Author’s Note: “Some childhood experiences remain with us for our lifetimes. This poem memorializes the day Earle Hagen, visiting our school, performed his skill at whistling. Art, William Butler Yeats remarked, is the daughter of hope and memory. The ancient Greeks named Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, the mother of the muses. While inspired by this childhood memory, “Earle Hagen” is imagined in hope, this fallen man’s name being forever written on “every golden petal.” This poem is the product, therefore, of hope, memory, and imagination.”
Earle Hagen
When I was in what then we called
Junior High School, Earle Hagen
came to visit. The entire school—
all the students and all their teachers
and all the administrators—assembled
in the gym where the wooden bleachers
expanded like an accordion’s bellows,
(or steps to the Palace of Pandemonium),
the watchful eyes of teachers roaming
the student body, positioned on the margins
at the gun-gray double doors, secure as
a prison.
Earle Hagen had come
to display his unique talent for whistling,
as Earle Hagen had whistled the theme
to The Andy Griffith Show, which we
had been watching for years by then
when Andy and a barefooted Opie head
to the river to catch a few fish for dinner,
all while the whistle of Earle Hagen bubbled
over the scene of father and son like water
from Bernini’s fountains, or rising from
a sacred spring.
Earle Hagen, who
not only could whistle the theme
for Andy Griffith but also the sound
of a horse sleeping, or a stock car
screaming past a mad curve, Aeneas
searching the underworld for his lost father,
a baby in the sweet embrace of her dream,
or the splash of oars as Charon slapped them
while crossing the River Styx with you,
someday in the crowded skiff, your payment
set into the ferryman’s rough hand.
When I heard that Earle Hagen had died at 88,
I imagined the doors of the gym thrown open
upon a field where shining flowers grew,
Earle Hagen whistling “The Fishin’ Hole,”
his name written on every golden petal.
P. Loggins, from Maryland, is the author of The Wild Severance (winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition, 2021), The Green Cup (winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, 2017), The Fourth Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2010) and Heaven Changes (Pudding House, 2007). In addition to the Delmarva Review, his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals.
Delmarva Review publishes the most compelling new poetry, short stories, and nonfiction selected annually from thousands of submissions. At a time when many publications are reducing literary content or going out of business, the Delmarva Review was designed to encourage and print outstanding new writing. It is available worldwide from Amazon.com, other online booksellers, and regional specialty bookstores. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org
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