Yeah, so this is another one of these neighborhood poems.
And one of my favorite pieces of music
is the Bach "Cello Suite" as it's played by Pablo Casals.
And probably most of you know that the story of Casals being,
I think, about 12 or 13 years old when he found the sheet
music for these cello suites.
And up until the time that he made the recording--
he made the recording 30 years.
It took him 30 years.
He decided he wasn't ready for 30 years
to make a recording of them.
And up until that time, the cello suites
were considered just kind of practice music for cellists.
They weren't something that you actually played in concert.
They are just sublime.
They have everything in them.
Anyway, the poem is not really about that.
Don't worry.
There's something at the end of the poem that invokes it.
Lives, like a bit of shoelace snapped off and tied back
on by tight knot frayed, each of us lives attached
to the ridiculousness of suffering--
according to the Buddhist, needfully
with plenty of precedent and proteges, and of course,
just trying to deal.
Am I stronger than I once was?
Yes.
But is it enough?
On the street, parents with fidgeting babies,
students with bulging backpacks, the millennium or two of ideas
both boneheaded and marvelous.
Could I take up their burdens even if I wanted to?
What about the smokers, the malted smell of pipe tobacco
and vast stagecraft recalling Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern
shore as it goes up in smoke.
Or the cemetery staff the funeral director,
hearse drivers, and grave diggers
aware as they are that a headstone is heavy enough
to pin the head in one spot.
They subdue the mourning atmosphere.
Though even for them, perhaps childhood
comes back into view changed once in a while.
As the summer reading lists that once seemed to me a bore,
now look to be filled with insight and care.
With mutiny and courage to spare, never again will
you find me hating on those particular books.
Probably, you too wanted to be a dress designer, a rifleman,
or geneticist, or photographer--
a life of so-called action, of consequence.
Perhaps, you ought to have lived your story
as a French economist hell bent on improving
the lives of grim coal miners.
The street is wide enough to hold
my oldest, most dazzling wishes but not to let me touch them.
Put them alongside the sound of Pablo Casals
near flawless in playing "Bach's Cello Suite," though
and all experience stretches.