Gifts from the Underside

 

Gifts from the Underside

Noel Laflin

9-26-22

 

"Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table ..."

T.S. Eliot

 

The lines are famous in many an old high school English poetry book, but I once found them inscribed in an unusual spot - written on a thin bunk bed wooden slat at summer camp. I had crashed on the bottom bunk one afternoon while visiting the once thriving but now abandoned camp and when I looked directly up, there in perfect script were the words painstakingly written across the pale board. I recognized the hand writing and realized my good friend Fred must have inked them into the soft pine some twenty summers prior to that - somewhere in the1960's.

 

While most of us teens were humming along to a hundred bottles of beer on the wall, Fred was leaving behind something a little more profound that summer.

 

The once young scribe, laying on his back (just how I imagine Michelangelo once laid out upon scaffolding in order to paint the Sistine Chapel) and painstakingly etching out words on a wooden slat, died a year ago, some fifty years after carving the opening lines of the Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock on the underside of a bed. And although those words live on in many books of fine poetry, they also live on neatly inked into a simple wooden bunk bed board, a board I later liberated from an old summer camp cabin long ago.