Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!
- “Antigonish” by William Hughs Mears
The poem was written in 1899, but it’s in my brain, inscribed there, over a hundred years later. I can’t remember where I heard it, but I was in high school. A senior. Maybe it was an English class. Maybe that creative writing one I took in the fall semester. It doesn’t matter in the end. I heard it almost two decades ago, and those words have never left me.
Some words stick like that. Burn like plastic on the stovetop, imprinted like a tattoo, sharp black lines in skin.
They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.
-Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Here’s another one. I can’t quote it. The words don’t come back to me like that. But I hold them like dream images in my waking mind. The feeling I had when I first read it envelops me like a cloud of smoke. My son was two. I checked the book out from the library in Missouri. I am there, and here, and with the men in Vietnam. I look at their cartons of cigarettes and the pictures in their wallets. I see the slew of drugs they take to drown out the stench of decay and humid misery. I carry their memory, men I’ve never met, the pieces of them memorialized in those words.
Out of the blue and into the black.
-Neil Young
Sometimes words move you and you don’t even know what they mean. Maybe it’s rhythm, some syncopation of vowels and consonants strung together just right, and it turns them into an energy that catches your breath. Hurts your stomach. Takes you out of your day to day and to some other time. A time you haven’t even lived, but know. Somewhere.
One day you’ll be walking along and that turn of phrase, whatever it is for you, will catch you mid-step. Tap you on the shoulder. Transport you to your life before, or the one that isn’t yours but you felt it, even if only for a moment. And then you’ll continue on your way. But the damage is done. The words are in there. Poured and cemented, hardened into the depths of you. You build worlds upon them. Those sticky lines. You’ll never let them go.
I'm not a good singer by I'll still sing certain lyrics over and over again: "Old man, take a look at my life. I'm a lot like you were."
So true. For me it’s the words, “Let us go then you and I, when the evening is laid out against the sky like a patient etherized upon the table...” They run through my head not quite every time I’m getting ready to leave the house, but more often than I’d care to admit...