Tomorrow, June 23, 2018, I shall travel to Portland, Oregon, to join the Boettiger clan in celebrating the graduation of my son Joshua at the end of his two-year MFA program in poetry at Pacific University. Though better known as a rabbi (currently at Temple Emek Shalom in Ashland, Oregon) than as a poet, he is now bi-vocational. He has always brought his gifts as a poet to his rabbinical presence, but I'm confident that the truly wonderful growth of his poetic craft in the last two years will become known to a much wider audience in its own right. As soon as he shares his final thesis, including his poems, with his dad, I look forward to sharing my experience of his work with readers of Reckonings. More of his work will surely be published.
Stanley Kunitz's poem, "The Layers," is my best gift to Joshua at this time, as it is the first and longest-standing of the poems the two of us have shared, among the fruits of our chavruta. Its character is expressive of what he and I have cherished over many years.
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.