'I Might Be Lost, But Only Lost in Thought'

On Monday I interviewed a student with a double major, computer science and mathematics. He’s a senior applying to grad schools. The word that best describes his manner is ponder. He ponders. His eyes turn upward when he thinks, and he speaks slowly, choosing words like the stones and bits of glass in a mosaic. We talked about Aristotle and the Ising model. His thinking is taxonomic and anti-taxonomic. He doesn’t trust his taste for categorizing things. He seems like a young man who thinks like a cautious old man, ruminatively. 

I met the poet Barbara Loots when researching an essay about light verse. For forty-one years she wrote greeting-card sentiments for Hallmark. Her poems have the honest emotional core of a greeting card you would save from a loved one. She told me that “light verse and serious intentions cross over.” Last May on her blog, Loots published two poems that, in her words, “bookend my life so far, the first from my 30s (I think) and the second from my 70s. Same person. Same path. Some progress?” The first is “Climbing”:

 

“I have begun to narrow down desire.

As though tracing a river to its source

I climb, charting the change higher and higher

from placid meander to the turbulent course

where it began. I have loved much, not well,

collecting worlds to carry on my back.

What shall I leave?  The spirits that compel

this climb demand a spare and steady pack.

Leave beauty, wonder. They are everywhere.

Leave hope, and drink from the relentless stream.

Leave knowledge, learn trust in the nimble air

until, suspended by a slender dream,

you seek only to climb, and not to know

where you came from, where you have to go.”

 

A young poet who already is thinking old wrote this. Loots’ second sonnet is “Old Lady with No Complaints”:

 

“The outward qualities already met:

the white hair, glasses, wrinkles, overweight,

the random names I’m likely to forget,

the words for things (like icebox) out of date.

The comfy sweats retirees get to wear?

I live in those, with sneakers on my feet.

Do I look puzzled, with a distant stare

as though I needed help to cross the street?

I might be lost, but only lost in thought.

The road not taken troubles me no more.

Amused, I sift the clutter life has brought

and shut the past behind me door by door.

My bit in time seems infinitely small,

its prizes insufficient after all.”

 

The line that reminded me of the student I interviewed is this: “I might be lost, but only lost in thought.” Old souls in young bodies and, fortunately, vice versa.