Lightning, twice
Willie Tyler once said, "The reason lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn’t there the second time."
So while it seems like a second lightning strike in the same place – the fact that my teacher, friend, teacher/friend Sebastian Matthews appears again today on Writer’s Almanac just a week later than the first time – perhaps this poem strikes a new place in all of us, since the same place isn’t there now, even just a week later.
I think Garrison Keillor must just enjoy the feel of Sebastian’s words on his tongue, the way they sound luscious when he speaks them. Oh, to have a voice like that, a photographer’s frame like theirs, and a poet’s eye like this:
I want to be Walker Evans
or Robert Frank setting up shots
in the street—renegades
in Brooks Brothers suits
with Leicas draped on their chests
snapping shots of the downtrodden,
of churches, bits of billboard, bored
debutantes at posh parties
you’d have to fast-talk your way into;
or aboard an ocean liner, itching
to disembark; down in the boiler room
waiting for the foreman to look away
so you can frame his profile
with an arabesque of pipes
and release valves. I’d want to be out
on assignment taking far fewer rolls
than I’m being paid for, down
south alongside sharecroppers
and the sunburnt poor—trying to steal
moments, not souls, to find the past
inside the present, catch the already
falling out of fashion.
