A Coupling of Grace & Fear - (pp. 1 & 2 of 4)

Portrait of a Garden Poet

A Coupling of Grace & Fear

 

Paris Eugene Osowski’s Pilgrim Heart is about love and is dedicated to the Gardener. In the end, she is the only reason the poet cared about others at all. It is not that he was otherwise disinterested in his fellow man, but that he was inclined to do things that are different from love. In fact, even when he did love, it was expressed with illiberal conditions and a nullifying expectation of personal gain. Still, Paris could think of no better justification for his existence than love, and he never stopped trying to improve his ability to care about others. He chronicled that effort in the inspired and apposite poetry that follows. Writing it made him feel noble and even optimistic about his chances of living with a better sense of grace.

But Osowski’s work is more than a panegyric about the efficacy of love and the glories of poetry. It is also the honest history of an aging man’s search for meaning and his inevitable acceptance of life’s most abstruse reality. For even as Paris conceived of the project, the people he loved began to die. And as they did, he grew increasingly aware that the universe of his feelings and most devout beliefs belonged only to himself, and that his loved ones were likely to have navigated life in a similarly myopic way. He could only wonder whether what we call “love” is more than a quixotic delusion �" A kind of dubious story that we imagine and choose to believe.

Nevertheless, Paris was ever the optimist. He was born to run life’s cruel emotional gauntlet, and he strove to regain the position from which death had so callously pushed him. He continued to dream and remained that kind of dreamer who decorates gloom with the empyrean bunting of hope. Sadly, he began to realize his vision only in the dregs of old age: He went outside and finally liked what he saw. And he liked being seen by the eyes that watched him. Perhaps they belonged to a being that cared even more about its inventions than Paris cared about his.

 

The high point of Paris Osowski’s literary career occurred in 1964 when several of his poems were read aloud at a ninth-grade class assembly at Olson Junior High School in Minneapolis. Later, some of his work appeared alongside that of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, John Berryman, in the University of Minnesota Arts & Poetry Magazine.[1]  But no comparable obeisance was to follow, and Paris gave up writing verse until he retired from teaching some forty years later. Then, with eternity coming into view, the aging lyrist rededicated himself to the cause of beauty and assembled his magnum opus.

 

However, no delusions of grandeur are to be found in the work of Paris Osowski. He was comfortable in the knowledge that he was, and would remain, a common poet. His lines are the fruit of an old man’s hobby, rhymes that were written to enrich the lives and inspire the better ambitions of people he loved, not dazzle the minds of strangers, or make anyone wise. He recognized that his thoughts were not new insights, but affirmative statements about time-honored truths, and he wanted our universe to remain ours as much as he wanted his to remain his. Still, a timely coupling of grace and existential fear made Paris Osowski an American garden poet - And that merited the audience that he ultimately obtained.

Yet the Poet’s confidence in his work could be unseemly, and his literary ambitions were at least on some level driven by ignominious vanity, so much so, that he thought it should be read, and even admired, by loved ones and friends. And although that dynamic would betray a thin veneer of Christian humility, it provided him an excuse to claim a kind of patrician status in all matters pertaining to his work. Only near the end of his days did things change in any significant way; and then, only with the appearance of the lost souls who began snubbing Paris after church. By then, a better penitent, the poet came to recognize that he was less like others than he had hoped, and more like others than he had feared. Still, that lesson available in aging, made the creation of Osowski’s masterpiece possible.

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[1]  By 1970, Paris’s poems had found their way into some American poetry journals, including the legendary Imprints Quarterly, but by then the young poet had been swept up in a multitude of less noble ambitions and no longer saw a future for himself as a writer or even as an emotionally well-adjusted person.

 

 

Author's Note

This piece is a segment of my revised work, previously posted at WritersCafe.org. It is from a book in which some of the entries are written in prose or poetic prose.