Freya Manfred, "Imagine This"

When you’re young, and in good health,
you can imagine living in New York City,
or Nepal, or in a tree beyond the moon,
and who knows who you’ll marry: a millionaire,
a monkey, a sea captain, a clown.

But the best imaginers are the old and wounded,
who swim through ever narrowing choices,
dedicating their hearts to peace, a stray cat,
a bowl of homemade vegetable soup,
or red Mountain Ash berries in the snow.

Imagine this: only one leg and lucky to have it,
a jig-jagged jaunt with a cane along the shore,
leaning on a walker to get from grocery to car,
smoothing down the sidewalk on a magic moving chair,
teaching every child you meet the true story
of this sad, sweet, tragic, Fourth of July world.

This morning's poem on The Writers Almanac caught my eye because it's a Freya Manfred, who has a new book out, Speak, Mother, which I just bought. The title is intriguing, given that she's written extensively about her father, Frederick Manfred. Now it's mom's turn I guess. I'm anxious to see what Freya and her mother are saying.

I don't know if she's using her mother's voice in these poems; in this one, she could be. But Freya herself is of age to be thinking what's in "Imagine This." And I get it. After all, ideas like these catch securely in my mind too. I can't tell you what joy I got yesterday from a wood thrush outside my window--a wood thrush when we're pure prairie here, all prairie and no trees. He shouldn't have been in our backyard, but there he was in his gorgeous shiny brown livery.

"The best imaginers are the old and wounded," Freya Manfred says. I hold only one of those offices, but believe me when I say I understand "ever narrowing choices." Yesterday, a bowl of my wife's strawberry soup--"let me count the ways." The black-eyed susans--dozens, even hundreds of showy dandies appearing right now in the field across the road. The gargantuan sunflower in our garden, big enough for Jack to climb if he has trouble with the beans.

Little things are so blessed. She says she used to dream of New York or Nepal. Today, she's overtaken by a stray cat. I get that--narrowing choices, narrowing joys.

What I don't get is "Fourth of July world." Saturday is the Fourth of July, of course. Her father used to say that all stories--and his daughter is telling a story here, even though it's a poem--should be shaped like c's, because all stories leave something open for the reader, that little space that's unconnected in the shape of a c. Some stories are i's--they leave a ton unconnected and sometimes leave us totally puzzled. Some are o's; they connect themselves and hold no mysteries at all. But the great stories leave space for us to finish, to wander in.

That gap, at least for me, is "Fourth of July." When I was a boy, what my grandma used to call "the doings" in the park made the Fourth a wonderland, a brassy medley of John Phillip Sousa all holiday long from foghorn speakers in the bandshell. Back then, a "Fourth of July" world was pure thrill, the night sky flowering with fireworks as we sat in the dewy grass. Maybe that's the connotation she's keying in that last line.

But she's a late-sixties type, and patriotism comes at a cost for most boomers, for me at least. Our war was, after all, Vietnam. Does "Fourth of July" suggest patriotic hype? Love it or leave it?

Probably both.

Some find art's very heart a test because it glories it what it won't tell us. Instead, it begs us in to participate, to think, to try to imagine something you really hadn't considered, the world as we know it in the in-looped flags of a Fourth of July.

I don't know what Ms. Manfred intended, but I know what I think: it's a crazy, mixed up place we live in, an abode as full of tears as it is of laughter, equal portions of joy and sadness, and sometimes sadness that's really just another form of joy. And vice-versa.

He's the bossiest character in the backyard, that beautiful wood thrush who really shouldn't be here. He runs grackles that are then-again bigger than he is right out of town. Even ground squirrels. Wearing that flekked vest beneath a almost pastel cape that's as red as it is brown, he's a gorgeous flat-out bully. He really is.

But I'm glad to have him in this "sad, sweet, tragic, Fourth of July world."

As her own father would say, "Even the pain and hunger were sweet to have. It was life, not death, and all moments of life are sweet."

I'll put my money on this--that what Freya Manfred is saying about this Fourth of July world in "Imagine this" is not all that different from what her father has etched on his tombstone.

I get that too, when just outside my door is yet another beautiful dawn.