The Red Letters

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.  To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

                                                                                                          – Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #151

 

 

 

 

Back when my mother was alive – a widow then in her late seventies, and on what would be her last visit to my home up in Boston – we made a pot of coffee together and spent the morning trading stories with this theme: all the things we’d never told each other.  These tales about wild adventure, foolish peril, and narrow escapes, produced in us such a strange emotional amalgam: bursts of laughter mixed with solemn astonishment.  Somehow, it was affirming, though – to learn that we all carry old secrets and that, for the most part, we survive them.  Today’s Red Letter poem got me thinking about hindsight – what we can (and cannot) learn from the tonnage of memory we tow around with us most of our lives.  If hindsight is, as they say, 20-20, you’d think that perfect vision would be an invaluable resource for steering wisely into the future.  And yet. . . 

 

Somewhere in the Oedipus plays, Sophocles offers some caution about gazing in the rearview: “I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.”  And yet, after two dozen centuries, audiences still experience the play with hearts fully-engaged – hoping, perhaps, to learn enough from old suffering to avoid the new (though, we understand, new challenges will be continually barreling toward us from the road ahead.)  Though Dan Carey is a fairly young poet, he has become adept at mining personal history: for the insights the conscious mind craves; for the honest ache the heart feels compelled to preserve.  Dan is a native son of Ipswich, Massachusetts; he received his B.A. in English from Suffolk University and, in 2021, completed his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Lesley University’s Low-Residency Program.  I know some of the marvelous poets he studied with, and they tell me his great promise was quickly apparent.  Since graduation, Dan’s published three issues of Paradise in Limbo, a magazine he created as a way of furthering his literary apprenticeship; and some of his own poems have begun to find their way into magazines like Crosswinds, Anti-Heroin Chic, and DropOut Literary Journal.  He currently manages social media for Grid Books/Off the Grid Press, and works as a substitute teacher.

 

In today’s poem, he recalls driving through a storm high in the Rocky Mountains – and the grandeur of the scene both magnifies his brush with mortality and places it in the larger context.  It provokes a question we must repeatedly ask ourselves: how far can love carry us through this treacherous landscape?  The poem, as artifact, highlights the double-nature that is inherent in the art form: deep observation of the present moment that, somehow, cannot quite reveal its significance until some distant future.  Strange oracle – this far-sightedness that requires hindsight for its translation.  If Dan’s writing experience is anything like mine, his notebook is full of poems that seem to grasp some deeper understanding of circumstance for which our conscious minds will require months (or even years) to catch up to.  It makes me wish for this talented poet, at the outset of his career, that a day will come – years and years from now –when he’ll be drinking coffee with his mother and marveling over how surprising their journeys have been.  A poem like “Hindsight” may stand as one of those markers along the way, directing us: Life, icy roadway, bear right.

 

 

Hindsight

 

 

Ten-thousand feet above sea level,

creeping through Colorado, a two-wheel drive,

our Civic astounds us.  Pressure in the altitude

and traffic—I touch my face, sweating and alive,

hands at ten and two.  The storm we watched

break over the Rockies like a kiss goodbye

unburies itself now from the clouds

right over us, and hail appears.

 

We build cars to withstand weather,

but when they rust, they rust quicker

than most people.  People—what stinks

we make on our way out!  Against

our windshields, gumball-sized pellets

crack our comfort zones, like a critic’s

rejection of my “shitty first drafts”—

if only I had more time.  Death associates

from every direction.  What do I do?

Face it?  Who would I tell I love you?

 

We descend the mountain, and soon

I’ll learn this was the day Mom first

heard cancer, maybe at the same time

I let my own death drift in as I drove,

wanting, bad, for someone to feel

for me, hypochondriac ventriloquist.

Put it any way you want, I’m the son

who’s forever at a loss for words.

 

 

                 ––Dan Carey

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner