Looking Back to Look Forward

Dan Monroe, "Geoffrey II" (11 January 1984)This morning, a friend from college, from my days at Vanderbilt, Dan Monroe, sent me a spooky photograph of a poem he wrote, along with the following note:

was looking back through old writings (not that old... if you think geologically)... found a piece I had written after Vandy... for some reason, you had been in my head.

When I returned from work, I wrote Dan a short note, amazed at what he'd sent me today:

Dan, what a strange things to receive. Do you mind if I reproduce it elsewhere? The first strophe I particularly like, but it's weird to see such a thing especially after so long. Thanks for sending it and making me exist a little longer somewhere else than inside my head. Why "Geoffrey II"? Was there a "I"? Or was Chaucer no. 1?

And Dan responded fairly quickly:

Found Geoffrey I. You know... it's been so long, it's hard to tell what was in my head. You were partly an enigma to me... somebody I looked up to for a weird melange of reasons. I didn't understand YOU, but I understood your passion for words. I think the metaphor of being in Geoffrey's garden was about being in this place where words are harvested, but where they are also cut apart. I also associated the notion of poetic storytelling with Chaucer. The two were fused in the same place for a while.

Geoffry I is much less literal...more the capturing of a place... a time. But it reaches back to a place where you were still very much in my head.

Somebody reached back to me through here (facebook) the other day - somebody I'd not spoken with since high school. She had given me what was called a Nothing Book (a bound book with blank pages back before they were ubiquitous - it was 1977) I have put bits in it over the years. Randomly. Geoffrey I and II were both in there. I woke up in the middle of the night the other night and remembered she had given it to me... could see the inscription on the inside front cover just as clear as day. I dug it up from the dust of forgotten books and thumbed through it.

We all exist in our heads... but it's good to know we exist in somebody else's as well. 

Geoffrey I

Spent the morning in Geoffrey's garden:
images cut and printed,
pruned shoots, artichokes,
bulbs and withered blooms…
he created that which he loved most –
microcosm of life and death.

Kids, we used to say:
"Mother was Chinese"
(turning up eye corners)
"Father was Japanese"
(turning down eye corners)
"and I was a mixed up baby."

In an old LIFE magazine
a war baby lies mutilated
in a ditch, like vegetable
cast aside on way to market –
like kohlrabi, turnip,
withered rose…

I imagine you, belly swollen
with child -– miserable in bliss,
dying just that little bit
to give birth.

I bed beside you,
you smell still passionate,
still fearful in your eyes
of some small death.

To wake in Geoffrey's garden
next to you, is a glance
into the suns of that past
that we can grow to seed.

I like this little surprise of the day, the way it reverberates with my sense that we are more viably memories than we are humans, that we are more persistently records we leave behind than we are bodies that move through space, that way it reminds me of the past I once have, and the way it shows the surprise of the record, how finding something so old we may have already forgotten that it reminds us that we are such poor reliquaries of our own selves. Thanks to Dan for these potent reminders, which I received at the end of these many tiring months just past, which have been the months of my life when I've needed this most.

ecr. l'inf.