Height has such a poverty of reservoir
— A. R. Ammons, “Sorting”
December, 1963—
An old man jouncing toward us
on the passenger side of a battered golf cart.
He took no particular notice of any or all of us.
The cart stopped, tranquil and secure.
The old man pushed and eased out of the thing.
The driver stepped behind him
and helped him off with a plaid worn sports jacket,
then on with a brown sweater
that had surpassed worn
when it might have been another color, or none.
Its plaid was a ghost out of sight and time.
He stepped stooped, lunged a bit toward us.
Nodded. Some of us nodded back.
I did not know whether I deserved
to be a part of the nodding party.
My father stepped, obeisantly?
politely anyway, back toward
my sudden experiment in standing
where I stood, somewhere over there,
I think. My father beckoned, I obeyed,
and my father introduced me to Henry Luce.
Henry Luce nodded. If he spoke at all,
he was somewhere else when he did it,
and he spoke to someone where he really was.
A man committed even or mostly to commanding
shadows, the celluloid avatars of Time’s
pedestaled American Century.
Somehow, I didn’t feel honored in the presence,
but I didn’t think I was expected
to feel much at all.
A crotchety old man who could rest
easy in his crotchets. That I
was only one of the things he could easily dismiss,
and did, annoyed a little,
but more than a little I was honored,
as an ordinary passerby
included in the common disdain.
On a chilly afternoon in a time
when we put on sweaters on chilly afternoons,
I could also rest easy,
as one of the crotchets.
Henry Luce, once a man who chronicled
the making of his own Century.
I feel left aside now, again,
only to scratch out notes to lament
the fate of the future—hardly
yet coldly comforted somehow,
in equal presence cast away
into the tainted sacred reservoir
with a fellow derelict relic
in the common poverty of that
yarn-bare sweater.
