Hummingbird Sleep: Poems, 2009-2011

Old Men Out Walking

28 Old Men Out Walking I have watched old men walk around this neighborhood for over forty years. Now I am one of them, or more than one. Deliberate striders some, some swaggery with a stick, swinging it at times in a two-handed baseball arc to the side, pushing at gates with the extended tip, signposts and telephone poles. One of them talks into a tape recorder, everything he remembers about the houses, how they have been variously peopled, graced and disgraced, porched and deporched. He publishes those memories in a book called Strolls around Athens. The blessed Dean William Tate. I stop to write notes to myself, standing there near someone doing yardwork, so I won’t have to remember, short-term fading fast. There is a bench halfway where I sit and listen to birds, in loving memory of, within living earshot, three benches looking slanchwise, one at the other, the other. People say, Hey Coleman, from cars. I mostly cannot see through the reflection, but I act like I know who, not fooling anyone. Light rain sprinkles. Ambience, ambit. Is that the area a king can walk easily around in a day, his kingdom, his ambulatory ambition? Kingdom getting smaller. 29 Then they break loose all boundary, like Ed Hicks’ father, taking off for the river in the center of the swamp, a milkweed twilight float-tuft. On Mt. Vernon a woman sits in her circular brick driveway right down on the bricks picking at something very tiny in the almost-dark. Have you lost your mind? Yaaayuhh. That’s good. I’ll be joining you soon. Why do I keep going back to Plotinus? What am I looking for? Another sentence like, To behold beauty is to become oneself beautiful. Or, Because it has no size, the Soul’s nature is sufficiently ample to contain the whole cosmic body in one and the same grasp. Or, the Soul is coterminous with its expression, and this expression is of that grandeur intended by its form. I feel the truth of that. Something like a grandeur is trying to be expressed by old men out walking, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Chesterton, Mark Twain. Jelaluddin Rumi. Gary Snyder. My father. I love these walking fathers. It is good to be out in the eager air, on the side of a certain hill, or around a bottomland island. Maybe we can yet walk together and come close to saying the truth of whatever we know. 30 Plotinus might say, as we fall in with him, that pretending to knowledge is a kind of play, and play is good for approaching full contemplation, where the soul can rest. The Cherokee word for the center of the world is Ahyali-Ahlohee. A name not just for that hill but for the whole river valley, the island, the hills and mountains, though most have individual names, Chattanooga being the most magnificent, rock-rising-to-a-point. I have no right to, but I claim that my love for this air-ground-water, wind, cloud, and all the plants, and all the creatures living here, that have ever lived here, lets me name it. Yallalohee, call then this place we human types have chosen for the last fifteen thousand years, and beyond, the land-stretch between Missionary Ridge and Signal Mountain, bounded by Raccoon and Lookout, with Moccasin Bend at the center, stretching north unbound by any natural feature to say, the White Oak Cemetery Duckpond, where my parents are buried beneath a cedar tree. Yallalohee, a musical shortening of the Cherokee for the center of the earth, and all that gathers round the center and radiates out from the remains of a silo into a great wandering-rope circumference, a walking place for old men and old women, the young and the yet-to-be, a winding umbilicus path, also Yallalohee. We cast a circular net. We drag it in, slowly pulling unevenly the circumference to its center. Let us become that, a way crumpling into an origin. 31 Sometimes we catch a fish or a boot, turtle, a piece of boatwood, never the water itself. The beauty of mystery cannot be contained in any thing or word. This island, and all of Yallalohee, have figured mightily in my dreams for decades, as the site of a fabulous learning community, one that has let go the net, relaxing into some transcendence...