MIDDLE PATH

To James Wright

Your foot would lift, as if levitating,

and move through the air and, like

the front strutting frond of a die rocker

stamp down-the awkward strut

of someone burning up inside-as if

you had been wound up elsewhere

and set going in a dangerous direction,

past things which open and show you their insides,

under a brilliant sky you wildly hoped

one day might flow from your pen,

the air-change of uncried tears; or

Middle Path could in reality go straight,

like Aristotle's radical Golden Mean the class

wouldn't have quite got the hang of yet,

into hell. What the hell. All

failures en route could be material

for the construction of speech out of trouble.

You would step along Middle Path

afire in the clear idea that it could be done

and it could not be done for long.

The drum majorettes of high school days

in Martins Ferry are all old,

in old bodies, now, or else dead.

But second clarity may have given some

a transfigured beauty -a beauty like that

which living weakened, in danger, with courage

in a second life clarified by love, gave you.

You of all of us were to be able

to sit down forever, almost without self,

with a notebook and pencil,

wherever life and death meet-

as today, this first day of spring,

you may have strayed off Middle Path

and stamp through the remains of snow

and hunker down before a gravestone

and peer at the letters time

and the chemical winds have spared:

ALFRED AND [effaced]

AGE 6 AGE 4

CHILDREN OF [effaced] AND ELIZABETH [effaced]

OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF [effaced]

JOHN KINSELLA