Late Thoughts Emilio DeGrazia
Emeritus Poet Laureate of Winona, Minnesota
ve always admired the honesty of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” Frost’s traveler comes to a fork in a forest path and confronts a choice. On a whim not based on logic or practicality he takes the road that seems “less travelled by,” though the other is worn “about the same.” Will his choice take him to some pleasant Walden Pond idyll, a more harmonious life in “Nature”? Frost, a farmer, was only occasionally charmed by “Nature,” a tuft of flowers here or there. He had a dark philosophical view of nature, seeing clearly that it has death-designs on all of us. This dark design was on his mind when he concluded that “way leads on to way.” He well understood that the chain reactions that result from the choices we make send us toward unknown futures and fates. And not only the unknown but death hangs silently over him as he, on a whim, “chooses” his path: “I doubted if I should ever come back.” This thought becomes especially poignant when I’m suddenly sitting in the Mayo Clinic Mayo Clinic St. Marys Hospital courtyard by Tom Driscoll Emergency Room with something unknown going terribly wrong with my heart. The odd thing is that though I’ve arrived at a fork in my life journey, I’m powerless to avoid the limited options suddenly in play. In short, I’m looking at death as one of them. But it’s very strange that from my bed everything seems everyday ordinary––the nurses and aides coming and going, the colors of the chairs and walls, the tops of trees swaying outside the windows to my left. The road not yet taken, death, is nowhere in sight. Out of sight and almost out of mind, with the question, “What next?” walking me backward down memory paths already well trod. I’ve studied literature the better—the best—part of my life, and I’ve shown a prejudice for the darker, and tragic, narratives. Tragic heroes, unlike poor Oedipus as reigning king, usually die in those stories, and we close the book satisfied that this is how some personal histories rightly and of necessity conclude. We learn, I think, best from them.
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110 Summer 2018
