closed door

A Map of Love – Donald Justice
Your face more than others' faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to I while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.

Donald Justice died in August. I did not hear it on the news, we were not friends or relatives, I was not a member of his peer community, but today, I cried because I just read that fact. I can’t believe it is true. I felt as if someone I had loved has passed, I felt the loss in my gut.

Donald Justice first entered my life when I was in college. I went to school at Berea College. There is a kind of idyllic cloud over the place. There are the partiers and the trouble makers, but for the most part, Berea is this strange blend of good-will and thirst and hunger for education and opportunity. If you don’t know about the school, it used to be known as the school for poor smart kids. You know the kids in your high school who got pretty good grades, but have families that would never be able to afford college. At Berea, every student has a job, every student learns (most of us already knew the lesson) the dignity of labor and pays for their tuition and school expenses through a campus job. From janitor and waiter to working in the president’s office, everyone helps, everyone pays their way.

Alright, I know it is seeming a little candy-colored and unreal, but I have very fond memories of my time at Berea. I can’t help it. For the first time in my life, people were as excited about going to class as I was. I was in an environment that fostered every urge I had to think and just revel in that great feeling of being overwhelmed when every thought is a new discovery. In Berea, I met some of the greatest influences of my life. Dr. Wallhauser, Dr. Startzman, Dr. Lichtmann and Mary Jo. Each of these professors gave me a key piece of the person I took with me from my nest. Wallhauser and Startzman gave me a mirror for reality, Lichtmann taught that to love God was to question, and Mary Jo, well, she gave me the best gift of all, poetry.

I will undoubtedly talk about these people again, but for now I will just say, Mary Jo was a gifted poet who somehow found her way to our little hamlet of Berea. Her professorial style was laid back and her relationship with her students was one of “the guide” more than the teacher.

Although I was an English major, I was never a fan of poetry. The story had such opportunities to wind and paint and develop, but a poem, well it was just some whiney boy with a pen, right? I never knew the power of words until I discovered the poem. We chant the mantras “seize the day” and “make every moment count” but fail to realize the succinct beauty of the poem. Every word, every mark, every pause is a window on a captured moment. A snapshot of the world where everything has been stopped to show you the beauty that lies beneath. The quiet, the chaos, the dark, the light, every beat a sign of life.

While at Berea, Mary Jo started the Poetry Festival. Even in the intellectually fostering environment of Berea, it was still hard to get funding for a poetry festival, go figure. But for the few years that it went on, it was a revelation to me. I met Mark Strand and James Still. I picked Caroline Forche up from the airport and gritted my teeth in anger while she told me that I could never be a writer until I had traveled outside of Kentucky. I supposed that she had not researched the school she was coming to now, or considered the possibility that my family had subsisted on potatoes alone for a month my last summer at home. I have since traveled out of Kentucky and had all manner of experiences that I could never have conceived of at that point in time. I am still a less than stellar writer and an even worse poet, but I still am resentful and grateful for the advice. And then I met Donald Justice.

Let me just say this, and release it on the world so my mind can be free of it. I think there is a certain amount of conceit to every poet. I know the world labels them as sensitive, and there are many cartoons and funnies about them being somehow less self assured than great athletes or politicians, but I am here to say, I think this is a mistake. The poet truly acknowledges her role as the discoverer. The poet knows a secret the rest of us missed. Donald Justice was stern and confident in his talent. He was also beautiful. I would realize myself completely transfixed while he was on stage reading his work. I remember everything about that moment. The angle, the lighting, my chair, his pauses, everything, I cherish that memory.

For Christmas my senior year, Mary Jo gave me a book of his poetry. She wrote a very kind inscription about bringing Justice and I together. She was a student of his when he was in Florida, and I loved hearing her talk about him, and their correspondence. I have images in my head of her with him. How she went from being the person I most looked up to, to someone transfigured, into myself. She looked to him as I to her. Although she was already gifted, he gave her the same gift she would later pass to me, he gave her poetry a voice and a life.

I cried for the loss of Donald Justice. I cried that he would never again write, would never again observe the world in his simple, unadorned way. And I cried for the loss of Mary Jo. For some reason, the connection we had through his poetry died as well. I do not see her now, and will not ever again. His death seemed to be the last push; closing the door to the person I used to be. I work so much now, that I rarely take time to read poetry, and when I do, who would I discuss it with, who would get so excited over a few words. I cried because I had kept one foot in that door for so long, trying to keep it ajar so I could look back before moving on.