Interesting article about a poet whose day job is risk manager for the Maine
state university system--Candice
The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated October 19, 2001
The Rhythms of Risk
By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
What Edward Nobles calls "the poet's room" is behind a
handsome parlor in a big Victorian house with an attached barn
and an apple tree in the yard.The room is cluttered with
journals and papers and the composition notebooks in which Mr.
Nobles, the poet in question, records lines he might employ
and thoughts he might play with. Just now, however, a doll
sits on the poet's desk chair, courtesy of Mr. Nobles's
daughters, Hadley and Lydia, who are 12 and 8 respectively.
While Mr. Nobles signs a copy of one of his books on an
ironing board and a pug named Christabelle trots around
sniffing everyone's feet, Hadley and Lydia eagerly tell a
prospective customer about their handmade-greeting-card
business, which they and Christabelle and the doll run out of
the poet's room when the poet himself is at the office doing
his day job.
Almost all poets have day jobs, of course. But Mr. Nobles has
what may be the consummate employment for a poet: He is a risk
manager -- specifically, a risk manager for the University of
Maine System. Who else but a poet -- endlessly evaluating the
effect of every image and rhythm, constantly considering how
much of himself to reveal -- knows so much about risk?
******************
UNDER AGREEMENT
I want to live in the house next door
where no one touched a thing in years
except the lawn, which was cut
by small scissors, clump by clump,
by Mrs. Childs, the owner
who was born there. White hair bunned,
nightgown to heels, she'd lie stretched out
on the foot-long grass, sometimes in the night,
and cut it, snip by snip. It would take the entire summer
to not quite finish
the small front plot. And no help
from the neighbors wanted, but she'd talk.
And now she's dead and I want
her house, to lie on her bed and watch
the thick dust rise, the rain
dripping from the ceiling, its sound
loud and purposeful
through broken panes.
I will sell my house and feed
deeply on decay, a dried
sea of sepia, while outside
the half-dead hemlocks will continue
undiminished. They will swallow
the house, the blackbirds, the sky.
And inside this world, the papered walls
will slowly collapse, and I will move
to the basement
with the dehydrated potatoes, and bolts,
and broken metal
toy soldier, which I'll march
back and forth
along the one clean line, the trench
I will make for him, shoveling
the heavy dust, mote by mote,
with the long curved nail
of my only remaining finger.
(And no one
will see me. And no one
to know.)
Oh, broken soldier, slow down.
I am tired
and my will to push hurts.
From "The Bluestone Walk," by Edward Nobles.
Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission of Persea
Books, Inc. (New York)
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i08/08a05601.htm
Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
|