![Assistant Professor of English Katie Adison, photographed on the historic Quad on Aug. 14, 2020.](https://www.bates.edu/news/files/2020/10/200814_Katie_Adkison_0134-crop2-200x133.jpg)
Robert Farnsworth's reading of a Tagliabue poem
At the September 2006 faculty meeting, English faculty member Rob Farnsworth, who spent the summer as the poet-in-residence at The Frost Place, a museum and arts center housed in poet Robert Frost’s former homestead in Franconia, N.H., read a poem of his own in memory of John Tagliabue as well as this poem of Tagliabue’s, “Sliding into the Future”:
Sliding Into the Future
Achieving?
What is there to achieve? The event occurs at its
own accord
as the sea shell is made or the volcano erupts
or the lines
of a Shakespeare play are memorized; in due time
It Happens
momentously temporarily, the snow cap melts,
the sea anemone
blossoms, the lizard’s shadow is sketched in the
memory.
The anguish in the sick bed is engraved on
the foam.
Forms keep changing; clouds as much as deities;
and Zeus
is bewildered, transformed. The opulent is found
or lost in
the twinkling of an eye. Someone performs a
ritual in shadows.
The lover leaves his bed; none knows what will
happen next.
Achievements flare up like the flames of orange moths
on Paros.
Faces keep appearing from the distant past. Boats appear
with cargoes never seen before.
— John Tagliabue