Borges at the Northside Rotary





     If in the following pages there is some successful verse or other,

                           may the reader forgive me the audacity

                                  of having written it before him.

             —Jorge Luis Borges, foreword to his first book of poems







After they go to the podium and turn in their Happy Bucks

            and recite the Pledge of Allegiance

and the Four Truths ("Is it the Truth?

                        Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill

and better friendships? Will it be beneficial

            to all concerned?"), I get up to read my poetry,



and when I'm finished, one Rotarian expresses

            understandable confusion at exactly what it is

I'm doing and wants to know what poetry is, exactly,

                        so I tell him that when most non-poets think

of the word "poetry," they think of "lyric poetry,"

            not "narrative poetry," whereas what I'm doing



is "narrative poetry" of the kind performed

            by, not that I am in any way comparing myself

to them, Homer, Dante, and Milton,

                        and he's liking this, he's smiling and nodding,

and when I finish my little speech,

            he shouts, "Thank you, Doctor! Thank you



for educating us!" And for the purposes

            of this poem, he will be known hereafter

as the Nice Rotarian. But now while I was reading,

                        there was this other Rotarian who kept talking

all the time, just jacked his jaw right through

            the poet's presentations of some of the finest



vers libre available to today's listening audience,

            and he shall be known hereafter as the Loud Rotarian.

Nice Rotarian, Loud Rotarian: it's kind of like Good Cop,

                        Bad Cop or God the Father, Mary the Mother.

Buy Low, Sell High. Win Some, Lose Some.

            Comme Ci, Comme Ça. Half Empty, Half Full.



But in a sense the Loud Rotarian was the honest one;

            he didn't like my poetry and said so—not in so many words,

but in the words he used to his tablemates

                        as he spoke of his golf game or theirs

or the weather or the market or, most likely,

            some good deed that he was the spearchucker on,



the poobah, the mucky-muck, the head honcho,

            for one thing I learned very quickly

was that Rotarians are absolutely nuts

                        over good deeds and send doctors to Africa

and take handicapped kids on fishing trips

            and just generally either do all sorts of hands-on



projects themselves or else raise a ton of money

            so they can get somebody else to do it for them,

whereas virtually every poet I know, myself included,

                        spends his time either trying to get a line right

or else feeling sorry for himself and maybe writing a check

            once a year to the United Way if the United Way's lucky.



The Nice Rotarian was probably just agreeing with me,

            just swapping the geese and fish of his words

for the bright mirrors and pretty beads of mine,

                        for how queer it is to be understood by someone

on the subject of anything, given that,

            as Norman O. Brown says, the meaning of things



is not in the things themselves but between them,

            as it surely was that time those kids scared us so bad

in Paris: Barbara and I had got on the wrong train, see,

                        and when it stopped, it wasn't at the station

two blocks from our apartment but one

            that was twenty miles outside of the city,



and we looked for someone to tell us how

            to get back, but the trains had pretty much stopped

for the evening, and then out of the dark

                        swaggered four Tunisian teenagers,

and as three of them circled us, the fourth

            stepped up and asked the universal icebreaker,



i. e., Q.: Do you have a cigarette?

            A.: Non, je ne fume pas.

Q.: You're not French, are you?

                        A.: Non, je suis américain. Q.: From New York?

A.: Non, Florida. Q.: Miami?

            A.: Non, une petite ville qui s'appelle Tallahassee



dans le nord de. . . . And here the Tunisian kid

            mimes a quarterback passing and says, Ah,

l'université avec la bonne équipe de futbol!

                        He was a fan of FSU sports, of all things,

so we talked football for a while, and then

            he told us where to go for the last train.



Change one little thing in my life or theirs

            and they or I could have been either the Loud Rotarian

or the Nice one, and so I say to Rotarians everywhere,

                        please forgive me,

my brothers, for what I have done to you

            and to myself as well,



for circumstances so influence us

            that it is more an accident

than anything else that you are listening to me

                        and not the other way around,

and therefore I beg your forgiveness, my friends,

            if I wrote this poem before you did.





-- David Kirby