The picture of the Lindsay family grave markers was taken from the driver’s seat of my car March 20 at Oak Ridge Cemetery. I visited the site because I wanted to have a new poem to share at the poetry reading at the Museum of Funeral Customs on Monument Avenue this coming Saturday at 1 pm. I’ve read a new poem there every year but one, and usually played one of my hit songs about death there as well. (”Death ain’t nothin’ but a good time feeling bad….” HIRE ME, Job Conger songwrither, and I’ll sing the entire thing to you.) Writing a new poem for this Saturday was not an obligation; it was a calling. And I was happy to focus on poetry for the first time in 2007.
I knew three weeks ago I wanted to write a poem about Vachel Lindsay, his death or his grave . . . . something I could share at the Funeral Customs Museum event. Also from the start, I knew I wanted to share information about the poet. One early idea was to focus on the fact Vachel’s headstone is larger than his parents’ head stones. There’s a reason for that: he was world-famous; they were not. But still it grated on me. IF my mom and dad were buried together and I was planning to be interred on a family plot, I would want their markers to be larger than mine. I think they were nobler people. But I’ve learned “noble” doesn’t make the world go ’round.. I knew that I was going to let my visit to the grave sites provide the poem. And it did.
Of course I took my camera along. I wanted to photograph the Lindsay plot from every angle. Money and time didn’t matter. Photography is cheap, and where the heck else did I need to go Wednesday? Nowhere. Vachel wrote “Come eat the bread of idleness….” which is required if you’re going to write a poem. It’s “idleness” only if you forget that determining to write a poem and sitting down to write it are profound engagements of time. It may not be as active as watching a baseball game on the sports channel, but it’s an activity even so. So I had fun with the camera: nobody calling me in for lunch, nobody telling me to get off their lawn, no employment interviews slated (DANG IT) and I wasn’t even hungry. Because I wasn’t rushed, I could open my eyes to see things I had missed during earlier visits. For one thing, the grass was recently trimmed. Vachel Lindsay’s family stones looked great. Even Olive Lindsay’s marker (She died in 1957 and it looks new. Maybe it is.) and the stone marking the deaths of three toddler sisters of Vachel’s were easy to see and read. I noted the metal “Perpetual Care” spike which was placed at Vachel’s headstone. Eight feet away were two headstones that weren’t in such trim shape. These Lindsays were not connected to Vachel’s family as far as I know. There was a shrub between the identical stones, and more fall and winter detritus lingered. They weren’t marked for “Perpetual Care,” but they should be. I wanted to clear away the winter’s flotsam and jetsam, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to break the law. I DO intend to talk with Oak Ridge management to ask permission to trim the shrubs and remove the old leaves at the other Lindsay stones.
I also carried a stenographer’s spiral-bound note pad and pen. Besides recording information on all the Lindsay stones, I noted everything else about them I could see, including a heaviliy weather worn small granite stone to the left of Dr. Vachel Thomas Lindsay’s marker that read “NVL” above a large “P” — no doubt an early Perpetual Care marker for Vachel’s parents. Also, on the top of Vachel’s marker were a modern, shiny quarter and a dijme, just sitting there. I picked up the quarter to be sure it wasn’t permanently attached (it wasn’t) and respectfully put it back. And I made notes about the site’s location: just across from Bissell Hill 12 (Governor Bissell served from 1857 to 1860) and just a few hundred feet from the grave of William Herndon, Abe’s law partner. Suffice to say, the Lindsays are in a pretty good “neighborhood.”
Then I came home and wrote the poem over the next five hours, mostly non-stop longhand, then to the computer to copy that . . . . then revising what I had written into the computer. . . . I stopped when it was time to get ready for the poetry reading at Gallina’s downtown. Even though I had read the poem alound by the computer several times, one really has to read it while people listen to fully consider how it works.
I had promised to meet a young poet who had called me (found my name and number in a bus station rest room, I think <– not really), and that was why I attended. During the months between my last visit to the readings, I had written NO poetry. As poet who gets easily bored repeating my OWN poems to the same people, I have harbored no interest in regurgitating my own to these fine pipple OR in subjetcting my own dang seff to more of the same poems from others. But I wanted to introduce the new poet to the Gallinas gang, and I’m glad I did.
My new poem, The Whispering Winds, is posted at
www.civag.com/poemsofjob.htm
I hope you will visit and read it. In the meantime, I continue to revise. The veresion I share at the Funeral Customs Museum Saturday will have been “tweaked” maybe 10 times including three times Wednesday and twice today before I posted it to my poetry page. People ask me why I revise.
I’m almost done; just a few more sentences . . . . I consider a new poem analagous to a pair of shoes in my size, which I discover by the Washington Park lagoon. They’re alone with a note pinned to one of the shoe laces. It reads: “If the shoe fits, wear it. With my blessing and permission, these shoes are yours to keep.” I try them on., and they fit fine. I start hiking up the hill and I feel a pebble between toes and ankle. I take off the shoe, remove the pebble and continue. Three hundred feet later, the thumb tack in the sole of the other shoe begins to be very evident. The tack is removed, and I’m back on the trail. And so on. By the time I return to my car to drive the block and a half back home, I’ve taken out every pebble, tack, discarded Doublemint Gum wrapper, and dime (where the heck did THAT come from?) in the shoes, and I’m finally happy with them. The same goes for poems I write. Even though some poets think their new creations are perfect as they come, Heaven-sent from their pen, to the paper. I write differently. I don’t consider my poems Divine, Immutable Coincidences the way some DIC heads do. When I “walk” with a new poem, reading it silently, reading it alound, reading it aloud to others, inviting others to read it and sharing reactions, I find pebbles and gum wrappers enough to confirm I do not poetize with the angels; I write poetry with the rest of my fallen humanity, and I’m absolutely happyj with that. Eventually, after waves of revising this and that subside, and I feel the poem is okay (never perfect, but sometimes okay) I stop feeling for lumps. And that’s how I wrote my new poem.
Thanks for reading.
Live long . . . . . and proper. .
