Hello Friends —
I have very vivid memories from early childhood of flying — not memories of dreaming about flying, just memories of flying, just me and sky. I also love ridge trails deep in Tennessee. So you can see why C. Dale Young's "The Vista" speaks to me — and, I hope, to some of you.
Enjoy.
Ellen
The Vista
Not tenderness in the eye but the brute need
to see accurately: over the ridge on a trail
deep in Tennessee, the great poet looked out and saw
the vista that confederate soldiers saw
as they rode over the edge rather than surrender.
I saw only the edge of the cliff side itself and then
estimated the distance down to the bottom
of the dirty ravine. This is what someone with wings
does when he knows he cannot fly: he measures
distance. I have spent far too much time
examining my wings in the bathroom mirror
after the shower's steam has slowly cleared
from the medicine cabinet's toothpaste-splattered glass:
grey, each feather just slightly bigger than a hawk's.
The great poet said one might find a vista like this,
perhaps, once in a lifetime, but I didn't understand
what he meant by this then. The wings, tucked
beneath a t-shirt, beneath my long-sleeve oxford,
the wings folded in along my spine, were irritated
by that humid air, itchy from the collected sweat from the hike.
I wasn't paying attention, which is a sin I have since learned.
At 14, after the wings first erupted from my back,
I went up to the roof and tried to fly. Some lessons
can only be learned after earnest but beautiful failures.
My individual feathers are just slightly bigger than a hawk's
feathers. But my wingspan is just about 8 feet. I'm a man,
and like men I measure everything. But vistas
make me nervous. And the great poet made me nervous.
And I knew then what I still know now, that I
was only seconds away from another beautiful failure.
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For the curious: The great poet who makes C. Dale Young nervous may be Allen Tate ("Ode to the Confederate Dead": "We shall say only the leaves / Flying, plunge and expire"). Tate in turn may have been made nervous by Donald Davidson ("The Last Charge": "the blue waves of hills lap all the distance"), and Davidson in turn may have been made nervous by Lord Alfred Tennyson ("The Charge of the Light Brigade": "All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred"). All of which is to say, every poet walks a delicate balance between the premise that every poem he could possibly think of to write has already been written, and has never been written.
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