Showing posts with label legacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label legacy. Show all posts

12/31/22

FOR SOME A MOUNTAIN - Stephen Dunn

For some a mountain, say an Everest or a Kilimanjaro,

exists to be conquered, the kind of obvious big thing

my father, that valley dweller, would casually diminish.

What’s wrong with life in the lowlands, he’d say,

why not just look up, enjoy imagining

how you’d feel at the top? And interesting people,

if you need them, are everywhere. They can be found

in a glade or a clearing, even in a suburb.

 

My father is dead; he only has the words I remember

and choose to give him.

 

If I were to say my need to define myself

involves breathing air not many have taken in,

and the excitement of a little danger, I’d hear him say

Do some good work, mow the lawn, carry wood

from the woodpile. Don’t confuse the dangerous

with the heroic.

 

But the truth is I’d like to be a mountainizer,

someone who earns the pleasure of his reputation.

When it comes to women, I desire them married

to their own sense of accomplishment, each of us

going our own way, coming together when we can.

 

Not enough, he says. If they lack generosity

they take back what they give. If they have it

they remind you, ever so gently, that a man

who climbs mountains leaves behind his beloved.

 

It is impossible to win arguments with the dead.

 

Everywhere you go there’s danger of being a no one,

my father insists. Is he changing his position,

or is that willful me changing it for my sake?

The grave was always his destination, the modesty

of his ambition obscured now by lichen and moss.

Comes the mountain before the reputation, I say.

Comes the unsure footing, the likely fall, he says.

1/26/20

THE MEN THAT DON'T FIT IN - Robert W. Service

There's a race of men that don't fit in,
    A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
    And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
    And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
    And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
    They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
    And they want the strange and new.
They say: "Could I find my proper groove,
    What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
    Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
    With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
    Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
    Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
    In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
    He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
    And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
    He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
    He's a man who won't fit in.