The Long View

I love biography, reading it, writing bits of it. I now have not one but two full length biographies that I want to write. Thinking about biographies often leads me to think about how I might narrate my own life, how particular moments, particular decisions have a cascading effect weeks, months, years down the road. Biographers identify these moments in people’s lives, organize them into chapters, animating incidents, illustrative moments. We cannot do this narrative trick with our own lives. At least not in the moment, only with the retrospectoscope. So while we know that our decisions, the actions of our lives in a particular moment, have meaning in our future, we cannot quite understand what that meaning is. It is just slightly out of our reach. It is being held in the future. We may know, eventually, but in the present it is elusive, even as it whispers to us to find it.

Another way of saying this is, how does the story end? How does it all work out? One of my satisfactions in reading fiction is seeing how a world contained in the novel works out, seeing what happens to the characters, how conflicts are both created and resolved. Again, we can discover this in a few sittings with a novel. In life, the minutes, hours, and days need their full count for resolution and often that resolution is not as neat as a writer might render it.

All of this makes me think about the extraordinary poem by Genevieve Taggard, “Long View.” Taggard understands this yearning, this desire to peer into the future, to read a chapter ahead, to see how things work out. She gives us word of our imagined future, knowing how much we need it, want it, desire it. It provides some brief comfort.

LONG VIEW

Never heard happier laughter. 

Where did you hear it?

Somewhere in the future. 

Very far in the future?

Oh no. It was natural. It sounded

Just like our own. American, sweet and easy.

People were talking together. They sat on the ground. It was summer.

And the old told stories of struggle. The young listened. I overheard

Our own story, retold. They looked up at the stars

Hearing the serious words. Someone sang.

They loved us who had passed away.

They forgot all our errors. Our names were mixed. The story was long.

The young people danced. They brought down

New boughs for the flame. They said, Go on with the story now.

What happened next?

For us there was silence,

Something like pain or tears. But they took us with them.

Their laughter was peace. I never heard happier.

Their children large and beautiful. Like us, but new-born.

This was in the mountains in the west.

They were resting. They knew each other well.

The trees and rivers are on the map, but the time

Is not yet. I listened again. Their talk was ours

With many favorite words. I heard us all speaking.

But they spoke of better things, soberly. They were wise.

And learned. They sang not only of us.

They remembered thousands, and many countries, far away.

One poet who sat there with them began to talk of the future.

Then they were silent again. And they looked at the sky.

And then in the light of the stars they banked their fire as we do.

Scuffing the ground, and said goodnight. 

This poem I bring back to you

Knowing that you wonder often, that you want

Word of these people.

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