I fight the urge to see if Joseph and Rosemary
Ceravolo’d children have Facebook accounts.
I find it strange and kind of sad that potentially they would exist on a
social networking website. I think about
deleting my own Facebook and open my web browser to the page. I feel a sweep of existential angst, the same
as I did when I first moved far enough away from home that I couldn’t return
whenever I pleased, and can’t carry through.
I wonder: if Joseph were still alive, would he have a Facebook
account? Probably yes. But maybe not. I take a sip of my neglected green tea. It’s cold, and I think, green tea still
tastes pretty good cold.
My mind feels tired, and so I go for a run to
clear it.
Returning – reenergized – I forgo a shower, and
power through the remainder of the collected.
It takes me all the way through the night and into the early hours of
the morning. I read, Mad Angels, the bit
of this book I most feared because it’s the bit that contains the previously
unpublished work, and therefore, the work I feel the most pressure to discuss
in my review. Danielle goes to bed
relatively early, and even though she is only in the room next to me, I miss
her desperately.
Nearing the end, I am struck by how overtly
personal Ceravolo’s poems become. My
lack of sleep turns me more emotional than normal and I hold onto his wisdom to
youth in poems like “Legacy” (“O young of this ancient world / we leave you /
in perpetual danger of the galaxy / of which we have no stroke / but like a
tree or an ant / live and die, / and maybe live again”). It is a different tone in “Mad Angels,” of
course. It feels as though the poet no
longer finds the same pleasures in the word play of his earlier writing, and
has now opted for a more direct – often brutally harsh – and honest aesthetic.
It’s early in the morning and I turn on the
television. Nothing is on but
infomercials and local news. I mute the
sound and keep reading. The poems have
become unapologetically contemplative, and it’s increasingly difficult for me
to read material that presumably grapples with the great poet’s oncoming
death.
August 13, 1984
If I left
nothing would happen
to the stars,
flowers would not wither,
sun would not flicker …
March 1988
…
No one sees me. I am just here,
my foot a decoy for compassion
my sympathies and despairs for
another generation to find.
And if in the dichotomy of a
missing world
a cough awakes the night
you’ll find I’m not asleep.
The sun rises through the windows in my
apartment. It falls across the wooden
floor. I can hear Danielle beginning to
wake in the bedroom just behind me. I am
young. As I read Joseph Ceravolo’s final
published poem of his lifetime, I wonder, if he had any idea that the poem
would be his last. I wonder: how does great art go unnoticed? I don’t know, but it feels wrong. I go to the refrigerator and eat peanut
butter with a spoon and I hope that everyone in the world will read Joseph
Ceravolo’s Collected Poems because if
they did, the world would be a more beautiful place.
March 1988
When a spirit comes to me
and frightens
and the weight on my chest
turns to butterflies into desert lands
and rivers flow through
arms to heart
shepherds and farmers sit to drink
my isolated soul,
but not because I’m away
from you or may never see again
the drunken night
or shaking star’s illusion
that distance is not time
and time not space
but the spirit comes to me
— Ian Brown