Maybe I enjoy Wagoner’s poetry because he taught the first English class I ever took at the University of Washington or because he taught the first section of the year-long class I took on modern poetry my senior year.

Maybe it is simply because I was young and impressionable then and, no matter what he was teaching, he was as mesmerizing as Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker. Anyone who can write lines like:

God bless me? Me be one for the cloud-capped, holy-
For showbiz, smug, sharkskinny, hog-certain, flowery Chosen
Harping for glory? Thumbs-upping glissandos on pure-gold G-strings?

could certainly hold my attention no matter what he was saying.

He saw the world in ways I, having been trapped in institutions, of learning my whole life, had never seen at 18 and 21 years of age.

Today, though, his poems probably appeal to me because they capture feelings associated with our common experiences, particularly those connected with the Northwest outdoors, as in the following poem.

GETTING THERE

You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You’re there. You’ve arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.
What did you want
To be? You’ll remember soon. You feel like tinder
Under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change. The sky is pulsing
Against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you’ve made a lasting impression
On the self you were
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.
What have you learned so far? You’ll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveller’s dream
Under the last bill
Where through the night you’ll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.
You’ve earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you’re standing again and breathing, beginning another journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings. David Wagoner from In Broken Country

Hiking, my metaphor for life, is a spiritual experience that reflects my journey to discovering who I am and who I want to be.

Each hike is an individual journey, and at least for one day all that exists is my goal is to reach the ãend.ä There is no outside world to worry about.

Of course, more than once I’ve wondered why I am doing a particular hike and whether I am ever going to reach the end, particularly on an extended backpack. When I do reach my destination, though, I feel physically and spiritually like “tinder under a burning glass.” That passionate moment justifies all the pain it took to get there. For that moment, there is only “Here and Now.”

As I start back the trail, forgetting the pain and struggle, I begin to think of my return or of my next great hike. And with the help of Wagoner’s poem, I realize that “the life in your hands is neither here nor there but getting there.”

A Place to Stand

On ancient maps, they stood,
Explorers, cartographers-
Between the dew-lapped god
Of the wind with an icy beard
And the arrow etched at north-
And panicked among the stars,
And tried the sun, and heard
The kraken plunging south.

They said, "Where are we now?"
But whirlpools turned the sea,
Swallowed and uttered land,
And flames cracked at the bow.
What solid geometry
Could guide their astrolabe?
Which latitude of the mind
Could cast them on the web?

They watched, on every shore,
Gargoyle and griffon rise,
Clawing the parchment air,
Scaling the dark for miles;
Saw the whole ocean poured
Like separate waterfalls
Down the corners of the world,
The corners of their eyes.

We ask, "Where are those ships?"
Keeled over on a chart.
"What lies around us, since
They foundered on old maps?"
The whirling continents,
The sky seen through a hole,
The stars flashing apart—
What master calls them real?

This always seemed to me a perfect poem to begin a volume of poems. Poems, like all literature, at their best serve as a semantic map of our world. Our very sense of reality is determined by our maps of the external world.

What better way, then, to challenge our view of reality than to show how ancient maps portrayed the world. Although the maps were certainly more romantic than modern maps, few of us today expect to find a “kraken” plunging in the oceans. What kind of man could sail forth with such maps? How miraculous that explorers dared cross the Atlantic with maps that showed a flat world with water running off the edges.

Do we dare to doubt that our own maps of our world, particularly those verbal maps we use to decide “right” or “wrong,” “good or bad,” will one day seem as “fanciful” as the ancient maps that confront us in this poem?

Even if Wagoner has found his final standing place and no longer has a need for this poem, I often feel the ground shake under my feet and I still find myself wondering if what I’ve believed for years is really true. And losing “old friends” does little to reassure me of my footing.

Truly, I have not yet found a place to stand.

Every Good Boy Does Fine

I practiced my cornet in a cold garage
Where I could blast it till the oil in drums
Boomed back; tossed free throws till I couldn’t move my thumbs;
Sprinted through tires, tackling a headless dummy.

In my first contest, playing a wobbly solo,
I blew up in the coda, alone on stage,
And twisting like my hand-tied necktie, saw the judge
Letting my silence dwindle down his scale.

At my first basketball game, gangling away from home
A hundred miles by bus to a dressing room,
Under the showering voice of the coach, I stood in a towel,
Having forgotten shoes, socks, uniform.

In my first football game, the first play under the lights
I intercepted a pass. For seventy yards, I ran
Through music and squeals, surging, lifting my cleats,
Only to be brought down by the safety man.

I took my second chances with less care, but in dreams
I saw the bald judge slumped in the front row,
The coach and team at the doorway, the safety man
Galloping loud at my heels. They watch me now.

You who have always homed your way through passages,
Sat safe on the bench while some came naked to court,
Slipped out of arms to win in the long run,
Consider this poem a failure, sprawling flat on a page.

The delightful irony of this poem title may be what makes it so memorable. This poem rings true to my experiences and even more so to the experiences of my children, probably because their childhood seems so much more vivid to me than my own. First attempts, and often many after that, meet with failure. I can remember my own stage fright when I had a part in my grade school play, a part based on my classroom performance, by the way, not on any desire to expose myself to public ridicule. While outgoing and boisterous in class with people I know, I have always been extremely shy around strangers. I decided from that day on that I never wanted to be on stage again, even though I was convinced to volunteer again in high school. Gradually public speaking became easier, but I have never really felt comfortable in front of an audience.

Luckily I’ve never had the bad experience of forgetting my gym clothes, but you’re not as “preoccupied,” or absent minded, as I am without being unprepared for many an event. I still remember a long hike where I forgot my boots and had to wear sandals on my trek up the mountain. Despite my dreams, I never made my high school football team, but the first time I played in the army I got an elbow to the chin that left me without hearing for a day and a half and stunned enough that I had to leave the game. Still, I was out on the field game after game giving it my best shot, even if I was 40 pounds too light to play on the line. I’ve never regretted it.

When my kids were growing up, I only had a few rules about participating in different activities: if you started something you had to finish it; if you played you had to do your best; and, you could always quit at the end of the season if you wanted to, it was your choice, not mine. As a result, they both seem to have grown up more confident than I ever was and are both willing to risk many things I never would.

All of us are probably haunted by our failures, but the real failures are those who are afraid to take the chances to do what they really want to do. There’s no reason to play football, or participate in one particular activity, but it’s a mistake not to play football or participate in a play simply because you’re afraid you will fail. Failure is less destructive than not giving life a chance.

Needless to say, I don’t consider this poem a failure.

Old Man, Old Man

Young men, not knowing what to remember,
Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
Where did you find what you remember? Was it perched in a tree?
Did it hover deep in the white water? Was it covered over
With dead stalks in the grass? Will we taste it
If our mouths have long lain empty?
Will we feel it between our eyes if we face the wind
All night, and turn the color of earth?
If we lie down in the rain, can we remember sunlight?

He answers, I have become the best and worst I dreamed.
When I move my feet, the ground moves under them.
When I lie down, I fit the earth too well.
Stones long underwater will burst in the fire, but stones
Long in the sun and under the dry night
Will ring when you strike them. Or break in two.
There were always many places to beg for answers:
Now the places themselves have come in close to be told.
I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
Every secret is as near as your fingers.
If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.

Perhaps I like this so much because as I’m becoming an “old man,” or maybe that’s because I’m an old man, I feel like I’ve discovered truths I wasn’t aware of when I was younger and “wiser.” I must admit, of course, that it’s never really clear in the poem whether this is actually an old man or, rather, some natural force in the “hiding place of the moons and years,” like the “man-in-the-moon.”

Like most young men, these young men feel like they will find “truth” “out there.” They are on a quest to find truth. As if it could be found in “the sky” (perched in a tree), in the “water” or on the earth (dead stalks of grass). Can they find it if they face the elements alone? If you deprive yourself of sunlight, “lying down in the rain,” can you remember sunlight?

I particularly like the line, “I have become the best and worst I dreamed” because that often seems true. Both our dreams and our nightmares come true, perhaps because they lie so close to our heart. Perhaps it takes “becoming” to truly discover truth; the truth is what we have become.

The ultimate truth, though, is that the important truths aren’t “out there,” or at least you can’t find them out there. You can only find them when something within you responds to what is out there. If your heart “stutters with pain and hope,” you know you are sensing something true, but that’s not enough. You also have to tinder that flame, protect it from being blown out, pay heed to it until it is able to survive by itself.