Jack turned 79 on Wednesday, August 9. Today’s show is his annual birthday celebration. He writes,
On August 9, 2019 I turned 79. Today’s show is an examination of that fact. In anticipation, I’m calling the show LIFE BEGINS AT EIGHTY OR IS IT LIES BEGIN AT EIGHTY. I have friends who are eighty—and eighty plus. My high school friends, some of whom I’m in contact with once more through Facebook, are either dead or turning 79 with me. What can be said of all that—a life. My friend Ivan Argüelles said to me yesterday, “You don’t know when you might go. You might go at anytime. You can’t count on anything anymore.” True enough, and—as has happened to poet friends—not only might you die but a sudden stroke might put you seriously out of commission. Yet here you are, alive and reasonably healthy.
What can be said of all this life?
The show deals with speculations about the nature of poetry and the relationship of the I, the ego, to the art and presents various recent works. Here is one:
FOR SANGYE, JULY 10, 2019
in anticipation of her birthday, July 13
Yesterday we bought rings.
A shop in Mill Valley.
Claddagh rings
To speak heart’s truth.
Today I drew blood
From the finger on which
I bore the ring
As if in affirmation.
We each continue to learn
New things
About the other.
I can’t tell you
How amazed and delighted I am
That you are interested in
George M. Cohan
And loved a film
I doubt that anyone else your age
Has ever seen:
The Phantom President (1932)
With Cohan, Jimmy Durante
And Claudette Colbert
(The shortest leading lady
The studio could find
To match Cohan,
She five feet five
He five feet four)
And Sidney Toler,
The second non Asian to play Charlie Chan.
(I’m not sure you’ve ever seen
A Charlie Chan movie.)
What delight we take
In watching films together.
Your mind rings
In mine as we send notes to one another
Across distances
That are not really distances
Because we stay in touch.
There’s a ring for my finger
And a ring for yours
As you reach the age
That Dante Alighieri called
The middle of the journey of our life
And I watch
The wonderful light in your eyes
Grow brighter.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.
…
AFTER BORGES’S “THE ART OF POETRY”—for Sangye
Looking at a woman’s face
We sometimes see the color of dreams,
The face of a woman we see only in dreams
Which is also our own face,
Gazing back at us as in a mirror,
And the sound of a voice echoing
In our consciousness, echoing
From the face of the mirror,
Or as we lay dreaming in deep sleep
And only our fantasy moves us to action,
To discover the possibility of action
In the vast river we call sleep
That protects us from the world
As a poem does, as the world is, in a poem,
Vast, echoing, inhabiting the poem,
A sweet, green, ululating world.
Borges’s beautiful, elegant lines
Bring us into the pastiche of his thought
And into the images that haunt his thought
As a river makes its way in wayward, wandering lines
And my love, like a river, is a wonder
That draws me deeply to a woman named Sangye
And to my knowledge that “Buddha” is the meaning of “Sangye,”
And to poetry, to the vast river that Time is, to Borges, and to wonder.