Joint Venture with A. Cohen

Alan Cohen / Poet first / Then PCMD, teacher, manager / Living a full varied life / To optimize time and influence/Deferred publication, wrote / Average 3 poems a month / For 60 years / Beginning now to share some of my discoveries married to Anita 40 years/in Eugene, OR these past 10.

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Joint Venture 2

If life is a joint venture between the will and the world
And it probably is
Where does our collaborative partner reside?
Or if that is too difficult
How can we communicate?

Many among us proceed as if there were no collaboration
As if we were sole agents in a static world
But the world bridles and the world resists
When we push and bully
When we fail to seek consent

Sure, even if we are solicitous
Marshal politesse
We may still end in stalemate
But that may reflect a different failure
Of venue, language, tone, or focus

It may be that the world prefers we listen
And that, when we have something to share
We formulate thoroughly and wait and watch patiently
For a measured and pertinent response
It may prefer that we speak in acts

In questions fit for an oracle
In cautious, tentative serious acts
Of, e.g., energy, diet, or climate
Proposing, not propounding
Yielding scope for response

The world too has a constructive will
Constrained by necessity
Confronting chaos
We can join and learn from it
Or go on fighting on two fronts

Whose will?
Whose world?
Whose home?
What we do is what we get
And what we say

And Finally Place Where

1
Where matters because no two places are alike
And because we have a faculty
Which conjures a sense of home

Then again where may not be that critical
However it may seem
Since one can think and act anywhere

Although clearly each of us is at least in part defined
By the places in which we grow and chance or choose to live
And how we respond to those places

The lucky love where they’re bred and born
Stay a lifetime
And, in some register, sing of what they love

Others from origins equally worthy
Feel themselves castaway/mislaid
And spend their lives seeking their proper homes

2
For one, a modest house, it may be, of stone and wood and glass
Beside a stream on the side of a wooded hill
Balcony, sunny kitchen, snug, ramshackle living room

Friends dropping by, one or two from time to time
No barrier between outdoors and in
Enduring a cogent smattering of storm and season

But tempered by a predominant tranquility
Sun by day, moon at night
Books and minds the stars and planets of this apt place

Here to live established
In a world of only being
Where make bears no taint of share or sell

3
Of course there often are along the way
Fervor, misfire, mischance—stubborn, splendid, siren locations
Real enough in the world, but, for you, out of reach:

During college that sylvan family hideaway you never quite saw
Which Doug and Lance would enthuse about, where spend their weekends
Once invited you, late week, when you were already otherwise engaged

And your father’s friend’s summer lakeside home
The one denied when you begged that weekend sanctuary
Embroiled, past hope, in wooing your college sweetheart

4
Yet to arrive here at late last
A place so vibrant as to be at first unrecognizable
An ablative, no not absolute, but of stance, time, and place where

Slowly though, it begins to come into focus
No mountain stream
But garden and lake across the street

Some barriers, it’s true, but still a sliding door
Opening on, not balcony, but deck
And trees and birds, and too 10,000 books

Not precisely what was dreamed
But facsimile, compromise
What we have

5
And here we settle, here we dwell
Here we make only if and when we choose
Here we toil, and here we rest

Mild climate, comfortable home
Congenial lifelong companion, firth, time of life
Provisionally at home for this belated first time

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