Being There

The air is filled with the morbidity Of wet orange leaves. There is no way to fake the investment. There is no voice mail to leave. There is no email to send. There is no package to Fedex. For this is how it is: You have to be there When the geese fly in In “V” formation, Over a winking sun, In the early morning You know that nothing is ever lost. Like gauze wrapping open sores, These wounds are just passports Into the foreign land of others Who understand the language And who know the terrain. For this is how it is: You have to be there When the geese fly out In “V” formation, Over a killing frost, In the early morning.

A Short Story

I am short. I have always been short. It’s never been something I have given a great deal of thought however I am reminded time and time again how taller people seem to have the upper hand in most things. Certainly at concerts and movies I am reminded. I think of how easy it must be for taller people stand and not have to do the “bob-and-weave” like some prizefighter to see a performance. In certain athletic events for sure, height lends an advantage – basketball of course comes to mind. Having played basketball all my young adult life it was an interesting study in psychology to have to play against people who were taller than I was. Psychology suggests being short can lead to “Napolean” complexes where one attempts to overcome one’s physical deficiencies with huge egoistic displays of will and power. Even in the language we are dissed: we “come up short” and possess certain “shortcomings” all terms that conjure up pejorative images. The language itself suggests to us what we all seem to already know: that being short possesses inherent difficulties. So this is why I find the gospel story of Zaccheus so intriguing. Luke provides us with such a great detail about Zaccheus’ height you have to wonder why? What was the point of such an arcane detail? Why did Luke alert us to the fact that he was short? Here’s the reading from Luke: Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." So Zaccheus was a short, rich man. Clearly, his lack of height did not prevent him from becoming a “success”. Of course, no one needs to be reminded that he was a tax collector and they were not the most popular of people – sort of like today’s politicians or CEOs I would imagine. He was interested in this itinerant preacher who socialized with his kind, though frankly, between you and me, I think this postmodern thought of these wealthy Jews that were hated by their own people sort of misrepresents their social status. We almost feel sorry for these tax collectors but wealth back then was the same as wealth today, and most wealthy people I know don’t seem to mind their lives. I’m sure these tax collectors had parties with other lawyers and tax collectors and even invited some of the Roman Senators for the occasional lamb roast. So let’s not feel too sorry for stubby old Zaccheus. He was doing just fine, probably had a timeshare in Palestine, overlooking the Mediterranean. All this, and he was short. Maybe he was one of those with an overcompensating ego. Still Freud was a couple of millennia away so all anyone probably thought of Zaccheus was that he knew how to get the things he wanted. Then Jesus comes along and Zaccheus wanted one more thing. He wanted to see this preacher. He wanted to hear what he had to say but the crowds were crazy. He couldn’t see. So he finds a Sycamore tree. Now the Sycamore is a large tree with small flowers. Legend had it that Persian King Xerxes found this tree so beautiful he actually assigned it a personal bodyguard. Now I don’t know that Luke had this story in mind, but the Sycamore is a large beautiful tree. It’s wood provided shelter for the pilgrims who first came to America. It is almost the antithesis of how we picture Zaccheus. He climbs the tree presumably scrapping with the crowd, throwing the occasional elbow here and there. And there, aloft in the soft breeze of the Sycamore, Jesus sees him. Zaccheus’ ability to overcome obstacles has caused him to seek the goodness that is represented in Jesus’ message. Though the path is crowded with others, nothing, it seems, will get in Zaccheus’ way. In essence his ascent into the tree almost foreshadows Jesus’ “climbing” his tree later on as he dies on the cross. It is this ability to shed his old life and leave his earthly concerns below that makes Jesus look up at Zaccheus and pronounce salvation to his house. Zaccheus almost seems to promise a new life when Jesus implores him to come down, willing to pay him back four times what he may have defrauded others. I love the description of the grumbling people when Jesus announces he is going to stay with Zaccheus. It seems that we humans have not changed one iota since those days. We seem to be a species that is so incapable of allowing another to have one moment of joy without us wanting to step all over it. Zaccheus probably had visitors at his house, but certainly no holy men such as Jesus. No spiritual celebrities ever stopped there – not the Pharisees or Sadducees certainly. It would be, I assume, akin to the Dali Lama or the Pope coming to my house. Better clean the bathrooms for sure! In the end though, it is Zaccheus’ shortness that causes him to find the way. Because of his limitation, he seeks to overcome his inability in that overdeveloped, Napoleanic ego of his, It is our disabilities that help us discover what our limits are: are we too “short” in loving others? Are we too “short” in forgiving others? Are we too “short” in finding the good in people? If we allow these “disabilities”, our lack of stature, to force us into a tree to see the truth, then we become so much more than just what we are not. The measure of who we are as spiritual beings is not made in what we cannot achieve, but in what we have overcome and choose to overcome. So I can really relate to Zaccheus. He probably could never have dunked a basketball either. He was always chosen last in the Hebrew School basketball pickup games; I’m sure it took a toll on his self-esteem. But remember that it was what was most lacking in him – his height – that drove him to leave behind earthbound concerns and offer Jesus a place at his table. M C Biegner 10/19/2005

Ruined (A Poetic Fable)

Poetry has ruined me. More specifically, it has eviscerated the most cynical parts of me and left me split wide open like a wound requiring the most ethereal butterfly bandage one can imagine. It leaves me dangling in the winds of inspiration like a pair of old shoes tossed over telephone wires. It reuses the old junk I have long ago discarded into the emotional landfill that makes up who I am. I traffic in the most lethal kind of poetry too – the kind that bubbles up from truth; the kind that makes me useless for the numerous sacrifices made hourly upon the altars of pop culture. It is a syllogism of the unearthly: truth is beauty and truth is poetry therefore truth and poetry are one. It is an unearthed rarified beauty discovered rather than made, the way wires pull radio waves out of thin air. I sell poetry for food and the occasional cigarette – just the romantic ones – because it seems right to me that I live off romance in a macho, Hemmingway-standing-over-a-big-game-kill-in-Africa sort of way. The romantic sensibility has long become the vestigial organ of the twenty first century. I, for one, would love to change the basis for all commerce the way Richard Nixon in August, 1971 removed the gold backing of money. I would make poetry the basis by which all things are valued. Sometimes I hand roll a couple of fresh fragrant haikus and inhale their warm delicate structure and natural flavor. I hope that a few syllables of haiku will lodge themselves into the wet mucous walls of my lungs to foster great big tumors of metaphor or alliterative coughing that would result in me hacking up a few juicy couplets which I could use somewhere else in my writing. In the mornings I would mix up a batch of sonnets and cover them with sweet refrains of tumbling verse, served with a few sprigs of villanelle poems on the side for breakfast. We would consume them together, drinking coffee then later play the “Howl” version of Boggle where the object is to find anagrams from the letters that start lines or phrases from Ginsberg’s great classic poem. On weekends I head out to do chores around the house so I go down to the hardware store and exchange a haunting blank verse epic for a couple of gallons of paint and the clerk is simply overwhelmed and starts to weep. “This is way too generous for just these two gallons of paint,” he says and provides me change in the form of a few ad hoc limericks. Though this may strike you as odd in today’s world, and since poetry has ruined me, in this new world even hardware store clerks are nourished by poetry. The farmers who grow my food, the doctors who heal me, the teachers who instruct my children – in a ruined world poetry is like oil where people must line up and fill up their big SUVs with rhyme and alliteration and lyrics and meter. Where people line up now to give up hard earned money for random numbers, the quick pick would be changed to randomly select quotes from Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman or Ferlinghetti or Hughes or Chaucer. Poetry can ruin a world in ways that other things can only imagine. A few years back, Death came to take my best friend who was sick and dying from AIDS. I wrote poems to the many hospitals he frequented to pay for all the MRIs and CAT scans; for the blood transfusions and hours in the ICU; for the nurses and doctors and physical therapists who all tried to heal him. I wrote poems to the pharmacies to pay for all the drugs he needed. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote until my hand cramped; until I filled dozens of journals trying desperately to save his life. On that last night, when Death came to take my friend, I quickly wrote this and handed it to him: New Day Like the heroic quiet light Of a sun that sets, You looked me straight in the eyes – Someday when our eyes lock again When the brown from your eyes Makes a haughty earth Upon which I will take all my stands; And when the blue from my eyes Gives you gentle and earnest repose; In this brand new place We will talk of many things About How to make everything fresh again. We will carry on important conversations Of what we always thought heaven Would be like That will fill large wheelbarrows. And everything we speak of Will fit inside the wheelbarrows With room to spare: What I love most about you And what you love most about me And what remains lamely behind, Draped over the heavy furniture Of all the living that we did. Poetry has ruined me and it seems to have ruined Death as well. The last I heard of him, he left my friend ashamed and crying and is now working in a garden center somewhere outside of Seattle. She walks in beauty like the night. There are no fewer than one thousand things in this ruined life of mine to which I could apply this single line of Byron’s. I carry it with me with all the jealous verve of a newlywed. I cling to it tightly as I do my credit card or driver’s license. I fiddle with it in my wallet as I head into a local bar for a nightcap. This one line has got to be good for a small glass of sherry for sure. M C Biegner 10/6/2005