40. Theodore the Poet
AS a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
On the shore of the turbid Spoon
With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish’s burrow,
Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead,
First his waving antennæ, like straws of hay,
And soon his body, colored like soap-stone,
Gemmed with eyes of jet.
And you wondered in a trance of thought
What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.
But later your vision watched for men and women
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So that you could see
How they lived, and for what,
And why they kept crawling so busily
Along the sandy way where water fails
As the summer wanes.
– Edgar Lee Masters
(from Spoon River Anthology, 1915)
I awoke from a redundant Sunday nap to an apartment’s chill atmosphere which was redolent with uncreated or unsayable sacred texts, only to pick up and read this poem – almost at random – and some others in that book, and then I fell into a kind of reverie, imagining the reader here is like Pedro Páramo, adrift among the dead in Comala.
The imagined ghosts are the ones who become the most alive.
[daily log: walking, 3 km; running, 3 km]