An Echo, needed and timely

For the waste of our flesh,
For the ways of solitude,
For the weight of doubt,
For the waning of life,
Let us pray to the Lord.

That we be healed,
That we be held in Glory,
That we believe,
That we be alive,
Lord, hear our prayer.

Perpetua

As my life moves slowly in directions of maturity I find, just now, that I am hard pressed for better metaphors for this becoming than that offered by font faces. I am easing myself into a pleasant appreciation of serif-fonts, whose little wings help my weary eyes glide over the puddles of white that separate sign from sign. Perpetua is my favorite, its name ringing with constancy. It is a book-font, and books are so much more constant than all I do here. It’s a font that I don’t even have on my computer, and that lack is what will cause these words to remain Tahoma for now. (I apologize for leaving the metaphor undeveloped. Account it to indirections of maturity.)

When I began to write all this, I meant to write about silence. It should seem obvious why that topic did not lend itself to discussion. Here is the question I have posed to myself today, and to which I hope the answer will have no words:

Why do I assume to be able to interpret silence in others when I have not first understood or loved it in myself?

The Lawn Party

Today the tall sloping lawn in front of Blanchard Hall is most anything that you could find a mind for. (And most any mind that you could find a thing for.)

Robert Frost is lying propped up on his left elbow about halfway up the hill staring at the trees; on two stools T.S. Eliot is playing a game of chess with himself. Poe is hunched against a concrete memorial to a dead president with his dark umbrella open against the blue sky, and a handful of English majors with ironic tattoos are gathered around William Blake, all crying at at the beautiful things he is saying as he converses with a fir tree which he believes is an archangel.

Franz Wright is pacing in circles in a northern corner, Billy Collins is chuckling to himself as a creative writing class parades by, and C.S. Lewis is looking out from his office window high above it all with a pipe in one corner of his mouth and a half-smile in the other.

And I am there too, the unwitting subject of a poem, a plan, polemic, or pun, which is to say, less simply but all the same, that I am there too.

Hello, September sunshine. I have come, and I will be staying longer than you, probably.