Sliding Into the Future

Achieving?
What is there to achieve? The event occurs at its
own accord
as the sea shell is made or the volcano erupts
or the lines
of a Shakespeare play are memorized; in due time
It Happens
momentously temporarily, the snow cap melts,
the sea anemone
blossoms, the lizard’s shadow is sketched in the
memory.
The anguish in the sick bed is engraved on
the foam.
Forms keep changing; clouds as much as deities;
and Zeus
is bewildered, transformed. The opulent is found
or lost in
the twinkling of an eye. Someone performs a
ritual in shadows.
The lover leaves his bed; none knows what will
happen next.
Achievements flare up like the flames of orange moths
on Paros.
Faces keep appearing from the distant past. Boats appear
with cargoes never seen before.

— John Tagliabue

At the Sept. 11, 2006, faculty meeting, English faculty member Rob Farnsworth, who spent the summer as the poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, a museum and arts center housed in poet Robert Frost’s former homestead in Franconia, N.H., offered this poem as part of the faculty’s Memorial Minute for the late John Tagliabue. Farnsworth also read a poem of Tagliabue’s, called “Sliding into the Future.”

Canzone

In Memoriam John Tagliabue, On the Gift of His Scarf The Frost Place, Franconia N.H August 2006

Amulet. Talisman. Banner of belief.
It would seem to have arrived so far before
Its season, this long, harlequin neckerchief

You’d wear crossing campus in the iron cold,
Your dancer’s step brisk behind January
Drifts — lively, discerning, meditative, bold

In self-possession. You were yourself possessed –
Wholly given to wild dapples of worlds and words.

Now by grace of your Grace, this keepsake arrives
At the old master’s mountain house as summer’s
Fading, cooling. Your last brave word to the wise

In our long dialogue, flag I should believe,
Bright counterpoint to my ever skeptical
Heart, wistfully reposing here beside old leaves

That evening’s dark will purify to shadow,
But which now a throbbing hummingbird still searches.

Dear, diminished things. Five days ‘til departure,
Until I return to our campus, as you’d
Come back, inspired, from Florence or Djakarta,

And pick back up the weaving of listeners with lines.
Now in time for last cold nights on the famous
Porch, for watching the waning silver moon climb

Out of the granite crest of Lafayette, I have your scarf,
Memory of a master whom I knew, not one who just

Wrote poems, but a Poet, in and of this hard, ravishing
World, whose talisman I will try to wear with courage.