Good Times

Good Times

Robert Frost said that a poem runs from delight to wisdom, the same figure as for love, capturing perfectly the joy and force of Philip Thatcher’s poetry. Revisiting themes and strengths of his recent volume, Fine Matter, the poems of Good Time are always in motion, catching glimpses of an active and thoughtful life lived day by day with wry wit and resonant wisdom. The time we’ve lived through cannot be called good in any simple sense, yet Thatcher finds in its trials good reason to be living, savoring everything from contemporary Norwegian jazz to traditional Sami Yoik singing, from washing the dishes to standing before the stars.

In Good Time the approaching chaos and its hopeful antidote are compressed into a period of two years. The time is navigated by just barely. These poems define a moment in the ill health of our country and the entire world but also record a time in our lives when however much is lost something precious is rescued.

I stand in line as she places the
last item in the bag before mine
her eyes averted from a direct
gaze at the one she is serving

From somewhere else once –
I guess the continent, but not
the country, now left behind
bombed out from under her

or too rife with chaos for a life
to be lived, a homeland shot to
pieces. She ventures a smile
at the one walking away

the smile still testing this new
homeland, the loss in her
eyes asking what it will take
for her to belong here

or so I conjecture. He turns to
me, takes my bag and begins to
add up what will fill it and I look
for the story in his eyes, want

to ask a question but I hold back
know how a question in search
of a story can go aslant, can
trouble waters he tries to calm

Yet I want to say to him, I love to
hear stories, value each telling
and at times tell one of my own
from waters not always calm

but I simply thank him and go
as he turns away from me
his story to live, hers to know
not my story to tell.

About the Author

Philip Thatcher is the author of The Raven Trilogy and Fine Matter, his first book of poems. Born in Reno, Nevada, he lives in North Vancouver, taught English, history and drama for many years in the Vancouver Waldorf High School and worked as an adult educator at the West Coast institute for Studies in Anthroposophy.