February Fatigue

Kim remarked on how readable George Bilgere's poem is, and compared him to Billy Collins, which is quite right, as they're both consciously in the same "school" of poetry. The introduction to Bilgere's volume Haywire (which yesterday's poem "Casablanca" is from) is written by Edward Field, an older practitioner of what I'm going to call the "readable" school.

I was overly fond of imitating Field as a graduate student, and so my poetry workshop teacher, Stanley Plumly, assigned me to read all of his poems. After I read them I came back and he asked me what I thought of them. "Well," I remember saying, "after a while, the humor gets a bit much."
"Exactly," Stan said.

But in small doses, I still love Field. Here is a poem that really strikes me at the end of February, when I'm tired all the time. I had a moment about a week ago when I went to sleep at the wheel, veering over the center line without consequence (the adrenaline jolt afterwards kept the moment from repeating). This is the time of year when I say to Ron at the end of the day "I slept all last night. But now I'm tired again." Although I've never been a person who wants to sleep in the daytime, I can almost see the appeal of naps. Instead, though, my habit is to go through part of the late afternoon with a drowsy inattention to detail that leaves me staring out the window for short stretches, until I come to myself and attend to whatever I was in the middle of trying to do.

Tired

Never to really wake up,
this is some people's burden
that those of the tireless sort
are unable to understand, when all we want
is to lie around in a state of collapse.

First and last, I told my mother
who also suffered from it,
never use the word "tired."
It's like "depressed," a dead end--
just saying it brings it on worse.

It's as if some people don't have
an outer crust of energy
that rides over the lake of exhaustion,
a level of weariness
that is always there, threatening
to rise up and swamp us,
or that we are always in danger
of sinking into.

All our kind wants to do
is lie down and rest and sleep, bone tired,
dog tired, but never like a dog,
the lively breed that wears out people like us,
jumping up as they do, alert and ready to go,
tails wagging.

One of the many nice things about living with cats, I guess, is that they also get somnolent this time of year. The new kitten jumps about enthusiastically for a couple of hours at a time, but then he'll spend another two or three hours curled up on a chair or stretched out on top of my lap (or laptop) totally spent. Maybe it's contagious.

Parents and Paranoia

All the recent talk about how today's parents are obsessed with safety ("In my day we didn't wear helmets to ride bikes") finds me occasionally agreeing with the old people who "had to walk a mile to school in the snow" and had to "lay their infants on the front seat, putting out a hand at stoplights so the infant wouldn't roll onto the floor." The occasion for my disagreement is the proposals to raise the driving age. Where does all this parental safety stuff stop? Are we going to wrap all our children in bubble wrap until the age of 18, when they'll have to be pried out of our protective hands and shipped off to college?

When I took my kids to the beach and let them swim in the ocean this summer, I admitted to them that it's a fairly dangerous thing they still get to do. My daughter is paranoid about sharks. I don't mean just a little, I mean won't-go-in-the-water-above-the-ankles paranoid. None of my talk about the greater dangers of highway driving, or the statistical unlikelihood of shark attack or anything else I've said in her entire lifetime makes a difference. This is how she sees the ocean, as Edward Field wrote about it in his poem "Toothy Lurkers":

The shores are patrolled by sharks,
east coast and west alike,
Don't look, they're there all right--

better squeeze shut your eyes
as you dunk yourself
in the sharky sea.

Right now my greatest fear
is to wake up and find myself
floating with bare toes.

How do surfers dare
go so far out
with those toothy lurkers in the waves?

"How true!" says Eleanor, upon reading this poem.