No rest for the active

 No rest for the active 

I was in Axel’s odd study with its huge desk, huge high-backed, leather desk chair - furniture more for an executive suite than a pastor’s study; but there is nothing of the executive about Axel’s desk, covered with loose papers, stacks of paper, stacks of books, books splayed open. And the shelves, behind the cherry desk and all along one wall, beautiful built-in shelves but chock-a-block with beaten-up books, not frames for tasteful bric-a-brac. I was in Axel’s office; we were in a pause in our conversation, when Nils burst in. “You,” he barks at me. He’s always barking. He bursts in, barking.

     “This poem you read in your blog last week - guy lying in a hammock, looking around, listening around, nosing around, some farm in Minnesota. What’s that all about?”

     He’s red as if he’d been running or as if my reading the poem* had been a personal insult. He crashes into the seat beside me across from Axel, who takes his feet off his grand desk and stands up, slowly as an old man. Nils is a foot away from me, no more, but I can feel his heat. “Does he have a fever?” I’m wondering. I lean a bit away.

     Axel is getting a book off his “poetry” shelf, the VINTAGE BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY (sixty-five outstanding poets including Sylvia Plath  Robert Lowell  James Merrill  Louise Glück . . .). I watch him, absorbed. He’s looking at the Table of Contents. He sits down; he reads, slowly:

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

     by James Wright

Over my head, I see a bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year's horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

“Boy, that is a pisser,” he says to his brother.

     Though he can’t quite sit still, Nils has cooled down. He has stopped running; he is sitting. Still:

     “Okay, smartass,” he growls at Axel. “Either of you smartasses,” he looks at me. “He has wasted his life, the guy in the hammock. I don’t get it. Why write about it?”

     Axel looks at me. I shrug. Axel looks at his brother. He (Axel) shrugs. “What’s the problem?” he asks Nils.

     “Of course, he’s wasting his time. That’s the purpose, isn’t it? - lying in a hammock, doing nothing.”

     “But he doesn’t say ‘I’m wasting my time,’” Axels says. “He says, ‘I’ve wasted my life’ - by not wasting enough time, I gather.”

     “By spending too much of it not lying in a hammock on William Duffy’s farm,” I say. Then I get hoity for some reason, maybe too warmed by Nils’ heat. “It’s a kind of carpe diem poem,” I say.** “Seize the day by leaving the day - or the world - behind.”

“What’s he got against it, the world?” Nils is barking again.

     Axel looks up from the book. He looks at his brother and shakes his head. “If you don’t get that, you’re not going to get the poem,” he says. He starts to say something else, but

     “Wait a minute,” Nils pushes in. “This isn’t any kind of that mindfulness shit, is it?”

     I assure him it is not.

     Nils says, “Good.” And he leaves.

“No?” Axel asks.

     “No.” I look at him. “Nothing to do with mindfulness,” I say. “Nothing to do with that shit at all.

     Axel says, “Good.” And he sits down.

10.14.19

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  * James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” Click here.

 ** In the dark of December 2014, I spent several posts trying to explain carpe diem to myself and twelve others (the readership at the time, before it declined). That begins here and goes on a ways, soliciting the help of Horace, Abraham Cowley, Ernest Dowson, Jean Garrigue, Dave Brubeck, and The Chiffons, among others. To hear two carpe diem poems from that series, Abraham Cowley’s sweet and gentle “The Epicure” and Tom Nashe’s (since revised) rendering of Horace’s tu ne quaesieris, click here.

 *** Who is Axel? Here. Who is Nils? Here.