Being Of Beans

“BEING OF BEANS” is from a group of my early poems, written when I first began college in the fall of 1972. I had written and published four or five poems the previous year, for an Independent Study project, as a high school senior. But, this was the first one I thought had some poetic merit.

As I recall, I had recently discovered the meaning of the word “chimera”, and was intrigued by the concept. I have always been fascinated by the strange manifestations of humankind’s collective imagination. Dragons and unicorns and creatures half man, half goat. Gargoyles. The Sphinx. Turtle-headed and dog-faced gods. Winged lions and horses and monkeys. Flying women, as angels and witches and superheroes. Mermaids and Sulkies. Snake-haired women and one-eyed, giant men. E.E. Cummings homage to Pan as “goat-footed balloon man”. Horned, bull-headed men. Men with horns and cloven hooves. Gods that appear as bulls. And swans. And cobras. A Man of Steel with X-Ray vision, who flies faster than bullets. A boy that becomes a human spider. Men that turn into wolves. Pixies, fairies, elves, goblins, leprechauns, trolls. Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti.

Endless creative adjustments to the mundane reality surrounding us. Maybe these descriptions stem from man’s animal nature. hidden inside our human brain? Maybe reality is not absolute? Maybe it’s all nonsense.

Anyway, it came out as this poem.

BEING OF BEANS
Surely no less, still I am no more
than any star or tree,
this deep reasoner and logical
being of beans.
I have never been to the moon
or split atoms,
or really flown.

I hold to my superstitions
as each man holds,
and believe them true
and supporting great weight.

Illusions I see through
become other fictions – 
so I start building again,
from my same scarecrow chassis,
welding on appendages of facts
and fishes, dreams and donuts,
to construct the new and improved chimera
that is me.

And still I am no more
than any star or tree.