Shadow
Last night I saw him again.
This time at a train station.
Young. And I laugh at the word.
He had carelessly left his
thin wallet at a pay phone.
I know who he was calling,
and who it is who’s really
without the currency of
the realm. Where was he going,
though, when the train pulled away?
And when he finds me again,
will he be any older?
.
Okay, now I have to ask: Where is the last line?
You seriously leave the door open on this one.
I’m stuck in a fog.
Let me explain:
By shadow, you might possibly mean you, or your son.
While it’s most likely you looking at your progeny, I can’t help but wonder about days gone, from your perspective.
So, how’s the boy?
Well I’m not sure the last line’s been written yet, San. But I can understand the fog. This one seemed very clear to me when I posted it but looking back it does seem a bit hazy.
Well, you see, one day I was reading about Jung’s archetypes. (Isn’t Jung a funny word?) One of them is “the shadow,” a piece of your unconscious, neither good nor bad necessarily. From time to time the shadow appears in a dream. You’ll know it because it’s always somebody unidentifiable to you but of the same sex. He’s trying to tell you something, something about something going on underneath, in the recesses, if you will.
So anyway, that night I had a dream and the shadow showed up. Now, things like wallets and phones and trains in dreams have great symbolism, too. But geez, San, if I told you what those represent, I’d be giving away too much of the poem. In fact, I’ve said too much already.
The lad’s just fine, thanks for asking. He’s home from school for the summer. Got himself a summer job at Lowe’s. Need some lumber cut or a key made? He’s the guy you wanna see.
Oh, a dream. I guess that explains the fog.
But I would say, on the contrary, rainy, you could always say more.
Do you miss him? The shadow? Okay, I’m just being silly. I’ll just let this fester in realms of my imagination (while I think about how the name Jung would be perfect for one of those spam titles).
Sounds like you have a great lad on you hands there (secrets? Care to share?). I’m sure I have some friends in the area (if your Hemingway poem was on the mark … which reminds me; I had almost forgotten about Andersonville, okay, not really. I just played it out to it’s logical conclusion and saw no reason to continue) I could send his way for the occasional key. The housing market is in a slump right now, so I guess they might hold off on the lumber.
Well that’s the problem with logical conclusions (aside from the fact that they’re typically neither). Maybe that’s why I find myself unwilling to move beyond the illogical beginnings. That’s where the poetry is, you know. After that it devolves into mere philosophy, and that’s where I always lose interest.
Yeah, he’s a special kid, he is. Miles ahead of where I was at his age. (His mother’s influence no doubt.)
Illogical Beginnings.
I like that. It works. Chuck full of options.
Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t continue. I guess it was fast becoming … philosophical.
A humble one, you are. His mother’s influence indeed. I doubt I’ll buy this at full price. Maybe at 50% off.
Rainey,
Where does philosophy end and poetry begin? Are illogical beginnings a requirement? A line from a poem: “The philosopher’s philosopher man, the man who in a million diamonds, sums us up.”
I don’t rightly know, JT. As sangrain notes, it is at the illogical beginnings where all the options seem to be, all the possibilities. Or maybe I noted it and he agreed. Either way. It seems to me that once the deconstruction is in full gear, something gets lost. It’s like analyzing why a joke is funny. Somewhere along the line you lose the humor. Poetry’s the language of suggestion. Philosophy, the language of meaning. Frost put it nicely: poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Not that analysis isn’t a fine pursuit, and I think a good poem begs for it. But somewhere, and I don’t know exactly where, one gives way to the other. But then that ultimately feeds the first again. And we have your philosopher’s philosopher man. And so maybe it’s an ongoing cycle from philosophy to poetry to philosophy back to poetry.
Yin and yang maybe?
Well, I’m not sure either,Rainey. I’ve never quite managed to grasp what poetry really is. Is it the elegant arrangement of words? Rhyme? Meter? I guess it is all that and more. It seems to me that whatever the symbols, poetry is to create a mood, a feeling, an image that transcends the words and leads us intuitively to a place not often visited. Whether logical or illogical, poetry is a tug at the heart and mind. But then I’ve already admitted I don’t know what poetry is… 
It’s rather like trying to define art in general, I guess. Maybe we can borrow Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of hard-core pornography. I would say that’s as good as anything else.
Transcending the words is a nice way to put it. But then the signifieds always rise up above the signifiers.
“A tug at the heart and mind.” I like it. Let’s go with that. 
i don’t understand specifically what is happening, but that did not matter to me. what matters to me is that the voice is consistent, strong, and real.