Poetry and Lobster

Like everyone else here today, I have been shocked, dumbfounded, saddened, and bewildered by Tuesday’s events.  I have thought to myself again and again, what am I doing here when there is such madness in the world?  What am I doing here, when I should be there helping others?

I wonder, what are we doing here, studying poetry and lobster, when the world around us is spinning out of control?  I wish I had an easy answer.  Instead I have only a couple observations and a short reflection.

I have never had the pleasure to sit in one of the classes of my colleagues in Environmental and Biological Sciences, but I often hear and imagine what they do in those classes.  They observe the physical world and the living forms in it; they observe in tiny detail many facets of these complex living forms; all so that they might understand it more fully.  In other words, they study the life of, say, shellfish--lobster, so that they can make decisions on how we might live in sync with them.  In the process, the classes come to feel a bond with these rather foreign living forms.  In a word, they appreciate them.

Likewise, when my classes and I read poetry, we observe the words on the page, so that we may understand them more fully; we observe in tiny detail every facet of the living forms of poetry; all so that we might understand it more fully.  In other words, we study the life of, say, Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), so that we might understand another way of looking at beauty.  In the process, the classes come to feel at home with this rather foreign language of poetry.  In a word, they appreciate it.

I have never been inside the World Trade Center, though I have stood just outside of it.  I, like you, have imagined what it was like inside of it before Tuesday morning, and on Tuesday morning.

I offer this one tiny reflection, an observation of one small physical space in the heart of one enormous loss.

On the September 11, 2001, at 8:22 am on the 75th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Old Salt sits on his favorite rock at the bottom of his 500-gallon tank positioned between the Yankee Clipper Restaurant and the elevator vestibule.  He is 43 years old and weighs nearly 73 pounds.  Visitors often marvel at his size and age, but none know to marvel at his gift of reading people’s minds.  His gift of ESP is not unusual among his species, only unobserved.

The visitors this morning are not unlike those who pass by every morning.  Between his 30-second naps, Old Salt listens to their thoughts.

Mini Rodgers, blue hair, pale skin, clutching her purse as if it were her first born, wonders what she will get Pastor Everhart for Christmas.  “He’s not like Pastor Larson was, but still—he’s a good man.  Maybe a scarf would do, or maybe a pair of gloves, or…”

Gustavo Adolphus, wearing his first Armani suit (or so he thinks—it’s really a if fake), frets “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.  That’s it. I’m fired.  The boss is going to kill me.  If I lose this job, that’s it—I might as well move back to Sweden with my grandparents, and...”

Cassandra Beal and Francine Pelletier read lines from Hamlet to one another while they wait for their parents to come out of the restaurant.  They have Honors English—that is, when they get to back to school in Halifax on Thursday.  Cassandra reads the line, “for you yourself, sir, should be as old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backw...”

Old Salt chuckles at this part.

Mutumbo Banks, five months old, wearing a bib that says Tickle Me and real cloth diapers, thinks “where is that bottle, anyway?  And it’s feeling pretty wet down…”

Usamah Ibn Mundiqh, with one hand placed solidly on his nine-year-old daughter’s shoulder and one eye on his wife’s swelling womb, thinks to himself (and to Old Salt), “How wonderful is Allah who gives me both a family like this and amazing works of the hands of men such as this building.  It is so…”

Armando Cruz, 58, Director of Human Services at the Bank of America several floors below asks himself if a 15% tip was too much.  She was rather slow today.  Maybe tomorrow, I’ll…

Gretchen Schoff, 18 years old, 1500 miles away from her home in Madison, Wisconsin, now attending New York University, here for her breakfast interview with Simon and Schuster for a summer internship, reads The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams.  She reads

     It is difficult
To get the news from poems
     yet men die miserably every day
          for lack
of what is found there.

Dimitri R., intern to the Producer of the television show Frazier, hoping to reach the lobby before his boss does, thinks mostly about his last night with his girlfriend Sonya, her sweet breath, her soft fingers, her bright smile.  He wonders how he will ever afford to buy her an engagement ring, how he will ever balance his work and home life, what she will think when he asks her to move to Holly...

Maria Theresa Gonzalez Ramirez, veterinarian, on her first trip to the United States, looks out the window and muses: I wonder if the people down below think about us up above.  I wonder what people in the planes flying by are thinking right now when they see this building.  I wonder if they know who I am, who we are?  Ooo, I better not look down.  I better look…

Freddy Barnes, a new waiter, rehearsing his lines for an off-off-off Broadway all-black production of Waiting for Godot which opens in an abandoned roller skating rink tonight, stops to push the elevator button (though five others have already pressed it).  He thinks,
Adieu
Adieu
Adieu
And thank you
Thank you
Not at all
Yes, yes
No, no
Yes, yes
No, No
I don’t seem able…to depart.
Such is life.

What in the world is that sound?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

In honor of my students who sometimes shake their heads when they finish a Shakespearean sonnet and ask what is he trying to say, I will just add this footnote.  I hope that we will use this time of mourning purposefully; I hope that we will use it to learn to appreciate others who do not look like we do or dress like we do; rather than drawing lines that divide us, I hope we can draw lines that bring us together.  I hope that in our reaching out and showing others who we are, they will reach out as well; that we will begin to appreciate the living, breathing, poetic beings we all are.