michelle recognized me, and in my words she seemed to recognize her own monolithic anger. I felt myself tumbling crosswise into her chartreuse eyes as my mind broke free of its temporal bindings, and I went back. Back to the roof of the high school where Ethan still is sitting, still is sitting, perched upon the rampart with his back to the three-story drop.
I looked at Ethan as he smoked his herbal cigarette, and I said to him, "How can this fraying world survive in this young prophet's wake? Can we persist when everything so easily can break?" He twitched a grin, and looked at me through smoke drifting off his cigarette. "There's no more deep, insightful thoughts, and no more words to say," I told him. He nodded. He knew it was true. "A senseless fucking tragedy has taken you away. I see an unimagined pain in that empty fuckin chair, and I contemplate the things that prove your parting wasn't fair."
I left the roof then, carried on the flighty winds of memory, and went back further.
Back to the beginning.
Back to the bleachers of Keller Vale Middle School's gymnasium, where nearly a thousand children huddled in the seats still bundled in their coats at seven o'clock on a February morning. Ethan was there, up in the bleachers where he still is sitting. Still is sitting.
"I flip the yellowed pages in my mental catalogue," I told him, and he smiled at the memory, because it was his memory too. His as much as mine. "And I find the oldest memory, that early dialogue between two boys, just twelve years old, that helped me make it through that frigid Winter morning back in 1992." A bell rang through the glacial gym, and we joined into the surge of a thousand miserable children climbing out of the bleachers. "His fluid Scottish dialect had fascinated me, and he was captivated by my baseball history."
I left the gym, and even though I didn't know I could, I went back even further. All the way back to Philadelphia International Airport, and of course that wasn't possible because I had never been to the airport downtown. But Ethan was there, of course he was there, because this memory belonged to him alone. Except that he was sharing it with me tonight, and letting me see.
A procession of passengers emptied out of a terminal, and I saw Ethan, no more than eight years old, walking between a man and a woman that I recognized as his parents. I walked along side them as they navigated the concourse, hauling their luggage. "I think of all the knowledge that will now remain unfound," I told this young boy who was destined to bleed to death on an abandoned highway. "And your depth of boundless wisdom that would have been profound."
Ethan had his mother's crooked nose, but it was his eyes that really radiated across the years. He had his father's eyes. "I think of all the women that he'll never learn to love," I told Ethan's father, and he seemed to know, even from the dark recesses of this memory, how the story had to end. "And how they lost the chance to know this man they're dreaming of. I think of all the best laid schemes that rapidly dissolve, and how this greatest story could so terribly resolve."
I opened my eyes. I didn't remember closing them, but it was probably somewhere around the time that I went back to the roof. I saw the audience, saw the sympathy and the tears and the pain that I knew well enough myself even if I could never understand it. I felt the culmination of this agonizing exercise approaching, and so I said, "I couldn't guess what lies ahead, or if a world exists where those who conquer Death will meet, and where the mind persists."
Winnie was watching me, her grief so fresh that it broke my heart. Her eyes begged me to stop, needed me to finish. So I said, "I'm searching for a language that might properly convey my hope, my wish, my need to hope that I'll find a fuckin way to step across that Mythic Brink, and find him waiting there." I saw more tears, and felt my own, and spoke to be heard.
"But I just can't make myself believe when that fuckin seat is bare."
There was no applause, and that was just as it should be.