Soon I am to graduate from
this college with a degree--Bachelor's of Arts and Sciences. Only for a
year
Maria and I have been married, so I'm not a bachelor. I'm also no
scientist,
and the only art I really know is my writing. To tell you the truth, it
feels like trying on another man's suit.
I am sitting here at the Health
Department's Clinic thinking about all this while Maria is inside
having a pre-natal
exam from Dr. Lorri Esposito, an obstetrician. While I've been carrying
around a Grade Point Average, she has been carrying our little Maria or
Marco junior. There's no way to compare the two--it would be like
weighing wind and water.
I'm writing this down bit by bit in
this journal, so I'm keeping it in present tense. You get the feeling
of it
happening. Maybe, one day it could turn itself into a novel.
Oh, the dark eyed girl in the
corner
who came in with her mother has just run into the little bathroom--a
place
Maria seems drawn to like a cat to tuna. Even with her big belly, Maria
can
move like a cat-woman. Ah, that huge curve of her body has become the
source
of our pleasure and pain. I love stroking it, rubbing the soft globe of
it
with baby oil. The doctor said my rubbing might help with the stretch
marks,
but I think she just wanted to give me something to do--a science
project.
Maria loves it though--it's one time she never complains--"Oh, Marco,
do
it some more, please. Back here around the sides more." Then she smiles
deep
and sighs like a kitten, "I love your hands," and who can resist?
To tell the truth, I have to watch
it. You know, getting a-roused. I'm torn now, I tell you, between the
mother and the child. Since we did that Sonogram thing where you can
hear and see the baby inside the womb, I can't do it without feeling
like an alien invading his soft world with my hard thrusting penis.
It's strange, you have to admit. Oh, I want her plenty, but I also want
her safe. It's all driving me quietly nuts inside.
It won't go away. I know that now.
Like, when we went down to her mother's place for dinner last
Sunday--oh, boy! Esther greets us at the door, makes Maria take off her
coat and show her
huge belly--"Oh, muchacha, tanto grande!" When she smiles back at me, I
just
grin. Then Esther turns and she asks it, "Well, Marco, how do you like
it?"
"Like what?" I ask dumbly and wait.
"How do you like riding the hump--huh?"
Well, there is a full five seconds of silence; then everyone roars with
laughter and begins pointing my way. Even Esther blushes with me as she
looks
to Maria, "I'm sorry," she says, "that's what my father asked your
father
each time I was pregnant." She is hugging Maria's soft dome and crying
for
joy as I pass, slipping through the doorway and into the quiet kitchen.
Maria's step-dad Luis is there. He
is always in this kitchen drinking slowly at his table from short, thin
glasses.
"Marco," he says rising, "Come join
me," and he holds out a glass of honey colored liquid. It is warm to
the palm. He squeezes the muscle of my arm with his powerful hand.
Years of truck
farming in the Ohio fields have turned his arms and hands to stone.
"Sip it, my son. Drink slowly as
the
sun goes down."
"What is this, Luis?" I have to
ask,
for one sip has already taken me somewhere far out on the horizon where
the
sun is just above the trees.
Luis tilts his head slowly. "It's a
drink from my native land: a mixture of tea and honey..."
"And...what else?" I nod, grinning.
He too nods, "Some Tequilla... and
your Southern Comfort."
I sip again and it rolls gently
over
my tongue melting its way down my throat. It holds one quiet, turns the
women's voices to music. I sit and I sip.
"Golondrina, it's called. Golon-drina--it's
Mexican for the swallows," and he turns his hands into flapping birds.
"Someday I teach it to you. Okay?"
"Sure...mucho, Luis. Mucho." And
for
the first time in a month I am rested. I can feel my heart rate slow to
the
movement of the sun into the trees. My breath follows the snow geese
over
the back field. I am inside this dream liquid as Luis pours us another.
"Marco, I'm going to tell you the
story that goes with this drink. You've heard of how the swallows, the
birds,
they go back to San Juan Capistrano, si'?"
"Si'" I'm thinking Spanish now.
"Well, what you do not know is how
my people celebrate this. On that day they walk over the border from
Mexico and they go to sit all day in the warm sun, sipping glass after
glass of Golondrina. They drink and they watch the birds come
in, till the sun it goes down. Then they walk back across the border to
their homes."
Luis reads my big smile as part of
the landscape now, and it really is. I am already there with him in his
place, feeling the warm descent of the sun.
"Soon," he says, softly reaching
over to pat my hand. "Soon enough, you will have your Maria back
again...and
a child too to hold your dreams. Till then," and he raises his glass
slowly in the last trace of sun, "we drink life together." And we do.
Thinking this now, as I sit in this
clinic waiting for Maria, I cup my hands at my lap, lean back and close
my eyes, and I feel the full sun floating into my cup.
I am the world-crier, and this is my
dangerous career. . .
I am the one to call your bluff, and this is my climate.
(First Will and Testament, 1939 in CP 160, 161)
Who really understands another’s life, let alone his or
her own? What takes a lifetime to create cannot be grasped in a few
day’s reading or even years of research, and yet the attempt always
extends our understanding of personality, character, and humanity. In
the case of Kenneth Patchen, American writer and artist [1911-1972],
the life story is doubly revealing for what it says about courage and
character, and for what it exposes about the struggles of the
writer-artist in America. Though studies of Patchen
have begun to take a fuller look at his impact on America and its
literature,
I would broaden that focus here by including the impact of a turbulent
America upon his own life and art. His is a story of the rebel writer
in America—of the poet-artist who endures adversity and derision in
order to create. In my earlier book, Kenneth Patchen (Twayne
1978), the focus moved
quickly from the life story to a descriptive analysis of the
literature.
In this book, the life story is central. In agreement with the American
Romanticists, who offered Patchen an early and sustaining vision, this
study holds that a person’s life is his or her greatest work. Patchen
believed that too,
and this belief explains the central unity of his life and art.
Beginning in 1936 with Before
the Brave, his first book of proletarian poetry, and extending
beyond his death in 1972 to the books of his writing and art still
being published today, Patchen produced roughly a book a year. One
confronts in his writing an art fierce in character and dynamic in
form. As a Promethean poet, Patchen defiantly created a vital art
through four decades of struggle
and denial. As one of America’s primary “poets of engagement,” he
welded
his life and art as one. For many he remains the model of a “rebel
poet”—in
the purity of his faith, the abundnace of his creative output, and in
the
example of his life. His self-proclamation as “world-crier” and “bluff”
caller
in a “climate” demanding such a “dangerous career” is ultimately
revealing. Patchen labored hard at what he felt compelled to do— help
create a new world order from the vitality of his vision and art. His
moral position as artist is summed up well by his fellow poets. Kenneth
Rexroth declares, “His voice is the voice of a conscience which is
forgotten. He speaks from the moral viewpoint of the new century” (Bird
97). William Everson accents Patchen’s defiant stance, “I best
see Patchen as one who cocks a terrible right arm against the glass jaw
of New York, stunning it with all the contradiction of its values he
can summon against it. And if it seems impervious to his passion and
his power that is only the deceptiveness of time, for he will survive
it, as the power of the poet always survives the metropolis that hates
and ignores him in the moment of his accusations. Bless him in his pain
and
passion, for his cry is heard” (Homage np). Such devotional
praise
is rare, even among poets, yet characteristic of the many personal
appreciations
one finds of Patchen. These tributes rise in recognition of the moral
values
so deeply etched in his work and in the story of his committed life.
Though
he bravely declared and defied the violation of others, Patchen never
raised
his fist against another person. His art is measured by its compassion
and
commitment.
Songs
of the Woodcutter
From Chinese
Zen Poems: What Hold Has This Mountain?
From Thoreau's Lost Journal:
Poems by Larry Smith (Westron Press, 2001)
From Working
It Out (Ridgeway Press, 1998; fiction).
From Kenneth
Patchen: Rebel Poet in America