Pickling the Universe

I am tricky
challenging
weird

I keep rocks
remember shadows
learn languages
hide fears
read clouds

I shout COME BACK HERE
I am still here

I see possibilities
hear jokes
taste ice cream
feel my son's soft arms
around my neck

I whisper keep going
I am still here

I want the universe
I will the universe
I can the universe
like pickled peppers
I pretend to eat the universe
as a side dish to meat loaf

I sing over the river
I am over the hard parts
I am still here

mister

mister
i find you here
tucked quietly
into the reference section of the library
your yellow-gray beard
as yellow-gray as a page from Bartlett's menagerie
of proverbs and maxims

mister
i find you here
writing rapidly
composing fiercely
among the thesauruses of song and of rhyme
your blue-green plastic wrapper
the remains of a studious breakfast
spread out before you
like a wrinkled Caribbean sea

mister
i find you here
cloistered and detached
from the kids
who are here
finding themselves
who are here
sucking up cold air
who are here
reading trepidatiously
to avoid the heat

mister
i find you here
active in your retreat

mister
i find you here
your quill a black ballpoint
your scroll a slice of notebook paper
your blotter an old newspaper
your ideas a mystery to me

mister
what do you find here?
a history of the United States
transcribed from the minds of those around you
telepathically?
an ontological proof for God?
an appreciation for Russian fairy tales?
a solemn sabbatical from the world
as it is?

mister
what do you take from here?
what do you gather neatly onto that page?
what do you fold up
like golden fish in a market?
like silk spun from Malaysian spiders?
what words do you swaddle in your saffron-gold envelope?
a treatise? a poem? a manifesto?

mister
you found me here
you glanced up for a moment
fixed the silver-rimmed spectacles on me
before you turned ferociously back
to your masterpiece
we fixed each other on our pages
penned
like butterflies are
pinned

Reading Whitman as Sacred Literature

I picked up Leaves of Grass with the intention of reading it beginning to end. A poem a day. To try to roll that poem around under my tongue all day, really think about it, imbibe it. I have the notion that I'll glean some sort of enlightenment from it. Not anything transcendent or global necessarily, but I feel like I might learn something about myself. I've felt in the past, just from reading a poem or two of Whitman's, that we would have been kindred spirits, so I've decided to adopt him as a spiritual (I mean, actually spiritual as he's long dead) grandpa.

Yesterday I wrote a poem. It's posted below, and I wasn't really satisfied with it. I just wanted to write a poem, so I took what I was thinking about and tried to do it justice as free verse. Still, it didn't capture what I was feeling. I'm not going to delete it. It's there. It's something I did, but I'd like to do better.

Lately, I've been trying to embrace myself just the way that I am. To lay off myself. I don't think people realize that I'm my own worst critic. I read once that you should never point out your flaws to others because most people are too absorbed to notice them independently. So I don't point out my flaws to others, but because I am self-absorbed, I can't help noticing them myself.

I work in the yard, for example, planting Russian sage or basil or roses, and they die, and I assume responsibility for that. Weeds take over garden plots, and I beat myself up. I don't get the kitchen painted, the table sanded, the poem written, and I fall into a funk, feeling like I'll never get anything done.

But lately, I've really been trying to cut myself some slack. Not the way my neighbor does when he says, "Hey, you're one girl. It's a big yard. You can't do everything." More like, "OK. Y'know. I pulled some weeds today. I did something. It's not all I'd hoped to do, but I tried. I did what I could." And then I just kind of stop there and rest, which is new for me.

I did think yesterday, walking through the garden, looking at burned collard leaves, "God didn't do everything in one day. Why do I think I can?" Then I thought about the centuries, the millenia, that God has been creating, refining, striving in order to make tangible this idea of the world that he has, and I think that it's okay if I don't get everything just right today or even this week. I have an idea of what would make the world beautiful, too, and I think that he only expects me to do as much as I can. I don't think he wants me to make myself droopy and withered and burned out in pursuit of immediate perfection. He just wants me to create and refine and strive for as long as I can.

I guess reading Whitman is my way of doing that. Reading the thoughts of someone who really learned the art of loafing.

Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back awhile sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

Relativity

When I first bought the place,
these two city lots
of pine trees and crape myrtles and half-dead boxwoods
and all-dead grass,
I delighted in hour upon hour
of contemplation,
mental meanderings through gardens
that I had imagined first when I was ten and reading
The Secret Garden.

For two years, I worked diligently,
digging and planting,
warring against dandelions and crab grass,
and it was good.
Then I got tired, and I let it go.
And it went.
All my fine work devoured by dandelions,
nibbled and pinched away by crabgrass.

Tonight, after a renewal of efforts,
I looked back on my work, my sweat,
and saw that I had only managed to secure
a little bit of ground,
and I felt rotten,
as if I'd never achieve that vision
that I'd had when I was ten
if I could only manage a little bit of ground
most days.

Then I thought that it had taken
God
over thirteen billion years
to make me
just the way that I am,
and I realized that accomplishment
is relative.