The downtown park bench is well located for
cigar smokers, just far enough off the ordinary path to be away
from the condescending stares of nonsmokers.
I watched him approach. Each slow and
delicate step seemed thought out in advance. Even at a distance, I
could tell he’d targeted my spot. He was well dressed,
dapper. A fine fedora perched rakishly atop a mane of long white
hair. A cape, or smock, or small quilt, was folded square and neat
across his left forearm.
“Mind I join ya?” he asked as he
pulled a cigar from the pocket of his tailored shirt.
Without waiting for an answer, he added,
“I like my cigars like I like my whiskey and my women —
cheap!”
His parts didn’t match; his hands were
muscled thick, like your father’s hands when you were 5. His
eyes shone polished-gemstone-bright; his voice was strong, a young
man’s voice.
All the rest of all of him was old, the
oldest man I’d ever seen. When he laughed, as he did after
his “cheap joke,” his deeply wrinkled face lifted high
up into a soaring full-teeth smile; then, as the smile melted away,
his face settled back down like a warm blanket to comfort slumping
shoulders.
Jimmy “Buck” Donavan was
traveling with a Chicago seniors’ group to see the Lincoln
sites and looking for a retirement home that’d let
him keep his dog. His conversation did not much abide common
convention; it skipped from topic to topic, stopping only randomly for
breath, or paragraph, or response.
“Be easier if the dog weren’t so
set in his ways; from time to time, on a moonless night, he’s
still more wild than tame.
“Can’t beat Lincoln’s
second Inaugural Address, as far as we’re concerned. Dog and
I used to work the trees. I was a topper; used to dance up the
trees to top ’em out; no more, lucky to see the top of a tree
nowadays, much less dance one. Dog watched to see all was right.
Can’t work trees for years, we work words now.
“Gotta work something or you’ll
fade out, dissipate! We’re poets now, but gotta rhyme and
have cadence to it — that’s the hard part; don’t
rhyme, don’t have cadence, then it’s not poetry.
That’s our final thoughts on the matter.
“Lincoln would have been have been a
hell of a poet were he so inclined. Hard to decide what to take to
a one-room retirement joint when you have near a hundred years of
lifetime stored up. That’s our final thoughts on the matter.
Some folks disbelieve in the dog; dog don’t cotton much to
cities, he likes the forest best. You agree?”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I
said.
In the short time we shared, he spoke a hundred more slapdash thoughts I couldn’t
agree more with — or less with, for that matter.
The senior tour passed by a half-hour later
and gathered him back into its emasculating fold. A chaperone
apologized: “Thinks he’s a poet; sometimes with a dog,
sometimes not — varies day to day.”
“Your address?” Donavan asked as
he left. I told him; he wrote it down.
The letter arrived last week, two poems,
handwritten in two very different hands and in two slightly
different styles. The return address read only “Buck.”
__________
He was ninety-nine years, to the calendar
day,
when he gathered his goods,
and gave ’em away
He kept a shirt, a hat, and a fine new smock
with a belt in the back
they could use
as a lock
At night, in the sky, where they cannot see
he sings out his song
to the top of a tree
He tells stories, and poems, that feature his
dog.
and dances with stars
in a mystical fog
_________
To Be.
A Howling wolf in silver solo.
Free, and wild . . . this spirit lobo.
remember days both good, and bad.
and change the times found colored rue.
make them green, and grow . . . and you.
To Find.
To Fetch closed minds in tainted hues.
To Catch the shades in blacks . . . and blues
To Live.
Survive inside grey one-room lair.
He can you know . . . and flourish there.
imagine deep, and bloom, and dream
impress them firm upon the brain
those wondrous colors
in arcane.
To be.
To bark.
To leave a mark.
_________
I couldn’t agree more.
This article appears in May 19-25, 2005.
