Strolling through our neighborhood this languid afternoon — after reading essays by a man who’d left his Brooklyn youth, citybred young wife in tow, to settle like a foreigner into slow hours of an Appalachian farmlife on a hilly rise in southernmost Ohio / rough land he’d scrounged for years to buy, hoping past all odds to learn to plant and herd . . . then, finally, to write there — I think once more of my poet-father’s probing line I’ve dwelt upon for years.  But, as time flows, in a changed way, encompassing my chosen life of teaching college in the Blue-Ridge South and settling into late years here —no longer just amused by that droll question posed in his poem set by a distant London “Duckpond” well over forty years ago (which then observes): . . . “ that Japanese lantern by the bridge, / or from across the pond . . .  / a drift of voices cultured and remote . . . . / The lantern maker, the couple chatting there, / would be amazed to find themselves [the subject of] a poem.”

 

I gaze now at the mountaintops surrounding me (familiar distance of another type), and feel so oddly transient, at this moment, and yet happy to have tried to write a little, and to teach some bold ideas in a slow but thoughtful life beside my artist wife Suzanne...after severing Midwestern roots and heading South so many years ago. BUT never severing the legacy of Lucien’s probing cast of mind (undaunted even now by a blind right eye, hands too frail to type, and a tricky ailing heart at 85).  Yet, unswervingly, still questioning the “World” at 85 — in poems strongly felt, but now more “gently strong” and sometimes hauntingly restrained, as in the brief piece that follows, called “Thought.”

 

And it will soon become readily apparent in nearly all of Lucien’s recent probings below, ranging from environmentally and politically imbued meditation (as in the openly didactic “Shivering”) to moments of sociologically impelled self-amusement (as in the concluding humoresque titled “Gargoyles”) — that true to the humane moral evolution, that time-deepened worldly sympathy in the latter years, of those bodhisattvas he so revered throughout his own half-century span of translating Far Eastern thought for Western readers, Lucien’s ripened worldview has become more concerned than ever (i.e., beyond what an individual artist might strive to “make or do,” or refine, alone) — with his fear for our common world’s survival, in this bellicose time of Iraq and Afghani slaughter, homeland “terror,” nuclear proliferations, continuous African genocide, our own opportunistic failure to protect New Orlean’s “vulnerable” from “climatic devastation,” and most ultimately troubling to his innate Ecological Reverernce, our widespread (“drill, baby, drill”) insensitivity to all those endangered “ten thousand [living] things” which must share what we have sullied in our techno-proud and careless age: the oil-smothered waterbird- and fishlife, the displaced benign-insect species, the earmarked regional forests — all that vulnerable array beyond sheer humankind.

And from such notions spring the central values in the late-life poems which I type for him, after he and Mom ( his lifelong “partner,” Helen — a skilled wordsmith herself, and matchless “verbal critic” for us both) unfailingly sit down to “workshop” them, a final time … until she okays what they’ve done, scrawls it down, courageously, with her curled arthritic hand, then sends it on for me to type for both of them, across the sea, in Bristol!  A final time, that is, after my ritual call, to their London flat where I was partly raised (and where they now live all year round since leaving their long life in Illinois).  And it’s across those distant airwaves, every weekend, that he’ll now recite his latest effort “to make sense of things around him for us all” —his self-proclaimed life mission to me, ardently, with her, engaged as ever, listening in, on the other line (and with only a faint tremor recently beginning to invade his still-rich reading voice, at 86).

 

 

Such, then, are the values, in these five new works I’ve once more had the privilege to type into “the world of higher thought” for Lucien, in his sunset, and which Suzanne and I will store forever, with so much else he’s shared with us, in the satchels of our spirits . . . as, each year, we sink more deeply into our own place and ripening age, within this Appalachian hinterland from where we also hope to probe the Greater World (like him, but from our own more low-key ambience, with his blessing) from the brushy top of our backyard hill, that “dual awareness” of so many of my poems and her paintings — so much a part of what we’ve tried to “make and do” for over twenty years since leaving home . . . and, caretakers of his probing and his wisdom, have become.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

 

 

 

Frankly, I find it hard to remember a day, after sailing to the States, without the need for seeking fresh word-concepts: that is, my own word-discoveries in an adopted language.  After all, born in rural Poland (in rough times after the first World War), I heard and spoke no English before I was four, after my folks had migrated to Chicago to settle in beside others of my father’s deracinated family, a few already launching small businesses there.

 

And so, hastily, out of the blue, I had to snap up new words and their basic meanings before I could attend American school.

 

And Poetry, itself?  Well, the seeds of that were planted soon after the Depression, when we’d followed my father out of Chicago, state to state…seeking lumbering jobs and such, here and there, while carrying with us the few possessions of any worth we’d been able to acquire in that brief hopeful period before the Crash, when we’d momentarily dreamt — with so many fellow newcomers — that “our lives in a fresh country were starting to pick up.”

 

But we’d finally made it back to Chicago, where a more solid period of job-holding led to Dad’s risky plunge into starting up a small paint & wallpaper shop of his own on the South Side, inspiring my mother Celia (herself of limited English) — but proud as punch of our family’s “sudden rise” — to buy a new red rug for our pleasant small apartment’s living room.

 

And being somewhat older, then, with my own newfound pride in my family’s “growing luck” (while also intrigued by samples of that “art of rich words” read before us, each morning, in a lively young teacher’s English class) — I was inspired to write my first poem, called “To a Red Rug,” which to my astonishment she not only praised, but read, with much gusto, before the entire class! (who, ever after, nicknamed me “Lucky”…“Lucky Stryk”).

 

Although I have no true memory of a word beyond its title, it likely led to all those “other words” destined to fill my life for the next seven decades and beyond.  Because what I do remember, without doubt, is the deep thrill I’d experienced when discovering — even in that young and dreamy time — how a richly colored object of pride, encased in those words “I’d originally struggled to learn,” might display my childhood glee in a palpable way.

 

 

Leaving for war, I’d intuitively chosen one book to stuff inside my duffle bag.  And during those lulls in combat, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass became my solace and pillow in the gritty foxholes, giving me hope that if I survived, it might still be possible to live humanely in the years to come.

 

So after that long spate of madness and suffering observed at close range, I strove to cleanse painful thought from my post-war mind, to quiet the guilt that I’d survived while friends perished — or snapped emotionally in those following “peacetime” years … had to block out that darkness to restart my life.  And it took many years before I’d felt the strength to absolve such nightmares in memorial words:

 

 

 

 

I can no longer speak for the world, Son.  I only know how much those true volumes of imaginative commitment have meant to me, untangling my thoughts in chaotic times, teaching me how to accept my lot.  Sweeping, like wind, in and out of my brain.  Clearing my eyes, to see.