The Education of a Young Poet by David Biespiel

Author:David Biespiel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Texas Roses

When my family moved from Tulsa to Houston in 1968, we lived for a short period on Lymbar Drive in the southwest corner of the city across the Chimney Rock ditch from Johnston Junior High. Shortly after, we moved north to Loch Lomond on the other side of Braeswood Boulevard, where I was given a room in the corner of the house that overlooked rose bushes my mother planted. They were generally tidy roses, sometimes raucous, and often there’d be petals scattered on the square brick patio. They had a kind of capricious beauty. When the porch light was left on overnight outside my window, I would look at them in the glare to help me fall to sleep.

William Faulkner writes that beauty “means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.” My experience was more limited, but I liked to stare at those roses all the same. There might be something to them having an elegiac consciousness because I began having a recurring dream about that time, too. This would have been when I was in elementary school. I’d dream of plunging into seawater and then, alternately, chased on land around a dense, circular garden by something unknown. Sometimes the dream felt like an experience, and other times it was limited to scenes or brief acts. The dream felt like I was always leaving home and unable to return. Or always returning and unable to arrive. I’d come to a point where I couldn’t go any farther and could barely lift my arms they’d feel so weighted down. My legs felt like they were sunk into sand, and no matter which direction I’d run I’d be returned again to the start.

The dream sometimes began with joy and then would turn to expectation and illusion. There’d often be a point when I’d be sure I’m about to drown in the sea—and then the running me, the one who is being chased, emerges out of the water. Or the running me who is about to be caught by the pursuer dives into the sea and begins to swim. It’s as if I’m regressing into my animal instinct, into a pre-human madness. The dream could even feel a little funny, like imagining eating raw meat with a fork. And there’d be grunting while I was running or swimming. The grunting would go on as I felt myself kicking against the water or running on the gravel, and then a swilling growl would come upon me, and then snatching at comings and goings, swimming toward or away from whatever was approaching, running toward or away from something falling just out of reach. Now I can see I was simply existing in that recurring dream somewhere between being and unbeing, when everything that is radiant becomes all that you are able to praise. There was that, but I also feel the dream was a yearning for solitariness. It became, when I thought about it, an investigation of myself, what I might now think of as an exploration of identity, a kind of haunting of an ill-defined destiny.

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