And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

When Nothing’s Happening, Everything’s Happening

107 When Nothing’s Happening, Everything’s Happening There’s something “old school” about you, Charles, and that’s what I admire most. You still believe in friendship, manners, duty, generosity and Launceston. I’ve never been to Launceston. Your postcards proffer me a proper Norman town in Cornwall topped by a castle. I’m told that all your townsmen know who Mr. Causley is, and why not? You schooled three generations there for half a century. That keeps you dearer to your kin than all your books. But it was books that paired us for a shared recital under Shakespeare’s shadow. After Stratford, it was letters, phone calls, meeting once in Washington and once in Pittsburgh. Now it’s messages through mutual friends. Or poetry—especially your dream about your parents on a picnic. Dead for decades, they’re sharing tea and stoppering a milk jug with a “screw of paper.” 108 They wave for you to join them in a feast that’s a reprise of Eden. They’re young and happy and in love, and the Cornish sky shines brighter than the borealis through your last (and lasting) words. . . . Your letters last as well, and that includes the jotted postscripts on the outside flaps. It’s so damn good to read what keeps alive what’s dearest to a man. It shows we’re not enslaved to memory or mere presumption—born liars both. It says the present perfect is the only tense in any tongue, which means the past is now whenever poets breathe it into life again. So here’s to the poet from Launceston. And here’s to your paper and ink. And here’s to the poems borne of your pen that help us to feel what we think. Long live the books that you’ve written, and long live the books that you’ll write like bread for the dead in the morning and eyes for the blind at night. For Charles Causley ...