A post-script to my last blog post: I see all the colors around me and know I will never again paint as I have before.

 

An Opening in the Vertical World by Roger Greenwald

Moving ... this and that to unpack and put away, and then those added things brought home from summer yard sales and more.

I looked everywhere for this second poem (below) to add to my earlier post. I believed I had torn it from a New Yorker and placed it in my "Save" pile. When I started writing the noted post, I could not find it. I even returned not once but twice to the recycle bin on a hunt for it. Why? I felt such a deep connection to the author's words. 

Then, today, after piecing together a bookcase and pulling books out from under furniture where they were temporarily stored, I saw the book of poems I had walked home with the other night after opening the window-paned Free Library Book box in which it had been placed and adding it to my carry-all basket. 

I am such a lover of the written word that I kissed its cover when I re-found it today. Its title is An Opening in the Vertical World by the poet Roger Greenwald. The poem from that book that I may now share is below:

In the Crowd

Not to have one

    person's name to say.

To stand in the crowd before

    the doors are opened,

to hear their language as though

    you were saying their words

yourself, to smell their skin their

    hair the damp wool

sweaters: to smell the infants

    they were, see their parents

in their faces, moving hands, the weight 

    shifting to the other hip, to feel

them pressing behind you

    gently as the doors are opened, they

do not push forward but

    do not avoid the bodies either, 

you are carried with them

    into the large hall, into

the music, they go with their friends,

    with their children, with

you in the midst, you in

    your leather jacket and its many pockets, 

you have room for Kleenex and matches

    you have your festival pass and room

for pens and lip balm and your book

    with five hundred addresses in the world,

the world outside, which is not

    here with you, the world

where some few people know your name

    though you have no one's name to say

as a man with a long mountain horn 

    lifts it, lifts it, puts his lips

against it and the mountain

    sounds, you hear its song as though

you were calling its notes 

    yourself, it does not avoid

your body, it presses gently

    against you, and a woman

steps forward to sing, at any moment

    she will call out, she will 

call the beginning 

    of something you belong to.

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Victor Slocum, my great Uncle, 

and Joshua on the right. 

Partial image of a family portrait taken in Washington D.C. at the studio of J.D. Merritt 

(photo now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution).

I have moved to a place my great-great grandfather and grandmother, as well as their children, once called home. The children, my great aunt and uncles, attended their only year in public schools here. I swim in the history of their story; one that is also mine. That final line of the poem "of something you belong to" resonates my feelings of arriving here. I am exactly where I am suppose to be. 

Note / Book cover image above: Etching "Spring Sans Souci"  ©1978 by Ed Bartam

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