I took a poetry collection to a café. I had an hour before attending an author reading, and was feeling particularly literary.
I sat at the bar, ordered the least expensive glass of red wine, and chatted amiably with the tattooed woman bartender about what a find to meet this poet. The poet of the book, not the reading. She asked me about the book, with actual interest. Commented on the flow of the poet’s name, not surprised from the sound of it the country where he resides. Asked a follow-up question or two. Interwove small talk with me while attending to other customers, cleaning glasses, and checking her Facebook page. She’d not heard of the poet; I’d just recently come across something of his, scrolling down the list of poems I hadn’t listened to on the poem-of-the-day website I check irregularly.
Another staff member from the kitchen came out and said hello to me. He had sleeve tattoos, a knit cap atop a chiseled, pierced face, and a wiry, muscled body. No way he was over 30, maybe not even late 20’s. He asked me what I was reading. I told him. He hadn’t heard of the guy, either.
“Here,” I said. “Read this one.”
I passed the book across the bar, turning it to face him, pointing at the page where it began. He read it. Slowly. All six stanzas.
“Wow,” he said. And then we talked about the poem. The poet. The accessibility, not obscurity, of the language. The power of contradicting, in an opening stanza, something held by most people to be unquestionable.
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” says the Book of Ecclesiastes. “Turn, turn, turn,” added Pete Seeger. And the bit about it not being too late to find a time for peace. The Byrds added the music in the 1960’s, and now it is beyond biblical, something pan-cultural, known on other planets just like the Beatles and Frank Sinatra: there are times, seasons for things, and all should happen in that time.
Yet this poet says otherwise. He says the demands of being a man make patience and the slow unraveling of time impossible:
A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.
We read a poem, this bartender/line cook/kitchen staff person and I. We talked about it in more depth than most people seem to be able to do these days, where literature and poetry commentary are reduced to what it makes a person feel and how one can relate it to their own life. I was earnest in crafting a spontaneous moment of literary connection, yet felt equal parts ridiculous and presumptuous and fearful that I was merely play acting. Yet the words rang true, briefly bridging two total strangers who, based on appearance and generational membership, should not by any rights have anything to say to one another.
He went back to the kitchen, and I went back to the book. I slipped under another powerful and lovely and meaningful poem. He brought out a gift: slim slivers of three different cheeses to accompany my wine. He was tentative, didn’t want to offend. “Do you eat cheese?” he asked, head tilted, shoulders shrugging in apology in case I didn’t. In these days of lactose-intolerance, allergy fetishes, and veganism, it’s a bold move to offer cheese. Veal meatballs would have been only slightly more daring.
I’d offered a poem and a smile, the only things I had. He offered what he had. I’d never had ordered a spicy, cracked pepper cheese; perhaps he’d never read an unfamiliar poem offered by a complete stranger who could have been, let’s be serious, bringing him crap to read. It’s not like poetry is “safe.” A middle aged woman, accompanied only by a book of poetry, drinking a happy-hour glass of a house red wine is probably far more dangerous than a cheese-bearing ink-sleeved bar man.
An offering for an offering, evoking another Judeo-Christian tenet. We equaled each other out, and this equity quelled my fear of being ridiculous.
I’ve been left wondering about the meaning of the poem, what the poet must have been experiencing to feel the press of time, the squeeze of competing demands in the vice that he called manhood. The demands I face, as a 50-year-old woman, place me similarly at odds with the unknown author of Ecclesiastes. How King Solomon had time for 700 wives and 300 concubines is beyond my modern sensibilities, as I can barely satisfy the needs of a singular husband and child.
I have no time to assign separate seasons to being a wife and a mother; sometimes I have only 10 minutes to make the switch. I am simultaneously daughter, mother, wife and the one who wants the time and space to be alone. I must be brave and timid at the same time, bring my full, truest self to all encounters, no matter how brief, no matter how unlikely, and save the make-believe versions of myself for, well, make-believe. Time, perhaps aging, perhaps adulthood, turns, turns, turns, and we’re all doing everything at once.
Here, I say again. Read this one.
A Man in His Life
A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.
-Yehuda Amichai (1983)
The Hour of Grace