Perpetual Notion

Tonight is a slightly different Haiku. A friend and I, once at a coffee shop, created more of a free-verse haiku. The method: he writes one syllable, I write two, he three, me four, and so on until deemed done. He has stepped back home from Alaska, and we once more have done it, four of us in fact…

Touch
sour lips
if blood drips
use tourniquet
to quench the flow of
consciousness beneath a
a boarded plank bridge which shifts
swaying in the November wind
on this night, the last child of the month
why is it that the cheese continues on?
My bull-dog named Zed rode a pinkish skate-board
fire water spiked with sugar, chase with hip hop.

Black Friday is not
the day that I buy your love,
but instead, my own.

The comfort I find
in the chase of a purchase,
tucks me into bed.

It is not the case
that I dislike the giving,
but I buy for me.

Do not get me wrong.
Despite all the crap, for you
I would wait in line.

It is endearing
that Woody Allen loves sports,
the frail cat he is.

And Friday night starts,
and is done so correctly,
with one of his films

Humor sits tip top.
On his comedic coat tails
I ride through my eve.

A self-hating Jew,
for a night wrapped in chuckles,
to you I prescribe.

I just read a New York Times article that spoke to me in a way that very few do. It was an Op-Ed written by Richard Rubin titled Over There – and Gone Forever.

The editorial introduced me to a man named Frank Buckles. Frank lied about his age in order to join the Army and fight in World War I. He served his time and made it home to the states. Now, with 106 years beneath his belt, Frank is the only surviving American veteran of World War I. The United States sent 2 million soldiers to France, Frank is all that remains.

Maybe it has something to do with my Bachelor’s Degree in History, and perhaps it is just general humanity, but I have always felt a strong connection to the living past. I have felt it a loss that John Lennon died the year before I was born. Not that I ever would have met him or seen a concert, but the fact that we could never walk the Earth at the same time, I had missed something.

Two and a half decades into my life, I have come this far still sharing a world with the veterans of the First World War. To what extent I have benefited from this, probably not much. I have not made the effort to go out there, meet these people, and hear their stories. Honestly, until this moment I had not realized the immediacy of the situation. What I have enjoyed is the sense of closeness that their existence has granted me.

We can always remember the stories through conduits such as history books. Yet text has such a disconnect. I could be reading about World War I or about Ancient Greece, and the experience would be much the same. Now having a living breathing veteran, a first hand ambassador to the event, that has power. The individual, as is the case with Frank Buckles, may not even live nearby. But for the pure fact that they are living, adds a reality to what would otherwise be just history.

The author tackles reality by addressing that this will likely be the last Veteran’s Day to recognize a living soldier of the war. There are more wars and there are more soldiers, but if history can ever be alive then it is about to die. And the cycle continues, history being created, lived, and recalled.

It is as though I am standing beside death, and once more realizing mortality. As I write, World War I still has a heartbeat. Its memory still holds a level of tangibility, and is within reach. Soon the pulse will cease and it will thus become abstract. We will then gather to talk about the event that has passed, but none of us will have known it. Strangers assembled to eulogize the strange.

I see this moment almost gone, and I am made to think of what we do have. My grandpa, among many others, served in World War II. He still has stories to tell, and I have yet to give a good listen. And that is not to say that history is noteworthy only through war, it is just one more, of many examples. I cannot combat the progression of time and its details, though I do feel it. And I do intend to acknowledge its passing presence. The great grandfather of wars lies on his deathbed, but the family tree of history goes on. …And I see that I must stay in touch with the family, for it is mine.

I had my first snow,
today while upon my bike,
and I did not fall.

Snow first fell before,
but not on or around me,
and so I missed it.

It came to the cold,
while I sat beside the warm
sunshine of Nashville.

But I have returned
for greeting an old cold friend,
so hands we may shake.

“Patience is no longer a virtue. It is just another thing, a fact. A detail such as a color. It could be black or white. It is not absolute in its placement, always good and never questioned. I question it. I am done with it. No longer second nature but a seatbelt to a dead car. It holds me tightly to a road going nowhere. I have lost patience, and will be better for it.”

dHb 11-6-07