When You, Friend

Today is Tuesday, 27 January 2009.

WHEN YOU, FRIEND, READ ROETHKE FOR ME

How the shy prairie insomniac in you would in this revel:
4 o’ the clock four days before January’s end
As heaping, hissing sleet,
In wind-harrowed piles slicks and deepens,
And the rare winter thunder and lightning:
Snap crackle pop.

Remember that day
On the North Shore?

“I feel a poem comin’ on”,
You’d shout
Turning to your shelves
Burrowing ‘til you found and declaimed
In multi-voice-ed splendor:
Perfect poet and poem for the moment.

Would that you were standing
(Mad-less)
Beside me.

‘Til too late:
We thought your schizophrenia was carefully-
Measured eccentricity.

More clever than us all:
Madness self-medicating madness:
Heroin needle betwixt your toes.

We drove you, us all weeping,
To rehab
And the next day you disappeared.

Some twenty years fled now,
And every knock at the door
I hope you’ve come back to your senses,
Returned to your friends.

When you read Roethke for me,
“The Meadow Mouse”,
How was I to know
You were the mouse?

“I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.”
____________________________________________________

“The Meadow Mouse”
By Theodore Roethke

1

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm? --
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.