Keeping It Simple, Stupid!

I was looking for something I didn't have to excavate through words I wouldn't understand, to get to the final meaning/purpose, that I wouldn't understand. Beauty in simplicity, where the profound is trapped in the thought, and not the language.

I'd never heard of David Berman, or his band, much less his poetry, before. It's just one of the first 'contemporary' poets that poemhunter threw up, and here we are.

It was Imagining Defeat that caught my attention first. A simple and ordinary series of semi-events. Girl wakes boy up, with a clear intention of leaving him. Boy is too lost in the mundaneness of the morning. Grabs a smoke. Girl makes one last attempt (knowing all too well, it's in vain) at driving sense into him, asking him if he thought of cancer...

Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead
in the distance where it doesn't matter

And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,
so far behind his wagon where it also doesn't matter.

except as a memory of rest or water.

And then kaboom! While you are basking in the afterglow of this sad and beautiful idea, he throws a bomb in there..

Though to believe any of that, I thought,
you have to accept the premise

that she woke me up at all.

The twist presents itself in the tale. The irony and the pointlessness.

But why imagining defeat? Was it because if the conversation had actually happened, there might have been at least a chance? Though more likely to have ended in defeat, than anything else. But because none of it really happened, everything, including the break-up has to be imagined..

I don't entirely get it. But there's something delightfully miserable about it.

And the others is the very definition of a simple poem, with no subtext and no overtones. But I read a very personal message into this. This light that we keep chasing, is our own. My light isn't your light, so don't try to analyze it, belittle it, or make me switch lights. And why should this principle not hold for those who haven't found their light? For crap's sake, don't sit in judgement over people who are making do with the dark! I doubt if the poet was leading up to this at all, but I do strongly feel that there will always be some who will not find that light, and to get by, they will convince themselves that they don't need it. Let them be!

The Charm of 5:30. I almost wish it were a Simon & Garfunkel song. It's as if he stashed everything nice, wonderfully warm and feel-good into a beer can, and as beer cans nearly always do, it exploded the fizz of loveliness into the air around me. And not in a saccharin-drippy way. In a genuine 'What a wonderful world!' way, the feeling that lasts all of 45 seconds on a good day. And he artfully prepares you for nostalgia as he ends..

In fact I'll bet you something.

Somewhere in the future I am remembering today. I'll bet you
I'm remembering how I walked into the park at five thirty,
my favorite time of day, and how I found two cold pitchers
of just poured beer, sitting there on the bench.

I am remembering how my friend Chip showed up
with a catcher's mask hanging from his belt and how I said

great to see you, sit down, have a beer, how are you,
and how he turned to me with the sunset reflecting off his contacts
and said, wonderful, how are you.

Memories like this, they appreciate in value over time, probably layered with our own wistfulness. It probably lasts just a minute, but the charm is everlasting. And if you are really, really talented, you can trap some of that charm in words, like Berman has..