I moved back to the Midwest from Colorado in 2010. Since then, you know, it’s been a magnanimous game of warfare of every kind, all the while witnessing more sexual conversations all around me and girls in compromising attire.
At one point, anyway, right when I was back, I was staying with my grandmother in Niles, Michigan, and I think my mom was visiting. As is a common habit of mine, I grabbed a book, found an uninhabited nook of her old one-story house, and started reading. It was a Shel Sylverstein book. I was 26 and my mom scolded me for reading Sylverstein, or said, “Why?”, in a sort of dry tone.
But that was the kind of man I wanted to be. I wanted to be simple, kind of goofy and friendly — popular, sure, but reliable, a kind of figure to make people happy, whenever I could. (Of course, I probably underestimated the amount of impending situations involving people becoming angry for the very reason of my ascendant happiness.)
I was a little bit scared, dig? I’d already been denied a substitute teaching license because of my misdemeanor-laden criminal background check and every social landscape seemed pretty much saturated with aggression and desperation, with relatively little opportunity making itself visible.
But I’d gone to the “lunatic’s ball” in high school and college, ya know what I mean? And just a few months ago I got the winning poetry manuscript in the mail — this girl who had multiple sexual partners, had visited Italy (she was going to school in Iowa, of all places), used a lot of big words and furnished a lot of ostentatious symbols of material wealth and status until it seems like life is just a big lifeless show-off orgy.
Robinson Jeffers was an American poet, originally from Pennsylvania, active in the early and mid-20th century. His foremost work is marked by anatomically robust lines dealing often with pastoral and existential themes, with a pithy way of rhythmically and emotionally mimicking these phenomena. “The House Dog’s Grave” stands as, pretty much, a stylistic anomaly, its obvious thematic parallel with the excellent “Shakespeare’s Grave” of course notwithstanding. It’s a poem told from the point of view of a dog that’s passed away and is then relating from its cubbyhole in the ground which is to be the eternal home of its bones.
The reason why I mention Sylverstein relates to the poem’s incredibly simple perspective. The dog’s genuine diction in anecdotes like “You were never masters, but friends… I was your friend” and “If this is my end, / I am not lonely… I am not afraid… I am still yours…” embody an ideal in palpable emotion, the kind of love/loss confluence that could only be expressed in simple terms. It’s like something a child could read and understand, and, even ahead of that, it’s like something a 10-year-old could write, himself, like a love song to a childhood home he has to leave.
Now, this is not to say that Jeffers’ most prominent work is juvenile and foolish — actually he’s capable of getting fairly dark, somewhat like Rilke, making foreboding statements on existence, et. al. The ability, though, to here transition apparently into a child’s persona, or the simple disposition of a dog, is notable in its flair for conveying a feeling that’s strong but also very basic and essential. The harshest, most powerful and celestial truths about life, that is, should always make us shed the extraneous, and communicate with direct and humble ardency.
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