Footfalls of the Unknown

These poems span many years of a writing habit. For younger days and themes they stumble into the puzzling ironies of existence, the way things are more than they seem, and then less, mysteries beyond their years. At older ages poems often mine again the trim, often innocent insights of one's youth, its enlightening confusions, bringing them into more complex worlds, their secrets and riddles. For age is anything but linear, the additive succession of our days into a future. It is cumulative, forever visiting its pasts and futures, leaping ahead of itself from the very beginning and forever eddying back, charmed and scarred by those early wonders, affections and sorrows, and now grown into sober contemplation of our days so fresh with alarm and quickened wit. At any moment we are all the ages we have ever been, and noticed as well along the way that it takes a lifetime to grow up. Even then we are not quite sure. Poems turn out to be like the dry stones we find in order to cross a stream, and we admit to the whimsical joys and perils of our crossings. But it is as much our own footfalls that we hear within the stream's rush and wakeful quiet, mysteries charged with gratitude and love, reckless and bewildered. We glow with these moments of grace, unbidden and profound, even when a poem begins with a leap and finishes with wet feet. Partly we entice these poems into our company, partly we earn their company with the fever to be unusually alive. Then poems seek us out, circling warily. They don't trust becoming familiar casually. Sometimes they come closer when we turn our backs. We write a little and wait upon language, the singular word or phrase so distinct we know the earth and its human beings have given us their particular say, unknown right up to the instant of its expression. A word separates itself from its crowd, seeks others with whom to make a particular music that takes a measure of the universe, a certain beloved, a time of day, the seasons of our given time. They are true footfalls, and we do well to dance with them.