`Quite Simply, a Sadness'

Ron Slate has written and posted a poem, “Four Roses,” with the circumstantial density of a good short story. It’s rooted in memory and family, but swings open from the personal to the universal on a beautiful hinge (several, actually):

“Unlike a bartender, a man selling liquor isn’t compelled to console
his clientele. Yet each time he sees the stumpy fingers
of a longshoreman when the palm opens for change,
he feels, quite simply, a sadness.”

I’ve tended bar and worked in a low-end beer and wine shop, and though I was drinking at the time and my impressions are not entirely reliable, that’s where I became a taxonomist of sadness. Sadness among drinkers is deeper and more nuanced than mere depression, and there’s more to it than biochemistry. Someone said a drunk passes through three stages -- bellicose, lachrymose, comatose – but that’s only the beginning and isn’t true of every drunk. Alcohol is a corrosive and dissolves whatever it touches, if it touches it often enough. Auden knew something about “The Sorrows of Gin,” to borrow a Cheever title, and he was more than qualified to write feelingly about Falstaff. This is from his essay on Henry IV, “The Prince’s Dog,” in The Dyer’s Hand:

“The drunk is unlovely to look at, intolerable to listen to, and his self-pity is contemptible. Nevertheless, as not merely a worldly failure but also a willful failure, he is a disturbing image for the sober citizen. His refusal to accept the realities of this world, babyish as it may be compels us to take another look at this world and reflect upon our motives for accepting it. The drunkard’s suffering may be self-inflicted, but it is real suffering and reminds us of all the suffering in this world which we prefer not to think about because, from the moment we accepted this world, we acquired our share of responsibility for everything that happens in it.”

Ron’s poem suggests his father knows something about that sort of responsibility. And for the uninitiated: Four Roses is a brand of bourbon.