Another birthday has reminded me that I have more years behind me than ahead. No, I’m not sad or depressed. Oh sure, there are things I wish I had done in my life, we all go through the would’ve, should’ve, could’ve periods in our thoughts.
But I digress,…
I am often reminded of life’s limits, and then I remember Jonathan Coffin. His friends and family called him Nonno. He was a poet, and once in about 1969, while I was still a young and energetic art student at SHSU, I met him on the stage of the Old Main Theatre in the piney woods of East Texas.
You see, Nonno was a character created by one Mr. Tennessee Williams.
Mr Tennessee was a troubled man who had an exceptional talent for expressing his raw emotions through his complex and often flawed characters.
Nonno was a very old man and had a small but very pivotal role in Mr. Tennessee’s play the NIGHT OF THE IGUANA.
I won’t go into how I came about meeting Nonno, but I’ll just say that this play was being presented at the university, and I had the good fortune to be employed by the Dept of Speech and Drama at that time to help build and paint the stage sets (a Student Technical Assistant in Drama).
Back to my point, Nonno wrote a poem, and he recited it in the play, and it has stuck with me ever since. This verse had also impacted the life of the main character in the play, the deeply tortured and fractured Reverend Larry Shannon. The Reverend was driven to the verge of madness, torn between his concupiscent instincts and the proper and righteous dictum required for a man of God. You need to see the play to understand how it all fits together; check it out on YouTube.
So, about this time every year, I’m reminded that I too have an expiration date, especially this year after a very recent stay in the hospital trying to build back my strength to be able to see my 79th year. I’m better now but still have more to do and Nonno helps me put it all back into perspective. Enjoy and I’ll have more to say later.
Jonathan Nonno Coffin’s Poetic Soliloquy
How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair,
Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.
A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then
An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth’s obscene, corrupting love.
And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me
NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, Tennessee Williams
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