`A Gift You Couldn't Have the Wit to Choose'

On Wednesday I left work early to pick up my 4-year-old, who was running a fever and complaining of a bellyache. When I got to his preschool he was sleeping on the floor in the director’s office. His hair was damp and matted, and he was snoring loudly. When I lifted him he made a sound like a bilge pump but nothing else came out. In the car he fell asleep briefly, then woke talking about a friend’s upcoming birthday party. A kid’s notion of time and space, real and dream, is fluid and shifting, like the contents of a lava lamp. Kids rely on the predictable but enjoy surprises. Even being sick offers the short-lived solace of distraction.

At the kitchen table, David threw up the orange juice I’d given him and one blueberry. After a bath he wanted me to read to him but not from one of his books. He insisted I read one of the books on my nightstand. On top was a collection of Daniel Hoffman’s sonnets, Makes You Stop and Think. Fortunately, First Into Nagasaki, by George Weller, was on the bottom. I started with the second poem in the book because I have a prejudice against eccentric arrangements of words on a page, and the quatrains in the first poem, titled “The Sonnet,” are aligned at the center and resemble nail heads viewed from the side. Here’s “A Legacy”:

“Wakened by birdcalls, I stroll down our lane.
I touch the infinite sky, the barbarian sun.
I’m tousled by a breeze that smells of rain.
I do believe this day has just begun.
My legacy from History is Now:
I’ll take it – in the air, in the mouth, in the dandle-bed,
In the savor, in the spending, in the Times, in the apple bough,
In that dream I first dreamed when I was eleven,
A stifled cry, then joy! I am not dead! –
For reality is vintage and delicious
Especially when you taste it while it brews
Because it comes as love comes, heart-skip sudden,
Yet long as a lifetime in a once past wishes,
A gift you couldn’t have the wit to choose.”

David listened patiently but was unimpressed though I like the poem, especially “My legacy from History is Now.” This moment, good or bad, healthy or sick, is the irreducible reality. Everything preceding Now led to its evanescent haecceity, what J.V. Cunningham called “this absolute of fact.” Hoffman’s choice is to “take it,” embrace the given as evidence that life still pulses within. I remember the patter 40 years ago of a sideshow barker at the Cuyahoga County Fair, calling us to wonder at the Giant Rats of Sumatra: “Yes, folks, live, livin’, and breathin’!”

After Hoffman, we reverted to Captain Underpants, but even with a sick kid who demanded a peanut butter and jelly sandwich 20 minutes after throwing up, it’s still “A gift you couldn’t have the wit to choose.”