A Poem For You, from Robert Penn Warren, via David Quammen

Last evening I lay snug in bed, propped up by sofa cushion and pillows, reading again from one of my favorite authors, David Quammen, and his book The Boilerplate Rhino <click for more info>  Last night's essay was about two writers, Jim Harrison and Robert Penn Warren.  Harrison has come to my attention only recently, in association with Gary Snyder.  They appeared live in NYC last November when I was there and I was fortunate enough to be able to see and hear them re:  <The Etiquette of Freedom>, the release of the film that accompanies the book by the same name.  Warren I have known of vaguely for much of my life but after reading Quammen's tribute to him last evening, I feel cheated out of so much insight and beauty for so much of my life.  Is it too late to get acquainted?  I'm going to find out.... 

Turns out, Quammen was one of Warren's students, and later lived a short while with the Warren family, and later still became friends with RPW. 

Here is a RPW poem that Quammen writes he would want to have with him above any other book or writing if he were lost on the proverbial desert island.  As for myself, in recognition, it takes my breath away.

                                 Grackles, Goodbye

Black of grackles glints purple as, wheeling in sun-glare,
The flock splays away to pepper the blueness of distance.
Soon they are lost in the tracklessness of air.
I watch them go. I stand in my trance.

Another year gone. In trance of realization,
I remember once seeing a first fall leaf, flame-red, release
Bough-grip, and seek, through gold light of the season’s sun,
Black gloss of a mountain pool, and there drift in peace.

Another year gone, And once my mother’s hand
Held mine while I kicked the piled yellow leaves on the lawn
And laughed, not knowing some yellow-leaf season I’d stand
And see the hole filled. How they spread their obscene fake lawn.

Who needs the undertaker’s sick lie
Flung thus in the teeth of Time, and earth’s spin and tilt?
What kind of fool would promote that kind of lie?
Even sunrise and sunset convict the half-wit of guilt.

Grackles, goodbye! The sky will be vacant and lonely
Till again I hear your horde’s rusty creak high above,
Confirming the year’s turn and the fact that only, only
In the name of Death do we learn the true name of Love.

— Robert Penn Warren, from New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 (Random House, 1985)

I leave you in silence to ponder what this stirs within you.