08-06-2021, 08:36 PM
As far back as I go is the Tar Baby story.
Third graders like me heard Miss Sanko read
The Wheel on the School. A switch was flipped
and I no longer knelt to change TV channels
but to run fingers along lettered spines.
Left to myself I joined a young Mongol warrior,
encountered scimitar, crewed with Vitus Bering
to suffer haunted fogs in frozen northern seas,
lost innocence to a stash of Men’s Adventures
met Mussolini in text framing incurious nudes.
Mad paperbacks taught me satire, Flying Saucers:
Serious Business, a revelation of cigar-shaped angels
photographed Unknowns more fabulous than God.
Ian Fleming defined spies and torture gardens
amid magical perils of Smersh and cyanide guns.
Then came annunciation: an Oxford philologist’s
Middle Earth more real than my nonfiction teens
whose unexpected inheritor soon leapt into view:
Dylan Thomas’ bardic chant of altar-wise song,
His Notebooks, his Letters, his Collected Poems.
A half-century later the written word is my Tar Baby:
my majestic escape from a lifetime of Brer Foxes,
foolish realities trying to trap a clever rabbit-man.
I cast myself ever again into language’s briar patch
always new as today but with roots deep as Grendel’s mire.
Third graders like me heard Miss Sanko read
The Wheel on the School. A switch was flipped
and I no longer knelt to change TV channels
but to run fingers along lettered spines.
Left to myself I joined a young Mongol warrior,
encountered scimitar, crewed with Vitus Bering
to suffer haunted fogs in frozen northern seas,
lost innocence to a stash of Men’s Adventures
met Mussolini in text framing incurious nudes.
Mad paperbacks taught me satire, Flying Saucers:
Serious Business, a revelation of cigar-shaped angels
photographed Unknowns more fabulous than God.
Ian Fleming defined spies and torture gardens
amid magical perils of Smersh and cyanide guns.
Then came annunciation: an Oxford philologist’s
Middle Earth more real than my nonfiction teens
whose unexpected inheritor soon leapt into view:
Dylan Thomas’ bardic chant of altar-wise song,
His Notebooks, his Letters, his Collected Poems.
A half-century later the written word is my Tar Baby:
my majestic escape from a lifetime of Brer Foxes,
foolish realities trying to trap a clever rabbit-man.
I cast myself ever again into language’s briar patch
always new as today but with roots deep as Grendel’s mire.