"THE USES OF
POETRY" by Anne Atik
FOR S.B. (13 APRIL 1906-22
DECEMBER 1989)
I
A Bible-reading man, he came
and left between two holy days he didn't much observe:
the Good Friday of his birth,
near the Christmas of his death.
His life between, a pilgrim's
progress with a smile for what he saw along the way and wrote of,
oversleeping,
age and hope and sloth.
Then saw, and wrote of,
wrenched along the way, age and hope and helpless weeping. But
he would have, reading those
two states, rejected both as most remotely holding but one part
or more than minute dose
of the inexpressible, whole
truth of how it is, it was.
II
He showed the
shortest way to
get across a line like this:
crossed
out such words as
these to get to speechlessness.
He
crossed out rivers to get
to their stones.
To
get to the bottom, when
the crisis is reached and truth-telling begins.
Whatever
he knew he knew to
music.
He
found the pace for misery,
matched distress to syncope, and joke to a Beethoven stop at the punch
line.
But
thought that he'd failed
to find failure's pulse.
What
that says about failure,
music and us.
*
Samuel
Beckett was an artist
with so jaundiced a vision of human existence that he managed to be
born not
only on Friday the 13th, but on one that coincided with Good Friday.
Later, he
would allude to the day of Christ's death in an immortal quip in
Waiting for
Godot: "One of the [Calvary] thieves was
saved. It's a reasonable percentage."
Champion
of ambiguity