Our friendship began when everything seemed to be ending. Shops were closed, everyone was housebound. Hospitals and cemeteries were the busiest places in town.<\/p>\n
During COVID\u2019s season of collective retreat, a woman I knew urged me to contact Juan Mobili, a poet who immigrated to America from Argentina in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
\u201cI find similarities in your poetry.\u201d Similarities didn\u2019t do it for me. I was too busy being gainfully alone. But when she said, \u201cHis two favorite poets are Robert Lax and William Stafford,\u201d I relented.<\/p>\n
Lax and Stafford were also favorite poets of mine. Lax because of his oceanic spirituality, his sense of humor, his minimalism. (Lax, like myself, wrote poetry into his 80s. Juan, at 66, is a relative youngster.) Stafford because his poems are like old growth trees\u2014deep, solid, wise, and written in the American idiom.<\/p>\n
A new friend in old age, when all one\u2019s old friends have taken up underground residency, seems to come from somewhere deep in the genie\u2019s bottle. Juan, more outgoing than I, has friends in all age groups. He works the room, as they say. I sometimes pop my head in, but the rest of my body refuses to follow.<\/p>\n
Our introductory Zoom, in August 2020, was a little different from all the weekly Zooms to follow. There was an immediate ease between us, as if our friendship was already an established fact, and all that remained was filling in some of the historic and psychological blanks.<\/p>\n
Juan has a strong, calm face that bends easily in the direction of ironies. A striking characteristic is the cigarette that nests unapologetically between his lips, as if this were the 1950s. He made me think of all the poets I met in Latin America when I was in my 20s and doing stories on Latin American radicals. They were mostly young. Unlike Juan, a mature family man, they could be wildly romantic about poetry, seeing it as the blood-soaked flag of revolution one moment, and a kind of literary priesthood the next.<\/p>\n
Juan will say simply that he writes poetry, \u201cto make the world a more hospitable place.\u201d<\/p>\n
His father, Jorge Enrique Mobili, was an Argentine poet of note, and a chain smoker. (My own father, Jack Hirschfield, a hotel maintenance man, was also a chain smoker. But he never a read a book in his life.)<\/p>\n
So, despite our occupying disparate points on the aging compass, Juan and I share a common heritage of poisoned lungs. His poem, \u201cMy Father Smoking\u201d (Adelaide Magazine, 2022)<\/em>, draws you deftly into the old ceremonial world of the religious smoker.<\/p>\n My friend came of age politically during General Videla\u2019s military dictatorship in the late 1970s.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was this reality going on where people would be disappearing, but you still went to buy bread and hoped someday to have a girlfriend.\u201d<\/p>\n He was part of the Argentine underground and took the nickname Chacho. His closest friend, Claudio, also with the underground, took the nickname Memo. Memo was captured and thrown to his death from a helicopter. (A Bolivian friend of mine, Isaac, a mining leader, met the same ghastly end.)<\/p>\n In his \u201cLetter to My Body,\u201d in his chapbook Contraband<\/em> (The Poetry Box, 2022),<\/a> Juan recalls:<\/p>\n A new friend is a mystery to be unraveled. Juan may have come from a place of darkness, but his writing is marked by careful evaluation, tender reflection, and outsider wisdom. All of this in his second language.<\/p>\n \u201cIn my 30s, there was a moment when I said, \u2018I need to write in English because I live in English.\u2019 Spanish didn\u2019t seem natural to me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow did it begin?\u201d I asked him, of his journey toward becoming an extraordinary writer of poetry in the English language.<\/p>\n He recalls for me a day in his early 20s. He was waiting somewhere in Long Island for a haircut. He saw a store selling books and magazines.<\/p>\n \u201cI bought an issue of Rolling Stone<\/em>, Psychology Today<\/em> and a pocket dictionary. That\u2019s how I started to learn English.\u201d<\/p>\n In due time, came these words in his new language:<\/p>\n Juan moves among the mystery of things without making a big deal of the mystery or the thing. How far will language take us? It is the silent question beneath many of our questions. We find ourselves holding on to different ends of the same rope.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t talk much about the rope\u2019s fraying. Perhaps because we see it as blossoming even as it seems at times to be growing weaker.<\/p>\n \u201cI still live my life with the thought that what happens next is what I am passionate about. Though I may be 66, I am also 20. I have the feeling that time will not be an issue if I keep writing. \u201cFriendships run smoother if certain tribal illusions are maintained. I see that with you. Your vitality. Vitality and health are not the same. Vitality lives in the question, \u2018How am I going to work today with images that will become something I could not even have imagined before I set them down?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n At 84, the vitality Juan refers to is often necessary to beat back dread when images freeze in their foxholes. I\u2019ll read him a new haiku about my father\u2019s dying to reassure myself I can still write a new haiku:<\/p>\n The subject of memory and poetry dots our conversations.<\/p>\n He is a fan of my chapbook, my only book, The Road to Canaan<\/a>,<\/em> about my mother\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s.<\/p>\n \u201cYou write about a time where you have memories, but you want to see what else is there that you missed. I always say, \u2018I go back to see what I missed. I don\u2019t go back just to affirm what I remember.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Saturday mornings, when Juan and his cigarette appear on my Zoom, and the old porteno<\/em> gives me one of his humorously emphatic greetings, I am beyond gratified that we didn\u2019t miss each other.<\/p>\n Robert Hirschfield<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is a New York-based writer and poet. He has spent much of the last five years writing and assembling poems about his mother\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s. In 2019, Presa Press published a volume of his poems titled,<\/em>\u00a0The Road to Canaan. His work has appeared in<\/em>\u00a0Parabola, Tricycle, Spirituality & Health, Sojourners, The Moth\u00a0(Ireland),<\/em>\u00a0Tears in The Fence\u00a0(UK) and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n Remembering Is What We Bring: An Old Man Recalls An Old Friend<\/a> \u2014 Hirschfield recalls his friendship with Alan Solomonow, founder of the Middle East Peace Project (MEPP) <\/a>“We were both young, and as children of the 60s felt it was forbidden to grow old. Now in my 80s, part of me still adheres to that ridiculous dictum. The same part that refuses to make peace with the reality that old friends die, and with them, parts of ourselves that were young.” Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 The sound when he flicked the lid open would make the whole family pause,<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0 the sort of collective awe Argentinians experience at the movies<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0when Fred and Ginger danced on a terrace under a sky full of stars<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0 how you vaulted out of bed<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0when a car stopped suddenly at the corner;<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0we became so quiet then<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 I saw a stone in the shape of a resentful heart<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 and a question mark in the shape of a lamp<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 the room<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0 the shape<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u00a0of his cancer cough<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
More on friendship by Robert Hirschfield:<\/strong><\/h2>\n