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| Marvin Bell |
It was my turn recently and I shared a piece by Marvin Bell, a retired professor at the University of Iowa who comes out to Oregon every summer to teach in a creative writing program at Pacific University in Forest Grove. I met him at a Fourth Friday event, one of the monthly meet-and-greets I do for work, alternating between coffee shops in Hillsboro, Forest Grove and Cornelius.
He was a warm and good-humored fellow and he readily agreed to write a guest opinion for the Forest Grove Leader. When I asked him for one of his poems to accompany his piece, he shared this one, named for his wife Dorothy, who coincidentally celebrated her birthday last week.
I love the simplicity of the language and the tenderness of the sentiment.
*****
To Dorothy
You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grew by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.
A child said it, and it seemed true:
"Things that are lost are all equal."
But it isn't true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn't move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn't be yours. If I lost you,
I'd have to ask the grass to let me sleep.
-- Marvin Bell
*****
Photograph: John Campbell