| Glass
by C.K. Williams
I'd have thought by now it would have stopped,
as anything sooner or later will stop, but still it happens
that when I unexpectedly catch sight of myself in a mirror,
there's a kind of concussion, a cringe; I look quickly away.
Lately, since my father died and I've come closer to his age,
I sometimes see him first, and have to focus to find myself.
I've thought it's that, my precious singularity being diluted,
but it's harsher than that, crueler, the way, when I was young,
I believed how you looked was supposed to mean,
something graver, more substantial: I'd gaze at my poor face
and think, "It's still not there." Apparently I still do.
What isn't there? Beauty? Not likely. Wisdom? Less.
Is how we live or try to live supposed to embellish us?
All I see is the residue of my other, failed faces.
But maybe what we're after is just a less abrasive regard:
not "It's still not there," but something like "Come in, be still."
"Glass" from COLLECTED POEMS by C. K. Williams. Copyright © 2006 by C. K. Williams. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (buy now)
It’s the birthday of the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley (music by this artist), born in Tupelo, Mississippi (1935). His first stage performance came in 1945, when he was 10 years old. He sang “Old Shep” at a talent contest, and came in fifth, winning five dollars’ worth of ride tickets for the Mississippi-Alabama fair. The following year, he wanted a bicycle, but his parents were too poor to buy one. His mother, Gladys, talked him into accepting a substitute gift: a guitar, which cost $12.95 at the Tupelo Hardware Company.
It’s the birthday of physicist Stephen Hawking (1942) (books by this author), born in Oxford, England. He was born on the 300th anniversary of the death of Galileo, which was always a point of pride for him. He came into a family of thinkers, and his childhood was somewhat unconventional. Family dinners were eaten in silence, with everyone’s noses buried in their books. They kept bees in the basement, built fireworks in the garage, and drove around in a retired London taxi. Hawking’s father had hoped his firstborn son would go into medicine, but the boy was more interested in the sky. He was always active: climbing, dancing, and rowing. Hawking studied physics and cosmology at Oxford, but found himself bored with his classes, which were too easy for him. It wasn’t until he began the coursework for his Ph.D. at Cambridge that he began to feel engaged. Even so, he only spent about an hour a day on schoolwork. He graduated with honors in 1962; in 1963, when he was 21, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s a degenerative neurological condition that results in gradual full-body paralysis and death. He had been stumbling, and occasionally slurring his words, for a while but didn’t think much of it. He finally consulted a doctor after he fell while ice-skating and couldn’t get up by himself. At the time of his diagnosis, he was given two to three years to live. The family was understandably devastated by the news, but when Hawking was hospitalized in the same room as a boy who was dying of leukemia, he resolved to not view his condition as a death sentence and give up. Instead, the disease gave him a sense of purpose that he had lacked before. “I was bored with life before my illness,” he once said. “There had not seemed to be anything worth doing.” He threw himself into his work with new vigor. He survived another 55 years. His final book was Brief Answers to the Big Questions, published the year of his death in 2018. He said: “For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.”
On this date in 1877, Lakota Sioux warrior Crazy Horse fought his last battle against the United States Army, half a year after the Battle of Little Big Horn in June 1876. The battle took place at Wolf Mountain in Montana against General Miles’ army; Crazy Horse and his band had engaged the army throughout the fall and winter. By January, they were weakened and hungry. In May, Crazy Horse led his remaining people to Fort Robinson and formally surrendered.
It’s the birthday of poet and novelist John Neihardt (books by this author), born near Sharpsburg, Illinois (1881). When he was 20, he moved to Nebraska and developed a fascination with Native American culture and history. In 1930, Neihardt met Black Elk on the Oglala Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge. Black Elk, a contemporary of Crazy Horse, was a shaman and a survivor of Little Big Horn and the Wounded Knee massacre. Neihardt spoke with Black Elk over the course of nearly a year, and then put a poetic spin on the stories and published them as Black Elk Speaks (1932). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
