George
Drew like Robert Frost is willing to follow the voice he
has created-- and thereby to lead the reader. The voice that
narrates this journey is at first private and overheard and then 'goes public' again. The
reader follows all--
with the wonder and the enjoyment of a poetic chase that leads him to the place, the
voice, and finally again to the word of the place that is
celebrated.
ABOUT
CONNECTICUT
Qui
Transtulit Sustinet
(Again,
To Gray Jacobik)
Of
all the states of the original Republic
it’s
the one I’ve been in least,
the
one I know least about. Until you,
I’ve
known only one person who lived there,
a
fine man with a fine Polish name,
Fedorowicz---a
fine husband, a fine father,
and
a fine friend. I loved him,
and
I love the memory of having loved him,
and
the way the memory keeps love alive.
Say
it: Con-nec-ti-cut. Quinnehtukgut.
Always,
as far back as I can remember
being
able to speak, it has been one
of
those words from Hell. Early on,
night
after night I’d lie in the dark
trying
to say it correctly, rolling the whole
insufferable
sequence of its four syllables
around
and around until my tongue stiffened
with
incompetence and every syllable slurred.
A
word that ranked right up there with vegetable,
for
my betrayed and bitter tongue it was
a
phonetic powder keg, a booby trap
of
epic proportions. Stress wasn’t the problem:
four
staccato syllables, two perfect iambs.
Rather,
at its core it had a kind of exotic nuance
only
an indigenous, home-grown word
can
muster. Oh, how I loved it! Even
on
my last visit in the dead of winter,
when
we lowered Al Fedorowicz’s ashes
through
dirt and rock and under the bruise
that
was the morning sky surrendered him
to
the flint of its embrace I cherished it
for
its inscrutable appeal. And even more,
I
loved the way I and so many others
misspelled
it with two t’s at the end,
or
with one n in the middle, or most of all,
with
that incomparable c omitted.
I
loved the way the final t trailed off
into
nothing, the way it thinned like vapor
from
a jet that was headed west, away
from
the long tidal river, away
from
the original Republic---from
the
original shining sea, from me and thee.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa