On September 11 we commemorate the loss of thousands of people to an unnatural disaster. Every year the human race suffers the loss of thousands of people to natural disasters — floods, earthquakes, blizzards, mudslides, tornadoes, hurricanes — disasters that we have very little chance of avoiding and no one to blame; only Nature.
My brother, Frank, will be ninety in December. He was a math teacher in high school for ten years and a teacher of rhetoric, speech, and theatre in college for thirty years. He lives in a nursing facility in Florida, where with the help of nurses, nurses’ aids, doctors, and the kindness of strangers his mind is active despite a frail body.
I, his baby brother age seventy-six, am his power-of-attorney and speak to him as often as I possibly can.
Yesterday I spoke to him early in the day, and he was completely dispirited.
“Babe,” he said, “I can’t bare it any more. That horrible incident in Oregon crushes me. Would you do me a favor? Would you write something that I have been preaching for decades now?”
“I’ll do anything I can for you,” I answered.
“Maybe you could send it to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times or The Saturday Review?,” he said.
“The Saturday Review is not likely, Frank,” I said without explaining. “But I will send whatever you say to The Times.”
Dreams are okay
as long as they pay.
That man is rich
who has a scratch
for every itch.
He was not at home in the world.
The Gods chased him into a corner
Where
With a trembling hand
He touched
His certain romance with the universe
And Calendar.
Love was the cruelest month.
Author’s Note: Knowing A Man was written in the Summer of 1960 while I was a graduate student at Iowa University. This poem was inspired by an old Columbia University professor of mine who had stopped in Iowa City to see me on his way to visit his father in Mexico City. When I asked him why he was visiting his father, he replied, “My father is very old, and I never knew his dreams.”
You only know a man when you know his dreams.
His troubles tell you only how he lives.
To discover that which is instead of that which seems,
Don’t ask of his pain,
Ask of his dreams.
I’m being tossed in a thousand different directions,
Each with a meaning in time and space,
Each to promise a kind of perfection,
Each to promise an honorable place.
But where is the throne?
Where is the throne,
That will smother the moan,
of being tossed in a thousand different directions?
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