AFTER THE DEATH OF CORMAC MCCARTHY, I LOOK AT THE LOCUST TREE OUT MY CLASSROOM WINDOW AND TRY TO EXPLAIN THE VIOLENCE AT THE HEART OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE TO MY CHILDREN IN THE MANNER OF AN ERIC CARLE BOOK
Over there, there is a green thing in the way,
under the silver of the moon that isn’t shining
because it is the daytime, and on its many arms,
there are so many thorns you could call it a coat,
a thorn coat, and there is always someone climbing
its trunk and hurting their hands so much so.
A little boy is climbing and a little girl is climbing
and with them the ghosts of their dead grandparents
and their unborn children’s children and a caterpillar
who only knows how to eat and eat, thorn and leaf,
on the way to becoming a butterfly and a brown bear
and a goldfish out of water flopping upward
and a wolf pup and a lion cub and an eagle without
a nest and you and me and every mother and father
and son and daughter who ever was—we are all
climbing and climbing and climbing until our hands
ache and ache and ache and make a cradle of that ache
and hang a lullaby in the air above that cradle
and we are all going up and up and up and it is
painful and strange because we are all also falling
down and down and down, deeper than the deepest
part of the ocean, which is singing to us in the way
a humpback whale does or in the way the waves
sing to the shore and if you listen very closely,
you can hear a great great writer whispering
to the waves in us and the trees in us and the thorns
and all that climbing and all those cut palms
and bleeding fingers. Listen. He is ending his book.
He is ending the great book of his life. He has no
say in this, but he is saying on the last page: fly them.
Dante Di Stefano: “Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite novelists. I wrote this thinking about his death this week and the ways in which McCarthy’s books have helped me understand our nation’s romance with brutality. I was also thinking about how I might explain some of this to my small children. I’ve read The Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? a thousand times in the past five years. In Carle’s books the world in all its wonder unfolds. I thought it would be interesting to look at McCarthy’s grim fatalistic view of human nature through the lens of Carle’s imagination. The last two words of the poem are the last two words of my favorite McCarthy novel, Suttree.”
