A Final Poem - Meditation on
Return - Luke Lucas
With laughter or indifference,
With the easy cynicism of the young,
With action outstripping thought,
With the certain dream of a future,
We survived the hazards of our age,
To leave this place, in reality and in metaphor,
And now to return.
Dream with me, or remember, if you choose,
That tribal time when many of us ran in adolescent packs,
Before the Diaspora that took us away, in time and place,
Scattered us to wander for forty years across this land and more,
Our collective self (though an accident of time and place, still a self),
Fragmented,
And now we are a fragment, a remnant recollected.
What a way we have come since then.
Carefree or callow, delinquent or timid, perfect or terrible,
The kids we were, now a relic,
Of those supple Eden days,
When we were all cartilage, before ossification set in,
Somehow for me, and probably for most of us, then was a before time,
Before certain secret expectations lived and died,
Before the knowledge of good and evil stared at each of us in its own way.
How did you go, then, was it fast or slow, your
leave-taking?
I left in a '48 Plymouth at the end of the summer of '63,
A wine-colored hunchbacked car.
I drove 1400 miles in 3 days. I fixed a flat in Kansas on that trip,
The wind blowing, the Great Plains stretching on, as far as all loneliness,
I fixed the flat, and drove on.
How have you measured the passing of these years?
I chronicle a chain of cars, marking off the times of my life:
Thanks to a tow bar and a friend's eager younger brother,
My Plymouth passed on to Detroit, where it may have re-materialized as a jalopy,
Then there was a Hillman, the worst of cars, so poorly built that the handles
rattled loose, The doors then
strapped shut with old belts,
And on to a Renault Dauphine, wrecked. And on:
Volvo, MGA, a better Volvo, Volkswagon Squareback, Vega, Mercedes-D, Malibu
station wagon, Fiero, Suburban, Accord, Odyssey, each with its own story, its
own time,
And here I am, now, 3 wrecks and several mishaps later.
Here I am, with you.
When you consider the cars of your life,
That carried your children, your love, your intimate moments,
Your fights, your petulance, your recriminations,
Where you spun your dreams, prayed your prayers,
Felt your hurts, your anger, your jealousy,
Where you felt funereal anguish and loss,
Wild joy, sexual ecstasy,
When you count them up for a span of 40 years, and it amounts to 13 or 14
vehicles,
Interwoven among your comings and goings,
Then your life, the passing years, seems comprehensible.
So where did David Endres go in the old Chevy called
"Constipation"?
And what does he drive now? (David, who gave the best and briefest explication
of the briefest poem:
I why? “This poem questions our being.”)
David, who gaily fish-tailed his father's new Pontiac, so that oncoming old
people pulled to the side of the road in alarm,
So after the motorcycle in junior high and his dad’s jeep at 15,
What happened to the iconic Harry Sebern,
When he sped away from that fight in his hot rod,
(I heard the cops caught him),
Has he moved on to airplanes now?
And what of Carol Stansbery and her Corvair, a dangerous
little car, now as extinct as the dinosaurs,
Carol of the dancing eyes and the ready hugs?
Is she driving grandchildren in a padded, side-air-bagged van?
And David McGrew, what germ of madness put him behind the wheel of a race car in
1970, the last I saw of him?
There are more questions and more stories,
Than answers or time in this gathering.
But come, stitch together these moments,
And let's make a story of those years,
Our leaving and our return,
Out of the ties to the past, the bondage of it,
Out of its advantages, and its deficits,
Did we find freedom, or the dream of it, a worthy pursuit?
Did we find love and goodness and tolerance?
Can we find each other in a human way, beneath the adolescent skin?
For us, sometimes frail,
Sometimes sturdy, often flawed,
Passion driven humans of our age,
There is a kinship.
Let’s draw together, then, resurrect memories,
Find a certain kind of joy, deeper than the joy of youth,
Informed by our years, even our pain,
Our love, real and imagined, acquired and lost and found,
Our struggles,
Our wisdom, that glistens here and there, jewel-like,
Among our follies.
Let us do so here, in this interlude,
Now, before we drive on.