Free Will: A Consideration

Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable 
                                                         road. 
                      —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prelude 

The flying godwit 
soars 8000 miles nonstop 
from Alaska to China’s Yellow River. 
It’s not its resilience we most admire 
nor its sheer hardheadedness; 
it’s the calculus, some bird radar 
pulling it forward, a threaded 
needle, its eye way above 
water

Winter Work 

Waldo waits for the water to freeze before walking across 
the Great River to arrive in 
Kalamazoo or wherever next 
he will speak. Even so, the chill 
wind invades his cloak, his scarf, 
and threatens his gait. He slides. 
Last week, as he stood tall, patient, 
before a crowd somewhere, someone 
said he resembled a perpendicular coffin. 
Well, yes: hidden behind the comfort 
of aphorism and the blazing quilt 
of certainty, his spirit has plummeted, 
careened from transcendence 
by the death of a child, his own, 
the hurt seamed into his heart, still 
pulsating, one lyceum after another, 
through one lecture, maybe two, 
another day x’d off the calendar.

An Interlude

 Free will, Nabokov writes 
in a sly and caustic note, 
“snaps its rainbow fingers” 
to dispute our every doubt. 
Perhaps. Yet we must consider 
going this way or that, the paths 
tangled where we least suspect. 
Sometimes we’re blown about, 
buffeted into fearsome lands, 
labyrinthine folds, no string 
to sift, no needle to thread. 
Other times we feel we’re saved, 
borne up on spirit we neither 
know nor understand.

Spring

 Every spirit makes its house, but afterwards the 
house confines the spirit. 
                                   —Ralph Waldo Emerson

 After the heavy rains, a pinch 
of light through the trees, and then a vibrant seam 
of color as the evening swells 
robust, a fine suture 
of sun and calm.

 The scholar sits still, 
as though before an altar, 
to what god he does not know. 
The old robes don’t fit: 
they’re yesterday’s choices 
and a bit threadbare. 
When one’s words are etched 
into platitude, embroidered 
as fact, is one not bound 
and gagged and lost? 
What a strange knot 
in the golden thread of a life 
exemplary to a fault!

A Postlude, Lightsome

 Lidian, wife of Waldo, who called 
him Mr. E for half a century, 
might be deemed a sentimental 
fool: In concern for a rat caught 
in the chimney she placed 
bread and cheese there. 
She so fretted that her chickens’ 
feet were cold in those northern 
winters (even her own blanket 
failed to warm their scaly toes), 
that her graceless friend 
Henry David, ever adept 
at construction, stitched 
for them leather shoes.