Key West The Newspaper

by Kirby Congdon [Key West Poet Laureate Emeritus]……….

There’s a song bird in midtown which I’ve noticed a few times up there on an electric wire. It is so ecstatic it flies straight up about a yard and lands back on the same spot again hardly interrupting its extemporaneous bursts of song. How can I indulge my anxieties and frustrations when this creature has so little and does so much with nothing? He doesn’t realize how brief his life is. He doesn’t believe he is going to die but neither does any other creature, including ourselves. I tried to handle that fact through a poem, “The Death of the Mite” back in 1975.

The speaker in this poem is my alter ego, but I avoid having my own identity made explicit as it adds an unnecessary dimension I, too, am trying to listen to the poem. So, then, the narrator in the poem transfers the disaster of the little bug’s fate to ourselves But the poem offers no relief beyond the bug’s “headstone” which has to be all of space and all of time itself. Can we snicker at the enormity of the one and the insignificance of the other? Not very easily when we realize that we too are all on death row. Some decades later I happened to be mindful of a friend’s anxiety when he was on his death bed. He had confided in his disappointment in the palliatives of his religion which provided only pomp and ceremony to alleviate his sense of abandonment. I couldn’t stick a poem in his face to placate him. What are the rituals, the impressive architecture and the history of centuries for? Wasn’t a life of decency to be recognized for itself, I asked myself as a Protestant? I wrote to my friend almost thinking out loud to myself.

The churches of my family were made of wood in a country that shunned the power of the priest or had doubts about that threat of hell. At Christmas in rural New England we crossed the fields, found a tree, cut it down, lugged it home and stood it up again in the living room like an old pagan totem which is what it was. We gave it all our attention, unpacking decorations to provide ornaments, strands of tinsel and hung bibelots and Christmas balls along the branches like another snowfall. Some families might even have sung a song before the tree and revived the pagan rite of a thousand years ago in their furnished, steam-heated, weather-proofed living room. What recognition of those actions was forthcoming? None. They were done for their own sake. The process itself was its meaning. This can translate so easily into doing good deeds, not to get a foothold in heaven but for their own consequences. The process was for its own sake. This rationalizes the elaboration in the architecture of cathedrals, vestments, rituals and finally just plain ordinary good behavior. If we had a talent, a calling, or a personal drive, they too were removed from evaluation. We participated in such matters simply for the chance to do it. A prima donna, a President, a street sweeper wants to do his job well simply because he is doing it. That is the positive consequence of any situation within its own time.

And that’s where the sense is in what we did, do, or hoped to get done. And it’s our own judgment of ourselves that operates here since we are the final judges of any activity we voluntarily undertake. There is no better measure of our own lives. Did these remarks make any sense to my friend when we were both beyond help of any other kind? When he died his family sent me, a complete stranger to them, a note saying that their man had framed my letter and had it hung on his bedroom wall. That made me pause. It reasserted for me the power of words when one has run out of them. Sometimes it is presumptuous to assume one can put them together as one would like to The world is already a big thing for anyone to handle and there are times when one can only look at the bird on the electric wire and, in appreciation, stand still and listen.

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The Death of the Mite

by Kirby Congdon

Even for the mute and unremembered

death of the mite

drowning so early in the dew

of any morning’s innocence,

the roar of crowds

from the world’s great chorus of the dead

complains

in the sound of breaking waves

–like leaves shed, from a hundred storms

at one sudden season’s rush–

and against the rude

silence of a thousand years,

attests to the rising tide of guilt

that no memorials document

or justify the waste

at the dying end of things

–those sparks, star-like,

that still, willy-nilly, go out.

If no requiem can be sung,

no tolling of the bells,

for the new seed mis-cast,

for the dry-bottomed well,

if only thought’s head calls

for the body’s time lost

–as an aging athlete sees

in his meticulous mirror

the private note

that the former, public grace,

like any work of art,

is going or is gone–

the disembodied mouth,

though circumspect, still can sing

some staid and decent song

and make that dead body dance

in the bodies of the mind.

And if the little theatres of the eyes

remain so tight, so closed, as if in some dismay,

the silence our singing made,

absence, though presence still prevails

and moves on in to take its place,

the stillness, in even the inanimate arrow’s cosmic flight,

like the meteor’s instant scratch of light,

make the quietude of the universe

a fitting stone laid to wait and mark the place

for multitudes, like those, becalmed,

who lie composed, as if at ease

and, so, relaxing, are contained

or who, like us alas, out-cast,

are lost in thought at that depth of time

and at that distant breadth extending endless

beyond each earnest mark of our desperate senses

across such vague and vast dimensions

as exist in such tremendous graves.