April 30, 2020

Devotee 

If you wish to learn devotion, observe
the broody hen. She is dedicated to the
business of bringing forth life, but not
just any life, and certainly not Life in
the abstract. No. She is compelled by an
ineffable urge, moved to stillness, drawn
out of and into herself at the self-same
time, by a force both mute and undeniable:
Sit here, on these eggs. Wait. Guard them
with your very life. Wait. Make yourself a
threat to any that would threaten these
lovely orbs. Wait. Hiss. Squeal. Screech,
if you must. Wait. Puff up at the intruder.
Leak a slow moan that says to the thief,
I have all the patience in the world, but
no acquaintance with reason whatsoever.

And thus she waits, a taut disciple of
instinct, a good and faithful servant of
life-force, unburdened by categories and
concepts and thus by anticipation or fear,
her reward warming, astir beneath her.

April 29, 2020

Management Style
 
I manage. Sometimes decently, sometimes barely.
Sometimes not at all. By some measures, I'm goin'
gangbusters all the time. Some would say I'm a
bust. Washed up. Busted. You managed to put up
a good front, kid. Sometimes it's all I can do to
manage the voices, cross-wise, at odds. It's odd.

I play referee to opposing teams, Switzerland to
openly declared adversaries, mediator between
rival camps in a hot war to claim territory in the
form of time and characterizations. I manage
to contain these multitudes – sometimes decently,
sometimes barely. Sometimes not at all. It's odd.

Are the odds even? Are they long? Are they safe?
Are there even odds, really? If I were a betting
woman, would I put money on me? Which me?
Odds are I've already placed my bets on myself,
my personal middle manager who somehow
manages to hold it together, chiefly by holding

hands with my wingman, seeking support from
the mothership, and taking counsel from those
who have walked ahead on the path of wisdom
and circled back bearing stronger light for the
journey to come. This is how I beat the odds.
Nothing odd about it. This is how I manage.

April 28, 2020

Occam's Advice

Some tool is needed, some device –
a weapon, perhaps, repurposed, alt-purposed.
This knot is wicked, indeed. Everyone is up
in arms, spouting theories in the conspiratorial
vein, conjectures that can never be proven
true because they can never be proven false,
yarns spun by the force of compelling
narrative, which holds no necessary
allegiance to the real or the actual, except
insofar as these elements render the narrative
more compelling still, by verisimilitude. The
very idea of verification has become veritably
laughable, to the great peril of all. We love
our stories, especially the fantastic ones –
the more other-worldly the better – and we
have not (yet) discerned the difference
between the story that giveth life
and the story that taketh life away.

Some tips for those aspiring to this discernment:
first, assume there is much you cannot know
personally; doubt yourself; make room for
uncertainty, let it take up residence on the futon
of your mind indefinitely, a permanent drop-out
from the school of the convinced; or better yet,
build it a granny suite, complete with kitchenette,
and drink your morning coffee on the porch
in its company, rocking wordlessly as you sit
together and watch the rising of the sun. Next,
develop an eye for simplicity, for clean lines
cut by a thin blade and open spaces exposed
to the lights of inquiry and investigation; hone
your taste for recipes with the fewest ingredients,
or at least the least complicated ones; collect a
set of knives, razor-edged, forged by the sweat
of expert blacksmiths, those who understand
the strength of the steel that slices the impossible
knot comes not from the tangled heart of the fire,
but from the cool quench, at last, in a barrel of water.

April 27, 2020

My Mother's Hands

Music eludes, infiltrates. It seeps through cracks
like the smell of warm coffee. It rises, wafts, lifts,
evanesces, and finally spirits away like so much
pollen or a flock of starlings, startled and swirling.

If I understand anything about music, it is that it
slips through fingers like water or air.  Not my
fingers, mind you. My fingers are dumb, clumsy
digits not well wired to my nerve center; thick.

But I've lived with music on tap, the faucet off
limits to me on account of my dumb hands, but
freely tapped at will, on a whim, or in search of
something like flight by skilled, masterful hands.

My mother's hands are works of art in their own
right, large and muscular, wingspanned for piano
octaves and landscaped with veins like the giant,
ancient river beds of Mars that ran strong and blue

before their waters ascended bodily into the heavens.
Did starlings once swirl over those waters? Did they
too ascend bodily, raptured with the waters of Mars
to sing in the chorus of the Music of the Spheres?    

  

April 26, 2020

Joanna the Baptist

I draw the line at bodies. Many things
will suffer neglect at my hands, appearances
mostly, and my own appearance in the main.
But if I have neglected a body in my care,
I have broken a holy bond, violated a sacred
vow, rent a hole in the wholecloth of my
very person. I am beside myself – Who is that?

Who does that? Not me. I am nearing the
time for sackcloth and ashes, for weeping
and gnashing of teeth. I am in need – need
of redemption, need of forgiveness, need of
a pencil or a sharp stick. I draw the line at
bodies. I draw a circle around the bodies
in my care, and say to those outside:

This far shalt thou come, and no further.

So if I, in this sanctuary, this circle of care,
if I, within this forcefield generated by –
and generating – the force of love, desecrate
a body by carelessness or callousness, I
desecrate the holy temple itself, Creation.
I am out of sorts and need to sort this out.
Put the house back in order. Mend. Heal.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.

April 25, 2020

Orientation

The house faces due east. It stands witness,
daily, to the surest thing there is aside from
men convincing themselves they're right,
all evidence to the contrary – or in the face
of no evidence at all, more commonly. I can
neither count the ways men lie to themselves,
nor count on them, on account of the lies posing
as knowledge. But I can count on the Sun.

The house is mostly mute, save for the
occasional creak here, scratch there, and the
soft, steady hum of the refrigerator. It knows
the better part of wisdom is silence. It knows
a store of cool silence is needed to buffer a
mother from the noises of children in the day,
joyous and welcome as they are, and also
from the unaccountable clamor of men's lies.

The former shall be abided, invited in fact,
nestled into this east-facing house that stores
just the right amount of silence for the job –
the work of sheltering the children from
the worst of men's arrogant fabrications, so
far as is possible. The morning sun pours
through the front windows, a powerful
disinfectant – and a silent one, blessedly.

Here, in and around this small, quiet house,
we can get our bearings. The children grow
strong, bearing witness to truths that fly below
men's radars, low-frequency miracles like the
rising of bread, the sprouting of potatoes, the
budding of the eldest cherry tree. We store
these miracles in the cool of memory, traces of
the warmth in a mother's heart at sunrise.

April 24, 2020

Questions for Father Abraham

How durable are we? How long
can we endure? Intelligible answers
depend on definitions and measurements,
of course. The relevant metric is time,
but in what units? Seconds? Minutes?
Generations? Millenia? Four score and
seven years? And these are human-made
units. How are they otherwise intelligible?
If you are a mayfly, how do you divide
your day, the single day in which your life
spans from one end to the other?
Perhaps, in that case, it is "you" that is
unintelligible, any "you" apart from
your kith and kin. "You" do not endure.
And yet, the mayfly persists.
But we are not mayflies. Definitions
matter. Rome was not built in a day.
Nor did it – did they, the Romans –
fall in a day. It took time, the undoing,
the unbuilding, generations to unravel
a delicate "we" – assuming it was not
a mirage to begin with, or worse, a
fiction of hindsight, the proposition
of historians only, glorious or garish or
ghastly, depending on the point of
view. But let us assume, arguendo,
some real-time "we," tenuous and frail,
tethered to the bodies of those within
the span of the Republic, the Empire,
by the thinnest of threads, the last fibers
of a severed umbilical cord. Did it endure?
Does it? In what was that "we" conceived?
Not Liberty. To what was that "we" dedicated?
Not the proposition that All Are Created
Equal. Surely not, right? That is the test
of our time, isn't it? But who are "we"?
Are "we" – We The People – up to the test?
Can "we" long endure? Time will tell,
though perhaps not intelligibly.

April 23, 2020

Playing the Market

Looking to diversify my portfolio,
I spread my seed packets across the
kitchen table and start to plan my
investments for a season of growth.

I take stock: tomatoes, of course, in
six varieties, the dividends of last
year's investments; likewise, peppers,
cucumbers, and basil are given; the green
beans did not perform well last season,
largely due to early losses to rabbits,
but we've put in control measures,
hedging our bets against that kind of bite;
the window for getting in on
carrots, beats, and spinach will close
soon, and they're new to my mix, so
they take priority over other offerings
right now.

Then, with garlic and onions already
taking off, and first-round potatoes
underway, I can have a little fun:
reinvest a small portion of last year's
sunflower yield and fund some bright
new annuals to attract partners in
pollination – those that venture from
bloom to bloom, spreading the wealth;
dabble in some new herbs – dill and chives
look promising – while broadening my base
of oregano, thyme, rosemary, and sage;
sow some summer melons and corn,
pumpkins for fall, and squash to store
through winter.

Futures are up.

April 22, 2020

Grounded: A Paradox

Pressure's on. Time to perform.
Time to make something happen.
Time to act a little god-like – or
is it like a little god? I don't quite
remember. I'm a little rusty in the
department of divinity these days,
at least insofar as it involves rapid
delivery of results and answers,
speedy deliverance from the
Unknown. Truth is, I never
quite got the hang of it, the
breakneck pace, that is, the
fast flight toward an End,
toward Resolution. My neck is still
very much intact, and though I donned
wings at some point – perhaps they
came with the donnish garb by which
I entered the circle of counselors 

at law – my feet have remained 

fastened to the earth, clods of clay, 

heavy with a viscous mix of
minerals, water, and microbial life.
Don't get me wrong: I understand its
value. I get the comfort and necessity
of a quick Conclusion, the neat tidiness
of reaching Closure with all deliberate
speed. This is what makes Action
possible. I take all of this as given,
and as good, for that matter, generally
speaking. But I also give quarter to the
notion that answers are, by necessity,
partial, and thus illusory, to a large extent.
I do not take the quarter as the whole, when
I cannot so much as say, "This is a quarter
of the answer you seek." That would
be silly, and I know better than to
act the silly demigod. Better to drop
the act and plod ahead, a humble
human wholly, my wings an ornament
of aspiration, both useful and useless.

April 21, 2020

Ocean or Mountains?

Neither, frankly. I don't need the drama.
The steady pulse of waves on shore would
be nice, but I have lots of pulses to steady
me here. Likewise, the vistas between rocks
that have clashed more recently than in my
region would likely take my breath away,
but I like my breath, thank you, and I
prefer the gentler view of rocks long
bedded down together, who settled their
scores ages ago and thereby grew a generous
blanket of soil that greens in the rain-sun
pulse of April, making their home here on
the westernmost edge of the Ozark Plateau.

April 20, 2020

In Dependence

Not since I was nine. That was the last
time I could see my way clear to anything
without the aid of a certain subset of
professionals who make seeing – its
science and technology, its hardware the
antidote to the softening lines in my field
of vision – their business. I am grateful,
of course, to have traded a very different
dependence for this one, but the way
I see it, it's all dependence. There's no way
around that. It all depends on how you
look at it: either you depend on the
technicians and their wizardry, dependent
as they are on a certain chain of supplies –
which is anything but certain but certainly
appears so – or you depend on someone
to take care of you and in such dependence
you accept a certain diminished capacity
to render care yourself, for yourself and
others. But even in the former case, you
are still dependent; there is simply the
illusion of its having vanished. It is slight
of hand; it is a magic trick – a useful one,
no doubt, but the least I can do is see it
for what it is, and myself for who I am.

April 19, 2020

Conductor's Leave

I've forgotten vigilance. I am too tired
to keep watch over all the unseen threats;
there are too many visible threats
to count, and that's not counting all the
normal, daily tasks – the dishes, the meals,
the laundry, the cleaning – that threaten
to throw me overboard if not tended.
I'd have a full-blown mutiny on my hands.

So I tend to them, but mostly by virtue
of momentum and not vigilantly or with
vigor. I am too tired for all that. Perhaps
I should rest a little. Perhaps I should prop
myself up, perhaps against a shade tree,
and give myself permission to succumb
to a little sleep. Perhaps that is a
necessary step on the road to freedom.

Perhaps I should, in fact, plan for it,
take it as given that rest is required on a
journey of this sort, where lives are at
stake, yes, but where you measure your
progress toward liberation in weeks
and months – or perhaps decades or
generations – and not in minutes or hours.
Perhaps a kind of Sabbath is in order.

That would indeed take some planning,
some elaborate contingency scheming,
to account for any sudden, undeniable urge
to stop –  which will be inevitable, mind you –
without risking the success of the whole
enterprise. We're in this for the long haul,
I remind myself, so take the rest you need
when you need it. Permission granted.

April 18, 2020

Business Model

I burned my tongue on too-hot tea.
That was yesterday, and today, it's
hard to enjoy my brew. I guess this
means I have something in common
with Icarus – although I'm not dead;
I have not yet drowned for erring on
the too-high side of things. It's only
harder to enjoy this steeped leaf-lift,
this liquid set of wings –
not impossible. It's annoying, yes, and
inconvenient, but still within the realm
of the conceivable – nay, more, the
probable, just clipped back slightly
for the time being. I still have my
tea, and it is still good, cooling now
beside me and darkening, swirling
with the life's work of a few dozen
bees. My life's work I take from
theirs, so I suppose the least I can
do is understand their business:
this visitation of lovely thing after
lovely thing, collecting, curating
sweetness for the queen and her
brood back home, all the while
trailing life-dust in your wake,
literally giving at the self-same
time that you take, leaving a
legacy of vitality, spreading out
and down, venturing far in the
way of abundance, but
never too close to the sun.

April 17, 2020

Eternal Arrival

It just came out of nowhere, he said,
this flash, this brilliance – and then . . .
it was gone again. Back to nowhere,
I guess. But where is that, exactly?
       
How do you know where nowhere is?
Is it, in fact? Is that not a contradiction
in terms? By definition, nowhere is not,
is it not? So you can't come out of it.

And you can't go back to it. There is
only now here. But even that is tricky:
When is now? You ask the question,
and then it is not-now; it is new-now.

As for here, where is that? Can't we
slice space into ever-smaller slivers, 
ad infinitum? Think on that: infinitely
small, that is, small without limits,

growing, if you can believe it, smaller
and smaller, but never reaching no-thing,
never crossing over to non-existence.
I am now here, she said. Blessed be.

April 16, 2020

Productivity: A Matter of Measurement

Yesterday, I walked two dogs, fed
three children two meals each (their
dad fed them one), and collected a
half dozen eggs from eight laying
hens who are fed twice daily.
Actually, there is a ninth laying hen,
a bantam, who is currently occupied
in the garage, hatching four full-sized
eggs. She is one week in to a
three-week stint. Her success rate
is yet to be determined, but she
is diligent about her work. That
reminds me: I need to candle those
eggs to see how they're developing.
That's on today's to-do list.

But I digress. Also, yesterday, I
put five goats on a fresh patch of
spring grass – six hundred, twenty-five
square feet to be exact. Tomorrow,
they will get a new patch of the same
size, so that works out to sixty-two
and one-half square feet of ground
per day per goat. I fed four bottles
of fortified milk to the baby goat
as well, and he got about eight hours
out on a patch of grass of his own.
I washed and dried two loads of
laundry, made two beds (never got
around to the third), and
drank two cups of strong, black tea.

I made half a dozen phone calls of
various duration, finished the day
one email shy of sending a full dozen –
although many more were needed –
and crafted one poem
of indeterminate quality. I did not
stop to count the number of sippy
cups of milk or juice I filled, the
number of hugs I shared with my
favorite pint-sized people, or the
number of giggles or squeals of
joy emanating from their vicinity.
Perhaps, today, I should expand
the scope of my awareness, to
measure even more of what matters.

April 15, 2020

Confession of a Number Cruncher

        For now we see through a glass darkly;
        but then face to face; now I know in part;
        but then shall I know even as also I am known.

                      1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)

It's all about the numbers, right?
The Dow, my BMI, your A1C,
the balance in my checking account,
the national debt, gross domestic
product, IQ, the death toll, the
infection rate, the cost of living.

I mean, it's all about metrics, right?
If you can't measure it, if you can't
put a number to it, if you can't
crunch it to see how it comes out,
it doesn't exist, does it? Does it?
Isn't that the bottom line?

Numbers are real, right? The
numbers don't lie, man. It's men
that do that. Does that mean men
are not real? If you lie, do you
count? Does a lie send you
reeling into oblivion?

I swear to tell the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth.
But in so swearing, I lie. I cannot
tell the whole truth. I cannot see
the whole truth. I cannot measure
it, or put a number to it.

Am I thus damned? Yes. I see
as through a glass darkly. I cannot
tell the whole truth, but only a
fraction of it, and I don't even
know which part of the fraction.
Now I know in part.

April 14, 2020

[Title Goes Here]
     
My derriere is in the chair.
I start to type. I type the date.
I type "Title Goes Here" –
bold and in brackets, which is,
maybe, just another way of saying,
cocky but not quite cocksure,
audacious but leaving ample
room to amble a bit, to meander
or even stumble my way to an
Ah-ha! or a Eureka!

It has to be this way. It is
the appointed hour, but that is
basically all I know at this
point. Some days, I arrive with
a germ, a seed, or a rocket
in hand, and my job is to let it
spread or grow or launch 
on its own terms. Other days,
my job is just to show up for
the appointment, start to turn
the crank, see what happens:

I muse. Or, I seek communion
with one or more muses. They
take pity, occasionally, and
condescend to commune with me,
a poor wanderer, a rough-cut
way-farer, who fares in her own way –
that is, in fair-to-middlin' fashion –
but who knows, at least,
how to show up for a daily
appointment with discovery.

April 13, 2020

Worthwhile

What is the worth of my while?
Will I spend my while meanly?
Could it be said, "And it came
to pass that all the while she spent
in meanness" – that is, in averages
and half measures? That hardly
seems worth the while. If I am
going to while away the time,
shouldn't I do it wholly, so that
it cannot be said, "Meanwhile,
her children grew up, and her
husband grew old, and she knew
them not"? I do not wish to
merely pass the time, not while
there are whole worlds worth
knowing under my own roof,
entire stretches of time, just beyond
my front porch, for stretching both
time and our limbs, for holding hands
and walking across the pasture to
check the apple trees together, or
stopping to hold our breath at the
pond at dusk, listening while the
frogs croak. Do I really wish to
miss this? I do not. But will I?
Will I pass before learning
my while is beyond price? 

April 12, 2020

One Way to Celebrate Easter

If I were feeling surly, or if a sudden fit of
pragmatism overtook me, I could tell my kids
to go hunt for all the broken eggshells in the
compost pile. If I wanted to put those shells to
more immediate use, and if I were feeling now
more imaginative or magnanimous, I could
convince the kids to collect them by the bowlful,
as if they were seashells – I could say, "Just
pretend we're on a beach vacation. Here, use
these old sour cream tubs." And I'd send them
down to the compost pile, each with a makeshift
basket in hand. We're making do around here.
They wouldn't have to pick through much to
fill their bowls, just onion skins mostly, and
coffee grounds – lots of coffee grounds – and
banana peels. The pile is basically all the food
scraps I did not see fit to feed directly to the
chickens, heaped on the shriveled carcasses of
last year's tomato plants. Actually, the tomato
plants from the year before that are down there
too, but they've broken down by now into loamy
stuff fit for feeding new plants, eventually. I'll
get to that, eventually. But for now, it won't
take the kids long to make a haul. They'd be
back up at the house in a jiffy – that is, if
they don't get into the compost equivalent of
a food fight out there – and we'd lightly brush
or rinse the loot while the oven heats up.
Over our stash of brown and pink and white
and blue detritus, I'd explain to them that these
shells will help our hens make even better eggs
for us to hunt each evening, replenishing their
stores of calcium so they can continue feeding
us, so they can continue making our lives
possible with the dozens of possible lives they
create week in and week out. We'd spread the
shell halves on a cookie sheet, then dry and
harden them in the hot oven for twenty or so
minutes. We'd let them cool, then put them in
a plastic bag, and I'd tell the kids, "Now, this is
the fun part," and I'd let them take turns
pounding the shells into finer stuff, not quite
dust, but getting there. Then, at evening chores,
I'd have each child sprinkle some of the shell
bits, like holy water, into the chickens' food,
and we'd say grace over the meal, giving thanks
for their sacrifice and the gift of continued life.

April 11, 2020

Call to Account

I feel out of my element and out of my league –
the league of the generous, that is, the comrades
with open arms, who trade in abundance and
traffic in the strength borne of seeking truth
while knowing most anwers will elude us.
I wander, lost among people who demand
certain solutions and crave comfort at any
expense, as long as they don't have to account
for it – and there is certainly no accounting
for it, no reckoning the cost of their ease.

Truth be told, I'm not all that good at it
myself, this reckoning, and this dwelling
with uncertainty. I aspire to it, and I long
for the fellowship of fellow aspirants,
those breathing the generous air of a truth
that never quite settles enough to contain,
not in a box or book or ledger or in any
other fixed vessel, a disquieting truth that
calls us to account, that insists, gently but
firmly, that we reckon the cost of our ease.

April 10, 2020

Motion Studies: Theory and Practice 

In theory, I am responsible. In theory,
I am able to respond. In theory. It's as if
I have the potential to respond, like I'm
an upright jar of pickles on the edge of
the countertop, hanging over just a little –
they say I have potential energy. It's just
that someone or something has to come
along and put me in motion, so that my
potential energy becomes kinetic energy.

In practice, I am not so sure. In practice,
I respond the best I can, the best I know
as of right now. In practice, I'm driven to
kinesis, to action, by conflicting forces –
by fear sometimes, other times by love.
Sometimes it's just sheer inertia, brute
momentum, that keeps me going: my
body in motion tends to stay in motion
unless acted upon by an outside force.

That doesn't feel very responsible, to be
honest. It is perhaps unavoidable, yes, this
"acted upon" business – one force over-
powering another to change my direction
on a given day, my speed in a given hour.
But is this the extent of it? Am I limited
to responding so mechanically to these
forces? I wonder. I wonder, so I practice.
I put myself in motion as best I am able.

April 9, 2020

Alternate Reality

What if we had a pandemic of poetry, a outright plague
of it, a veritable rash of people seeing, making connections,
linking disparate things, ideas and images joined together,
or juxtaposed, like shards of stained glass, myriad in color,
assembled with care and held up to the light?

What if we had an outbreak of openness to seeing things
afresh in that new-from-old light, to re-membering that
which was scattered and broken – ourselves, that is – to
mending that which was torn asunder, to gathering again
the fragments of our lives blown apart by the four winds

of busy-ness and sloth, recklessness and overweening?

April 8, 2020

Abiding Faith

We're buying time and biding time.
We mind the time, abiding. I abide in
my abode, a place called home.
I bid my neighbors hello from across
the fence or across the pasture. They,
too, are biding time, abiding, homing
in . . . on something. We know not yet
what. They – we – take shelter in the
places of our abode. Our bodies abide
at home. We do not bid or bet against
one another. Still, this abiding is getting
expensive. It costs a living, for some.
For others, it costs a life. Some do not
abide at home, some cannot. Some do
not abide. They bid the world farewell.
They cannot buy enough time to bide.
They lose that bid. Their bodies find a
new abode, and their spirits take up
residence among the living, abiding
faithfully in the memories and deep
tissues of those still biding time.

April 7, 2020

An Inconvenient Poop

It's the middle of a pandemic, and my son is
still working on his potty training – by which
I mean interruptions are the order of the day at
our house, serial time outs. It is inconvenient.
I'm in the middle of writing this poem, and
he asks to go poop. That is inconvenient too,
but it's better than cleaning out poopy pants,
since we're not letting him wear diapers in
the daytime anymore. He does a good job.
We high five and wash hands, and I get back
to work, slightly inconvenienced but other-
wise the wiser for it, because wisdom is
rarely convenient. It shows up in the middle
of a pandemic, demanding a time out.

April 6, 2020

Where the People Do Not Perish

     Where there is no vision, the people perish:
     but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

                                         - Proverbs 29:18

This potato, this one here, the one that fits snug
in my hand like a toddler's shoe or the oblong egg
of some large, strange bird, will give me about
two dozen more. Talk about return on investment.

I set it out in the light, with a few dozen more,
to turn on the growth genes. It turns green.
It grows eyes. Eyes. Eyes that will see in the dark.

I cut this one into four pieces, each with one or
two eyes, eyes that probe darkness, upon planting,
for good, rich matter to concentrate into food.
I should, perhaps, concentrate into food myself.

Vision proliferates in this cool concentration.
More eyes appear, and some make their way
upward, to draw power, freely, from the sun.

And in the presence of water, not too much and
not too little, power begets power. It is a sight
to behold, this concentration of power, just
below the surface of things, visionary power.

April 5, 2020

Merry-Go-Round: Price of Admission

I feel like I'm cheating. If something is too easy,
I must not be doing it right. I must be missing
something. There is no easy button, I think. No
easy buttons and no unicorns. And no free rides
on the unicorn at the county fair either.
So I am wary of ease, wary of comfort, wary
of the idea that I might have it figured out.
The thing is, there's really just one thing I know:
that I don't know what I don't know. I don't
know if there are easy buttons or unicorns.
       
I don't know if I will see my children grow
up, graduate from high school and college,
marry, and have kids of their own, named
William or Charlotte or Jane, or whether one
of them will love the giant stuffed unicorn
Grandpa wins for them at the county fair,
playing two dozen games of skee ball, while
the rest of the family makes the rounds on the
rides and through the live farm animal exhibits.
He wins that unicorn fair and square, no cheating.
  
I don't know any of this. I don't know whether I
or they or he or we will live to see that day. And
that's hard, the not knowing. So I guess I'm not
cheating after all, because I know I don't know
any of this. But now I can enjoy my turn on the ride.

April 4, 2020

Getting Pithy - A Word to the Wise Poet

Anger and poetry
do not mix. You
must get to the
pith of the matter
and not into a
pissing contest.

A wind might
come up and
blow the piss
in your face,
your piss or
your opponent's.

You cannot write
poetry with piss,
rank and acrid,
on your face,
your face or
your opponent's.

April 3, 2020

Sewing Machine

I need a sewing machine. I did not take
home economics in high school. Too
busy with my head in a book, I guess,
or worried that it would look like a
"blow-off class" on my transcript.

So I blew off the blow-off class, and
now I want to make lovely things – I
want to make things lovely – and I
can't. I don't know how. I had the
chance to learn, and I blew it.

I hope it's not too late. Maybe I can
pick one up secondhand, and find an
old instruction manual to go with it.
I find old instruction manuals very
helpful these days, for making things

Lovely, and whole. Maybe I can learn
to mend and to make amends. Maybe
I can stitch together a patchwork sail
to catch some of the old winds I blew
off, and some wholly lovely new ones.

April 2, 2020

Balloon Payment

It looms on the horizon, leering, casting a deep
shadow, like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day
parade number, but changed, darkened now in
the hands of a mad – and oversized – puppeteer.

The Joker, perhaps. Yes, the Joker.  He
commands the thing, and us, steers the thing,
and us, mocking the diligence with which we
plod toward it. We are faithful, and yet . . .

He knows we have pledged our fidelity
to the wrong things. He knows we have
mortgaged our lives to a bunch of hot air,
if you can call it air at all, all that helium.

He knows, nihilist that he is, that it is not
release that awaits us at the end of all our
misdirected plodding, not release but collapse.
So he waits, hissing slowly, to swallow us whole.

April 1, 2020

Arguing with Reneˊ

I am traveling light, these days,
stardust on a hero's journey, photons
moving in concert, en masse.

I know where I've come from:
sky-fire that warms Earth and
feeds the green masses.

I eat the green masses, and the gifts
of those who take up the light of
the green masses better than I do:

The tillers of Earth, feathered or
snouted, and the gentle grazers,
ruminating on the light within.

Edo, ergo sum.  Or perhaps
more precisely (because precision
matters): I eat light, therefore I am –

Light. I am traveling light. My mass
slows its trajectory, yes. Fine. I refract,
and therefore make rainbows.