A Walk With Friends
By Shaun T. Griffin
In this time when so little will assuage and the stories of people are equally heartening and heart-rending, in this time when we are confined to our immediate spheres, those with whom we are close are like good wine. I took a walk with friends today, old friends both, more than 30 years with each of them, and we walked lakeside with my older friend’s dog. I know them because they are poets, and because they are people with whom I share the quiet refrain of writing. Writing poetry has very little fanfare; it is, by design, an isolating experience. You cannot run from the basic fact of its existence—it came into being via reflection—and these men have reflected long on their experiences. One is a poet who writes in form—mostly sonnets—and I think he has done it so long that it could be like walking to him. The other poet writes an ecstatic verse, but deeply anchored in themes of family, desert, and difficulty. I have listened to them like you listen to birds on this same lake—the loon-like call of a spouse, the squabbling of Canadian and white geese, the searching quiet of the egret. And each time their voices penetrate.
These poets could not be more different—older and middle-aged, more aged than middle, and come from states of mining and farming, wintry and desert places, educated and self-taught places that hew a person’s character, leave them to writhe on the limbs of their respective origins. And yet, it was poetry that brought them together, enabled them to speak a common language, a language of acceptance, yes, but also, a way forward to wrangle the tough questions—the ones we are living with now: a leaderless leader, a virus, and a future of many unknowns. Poets swirl the breadth of these subjects with an urgency thought to be the domain of first responders. But their words, uncommon in the daily interchange, are what we behold after things settle down. After calm returns. So often the simplest of ideas defies expression and yet—my friends serve this art form without equivocation. It is no less exacting than other trades; you spend years becoming. Together they have written poems for over 50 years—an unthinkable effort devoted to something perceived as arcane or referential but otherwise, not essential. But the paradox of their lives, of all who work in the art form, is that it is essential to our well-being, our ability to witness, to absolve, to abstain from judgment. When our great minds pass, we look to their words to sustain us and the same is true with poets. My friends have written poems that move like the swan across this lake—and I return to them for their prescient understanding of not just water, but what lies below. I have read and reread these poems because they plumb the depths of things I cannot say, but experience or believe or intimate just the same. They lead me into a realm of sonic perfection or, if not perfection, a resonance of thought and belief and feeling, the music of thought perceived.
My friends did not expect to have this lifelong enjoyment or challenge. They did not know what was in store for them. After years and years of practice and study, they were able to look up and determine that yes, this lake I walk around is real but also symbolic—it affords me a way to reflect upon so much that flies by us in the span of a day. Walking around its circumference, they shared anecdotes of reading, writing, listening, and coping with the demands of this new time, the after times as James Baldwin called them. Each of them depend on this literary endeavor like the mallards dipping for food in the water. They trust there is enough in its pool to record the elements of our days and nights. And they trust the water to provide access, even when what is written down does not suffice. Most of the time, this is what they are left with—an approximation, a hoped-for outcome, a line or two that might fit in a poem. Paradoxically, the struggle to articulate this is what sustains. By the water’s edge, both men confided poetry’s difficulty, both men acceded to its unlikely mastery, both men nevertheless, took something from the morning. They took a corresponding belief in the process, in the diving down for the words that somehow resurface to name a quality, an experience, an ineffable moment.
I wanted to walk with my friends because this is a quieting time. There is no convenient door to exit, no path save doing what we know to stay healthy and even that has become political. Somehow I cannot imagine the virus, the mace-like virus, giving a damn if you’re for one party or the other. But their presence calmed all of this or much of it. As people we crave authentication of our experience—we need to know we’re not alone. Boredom and repetition set in quickly in this time but the walk, the water, and the waterfowl took our eyes away. More than once I looked up to see the egrets piercing the glassy surface, waiting patiently for the moment to strike. More than once I listened to the honking geese, the querulous jays, the mud hens, the pigeons, and the dogs walking astride their roving masters. All of us were on the path surrounding the lake, moving in tandem or more, a motion of minutes and hours. Then we rested and sipped something cool, the words falling off. We returned to our places away from the lake, our sanctuaries where the words remain, and I suspect, some were written down.
I want to close today with a poem from the Irish poet, Michael Coady. It is entitled Thirsting, and it is from Michael’s book, Oven Lane, published by Gallery Books, 1987.
Thirsting
If you should ask me why
your mornings bring from me
no air mailed intimacies
I’d argue that the heart
of love is shy of saying,
its miraculous surprise
sings best in contained silence,
speaks truest when it’s dumb,
free of the word’s daylit
finalities, its bleary grime
of usage.
In a Greyhound terminal
the burnt out phrase which I
don’t launch upon the air
is weak as tepid water
from this drinking fountain,
giving itself indifferently
to every traveller’s mouth.
Better the sustenance of thirst
which contemplates the sharp
inviolate delight of untouched
springs, savours a parched
long-distance argument
for singing dumb.
This is what my friends spend their waking hours doing—thirsting for a phrase, a word, an inflection to say what it is they are thinking, and as the Irish poet said, sometimes a phrase is better left unspoken. We have plenty of daylit finalities in our midst, but not near enough time to be with one another. Here’s to some thirsting with those about whom, we most care.
Shaun T. Griffin co-founded and directed Community Chest, a rural social justice agency for 27 years. Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me—Essays from a Poet, was released by the University of Nevada Press in 2019. For over three decades, he and his wife Debby have lived in Virginia City, Nevada.
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