Remembering a Friend Who Lived in Poetry

BESIDE MY bed, with all the books I am reading for inspiration or work or passion—the Shakespeare, the Mirabai, the Bible (for a Passion I whose libretto I’m writing, and for a couple of carols I have been commissioned to write), the Orwell, the Didion, the Jansson, the Hirshfield—are two books of poetry my friend Don gave me because he loved them and because he loved talking poetry with me. They carried on between us a conversation our busyness kept us from having as often as we should.

Don O’Brien died two weeks ago, much too soon, and that is a fact unfathomably sad. Don will be remembered for his service to Catholic education and as a wise and gentle leader. He was a man whose kindness was his courage, and too often, I think, the world mistakes kindness for weakness. Too often the shrill among us—and that, it seems to me some days, is most of us—take advantage of the gentle and the kind and wear it down. When he was worn down, as he was often of late, by the meagreness of too much going on too meagerly around him, Don turned to poetry. He said to me once: happiness is a book of poetry, an hour to yourself, and coffee outside in the shade. And it is as a reader, as a lover of the grace that right language performs in a life and in the world; it is as a man of a lyric cast of mind, a man who made friendship over into poetry, that I wish Don were remembered most, and it is how I will remember him.

One book Don gave me not so long ago is Christian Wiman’s Every Riven Thing. In it I find today “A Good Landscape for Grief”, and today along the Wingecarribee is as good a landscape for grief as any. I walk the creek, which runs too low, and I wish I had had more years with my friend.

But it is the other book Don gave me that he loved best, and rereading it, I recall what Don most admired and aspired to—dignity under heavy fire, a broken-hearted openness to beauty and to joy. The book is Adam Zagajewski’s Without End. Zagajewski, the Polish poet, died this year, too. In the last conversation I had with Don, in passing, on the streets of Bowral, we mourned him (Zagajewski). And now Don has passed, though his being here among us so beautifully, his care for me and for others, is, like Zagajewski, without ent.

I wrote this sijo for Don last week.

MY FRIEND has passed; he’s not the first. But why are all the good men

Dying back, while rapists and the pious thrive? An old lament

I share with the dog and late winter along the weary creek.    

Coincidentally, the Paris Review today has republished today a lovely poem by Zagajewski. It describes what Don went to poetry for, and it describes Don’s way in the world.

I can’t fathom how this can still be the world without you in it, my friend, but you would look up with me today, and perhaps you do, and enjoy the mares’ tails in the sky, and you would decry the inadequacy of our politics for the emergency of the moment, and you would ask after my children and I would ask after yours, and you would be glad that I am seeing more of mine now, and you would hurry away to get things set up for the new restrictions just announced that will take all learning at your school online from tomorrow, and despite all that is not right in your life and in the world, you would be, as you always were, glad. The way this Sunday is perfect notwithstanding all that ails the world and the humans in it, is the way that you were in the world, Don.

So here’s the Zagajewski poem. And it is for you, Don—one of my favourite poets.

My Favorite Poets
by Adam Zagajewski
Issue no. 226 (Fall 2018)

My favorite poets
never met
They lived in different countries
and different ages
surrounded by ordinariness
by good people and bad
they lived modestly
like an apple in an orchard
They loved clouds
they lifted their heads
a great armada
of light and shade
sailed above them
a film was playing
that still hasn’t ended
Moments of bitterness
passed swiftly
likewise moments of joy
Sometimes they knew
what the world was
and wrote hard words
on soft paper
Sometimes they knew nothing
and were like children
on a school playground
when the first drop
of warm rain
descends

—Translated by Clare Cavanagh