Date:         Mon, 6 Jul 1998 07:48:33 -0500
From: "Arnold V. Lesikar" <lesikar@STCLOUDSTATE.EDU>
Subject:      [WRITERS] FILL: Introduction

Most of the weekend I spent practicing looking at things, listening, asking
questions, and thinking about what the nature of poetry. And, by-the-by, I
watched my mother-in-law doling out the last days of her life with a big
serving spoon. Death keeps reaching for a bigger portion. She whacks his
hand with the spoon. The lady makes sure that her family gets the bulk of
what's left.

What a tough old bird!

It's my 60th year. It's another passage. It is the time when one way or
another you are to start getting ready to die. I can't go on pretending
that I am 30 forever!

There are maybe 20 years left - 30 if I am lucky, no kids, and not much
family, no one to receive my heirlooms, not that I have collected that
many.

I don't believe in God. The Bible makes no sense. The Sutras are not much
better. As for Vedanta, discovering that you are part of everything that
you see, well, that has always struck me as the task of poetry.

What I believe in turns out to be Rilke and Walt Whitman. What a hell of a
note for a physics teacher and part-time computer programmer! How could I
ever hope to explain to my students that I aspire to turn myself into the
blades of grass between their feet?

Would they ever comprehend the desire to praise:

        a large pink enameled bowl,
        the rich moist clumpy black soil within
        that holds a bunch of geraniums in cupped hands,
        right at the very edge of an aluminum dock
        carpeted with a blue fabric much darker than the sunlit sky,

        the glint of that sunlight off the water,
        swimming suits and suntan lotion,
        the revving motors of passing runabouts and jet skis,

        a blond haired kid trying to get up
        for the first time
        on waterskis -
        and failing in shower of spray -
        but finally making it,

        and the firecracker red geraniums
        there at the edge of the dock
        like a gift left at the front door,
        or the sudden awareness
        of an appointment that you'd forgotten
        or something quite beyond you
        that you had set aside
        hoping that later you
        would understand.

What nonsense to want to sing all this to a mile-high angel that no one can
see, who's not likely to condescend anyway!

The students would say that someone must have stuck a disk into my head
infected with a virus of poetical aspirations. Otherwise there'd be no
explanation for the crash of the CPU behind my eyes.

I'm the one-legged man who's entered himself in the marathon. It may take
him 29 hours to finish, but still he's got to race.

It is doubtful that there is such thing as salvation, but if it is ever to
be found, it will not be separate from the imagination.

That's my story. Make of it what you will.

arn