Roasted Chestnuts and Persimmons

From the Guardian series, by Budd Hopkins

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent — what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness —
between you, there is nothing to forgive —
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

–Jane Hirshfield

My weekend was spent remembering the life of Budd Hopkins—artist, UFO abduction expert and father to my friend Grace. Budd’s life was particularly complex, starting out focusing on art making and then shifting to research in the extremely surreal world of abductions and extraterrestrial intruders. Some of his friends were open and credulous to his pioneering work, some were not. He continued on undaunted, authoring some of the first books documenting the horrifying experiences of abductionists, many of their accounts eerily similar.

The following stanza from Hirshfield’s wonderful poem kept coming to mind this weekend as I listened to the memories that were shared about his life:

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

That “blessed rage for order” in us is not a force strong enough to truly unravel and reveal the real mysteries of a life. Yours. Mine. Budd’s. And in Budd’s case, I am willing to settle for just the roasted chestnuts and persimmons.