After listening to Billy Collins speak

After listening to Billy Collins speak, I thought of his poem, When I was Ten, and I thought of how 10-year-olds grieve at the idea of time passing. Something Collins hadn’t quite accounted for, when writing the poem, and then when he asked them what they thought, he was surprised to find angst runs deep within—no matter what the age. And yes, even age two is not too soon to worry about the direction of one’s life. Merely the world parameters are smaller, but that same fortitude we all carry within, is like the grief of a thin sliver of the moon waiting to shine as if from within. The stars in their courses never stumble, even the gazelle leaps across the skyscape each night searching for the Pleiades, and we look up into the sky, we look into that face of the moon and wonder about the beginnings and the endings of things. How to do it right. No matter what our chronological age, but we are always in medias res. It is always in the middle of things, there is no age, no circumference of thought. And as for those throwaway images—yes, that eggshell thin porcelain cup. The fragility of memory. I remember that poet’s proverbial jar placed in Tennessee and the slovenly wilderness surrounding it. Sure, there’s a little cultural elitism involved. One offhandedly drops literate phrases in the cultural desert, and utters scholarly things like in medias res, sage tags for the reader. Or to lend credence. All the left brain images we have learned so carefully, are tucked away to save for another day. But in the end, what matters most is not how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin, but how many pins are embedded in in the soles of those dancing angels’ feet.