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Hmmm...
Early one morning in late October I was driving back toward the farm from Ann Arbor, Michigan. The sun had not yet risen and the grey half-light of dawn was streaked and drawn as my windshield wipers battled the still settling dew. Though the drive is not long, I was fully armed with the proper road trip necessities - music slightly louder than normal, singles and change for the toll booths, and a big cup of coffee in a leak proof (yet ever-leaking) travel mug. Searching the radio channels to keep myself occupied, I came across the University of Michigans broadcast station somewhere in the upper 80s or low 90s FM. A young college student (who must have pulled an awfully short straw to land the 4 to 6 Wednesday morning slot) was obviously sleepy yet earnestly engaged in reading poems to his audience. One in particular caught my attention:
Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.
W.H. Auden
The student continued into Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, cleverly wrapping up his radio show and English homework by 6 am, but my thoughts had already turned toward alpacas. As animals with a strong sense of personal space, remarkable communication skills, and some similar defense mechanisms, Ill bet W.H. Auden would have gotten along with them quite well.
Pagus, it turns out, is an ancient Celtic term referring to those mysterious pastoral lands beyond metropolitan civilization whose ways are outmoded, primitive, and incomprehensible. A place where the inhabitants are at once barbarous and noble. A place simultaneously enticing and disturbing for the civilized metropolitans. Again, sound familiar? Have you ever been asked the question, You raise what? by someone portraying surprise or even disdain while betraying their own intense intrigue?
I drove on, contemplating this poem and drinking now-cold coffee. The sun had finally risen, turned grey into orange, and provided the necessary reinforcements to win the war for my wipers. I reached forward to change the station, and smiled over one last thought: if at the time W.H. Auden had written these words he had only met some of our sharpshooters, or a mother protecting her still-wobbly cria, Im certain he would have realized that he was armed with only the proverbial knife in a gunfight. Thirty inches is nothing more than point-blank.
-Ty Forstner
Litchfield, Ohio, USA |
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667-3233 fax: (330) 667-2165
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