Starlings at sunset

A couple of weeks ago, my school had its annual New Student Orientation, which I was required to attend. The school is situated in a rural area, beside a cow pasture within a ring of tall pines. Near the parking lots, behind the business building, a tall communication tower with six or so guide lines dives into the ground creating a skeletal circus tent formation.

When the event ended, I walked through the sterile public school corridors and out into the parking lot where I was immediately overwhelmed by the song of thousands of starlings perched high in the pines and along the guide lines of the tower. I cannot do justice to the nearly deafening chorus of the birds. I was thrilled. I felt for a moment as if I'd been transported from rural North Carolina to a rain forest in Brazil.

It called to mind all of the other times when I became suddenly aware of birdsong. I can remember distinctly walking to Lucky's in New Orleans one morning, passing under crepe myrtles and oaks along St. Charles and realizing with a start that birds were singing just by my ear. I remember stopping and wondering if they had been singing all along, continuously for days, and if so, had I merely blocked the songs out? The idea became an obsession for the day and has recurred often since. I'll walk out in the morning, hear the birds, and wonder if I have been ignoring them. It still bothers me. As if taking the songs for granted makes a statement about my general appreciation of the beautiful things in the world. I feel this profound sense of guilt, as if I've found a gift that some long dead relative gave me as a child that has become lost in a dusty corner of a closet due to my own carelessness.

On this particular night, I can honestly say that I have never before heard so many birds singing in unison. It was beautiful and breathtaking and eerie. I leapt in my car and drove to my parents house to snatch Fain away and bring him back to the performance.

I told him, "You won't believe this! Wait until you hear!" We were both giddy with excitement.

He was surprised when I pulled the car into the school's driveway and then into the parking lot, and I was so afraid the starlings had flown away in the interim, but when I told Fain to roll down his window while I parked, I could hear the multitude of birds all twittering together.

I jumped from the car and ran around the side to help Fain out, and then just said, "Listen!" I pointed up to the hundreds of birds perched along the guide lines and to the fluttering tops of the pines, where their wings and tail feathers, silhouetted in the black pine tops, looked like moving branches and brooms of needles.

His face registered the delight and wonder that I'd hoped for, and then we began to pay closer attention to the little birds on the guide lines, who seemed to have begun to perform in Vaudeville fashion for our small audience. One starling would attempt to nudge his way into the line of gossiping birds, and in doing so, she would create a domino effect, causing one bird to slip and slide and budge the next, which would in turn cause another ruffled biddie to slip and slide and so on down the line. Fain, who was wearing only his boxers and a t-shirt, laughed so hard that he had to hold his belly.

And then, suddenly, the noise would cease, just that quickly, and all in unison, there would be complete and utter silence, and all of the starlings would burst into flight in a mass of black against the blue sky, and that was the strangest part because when they flew, all at once, their wings would generate a vibration that was palpable and a sound like a heart palpitation, and it would make my own heart palpitate, not metaphorically, but actually. It was almost as if they had lifted me up and dropped me, and my heart skipped a beat for fear and excitement.

Fain said that it was the best night of his life. Of course, he's at that age where every day is either the best or the worst, but I was so proud of him for being moved by something that didn't come from Walmart. And I was relieved to know that when I'm swamped with work and worry that birds will conspire to sing loudly enough to catch my attention.

Cabbage white house

Today, I have established the ten minute rule. The ten minute rule is the result of a yard overgrown with nimblewill and crabgrass and purslane. It is also a product of a season of contemplation of the roots of many of my personal problems.

Last year, I felt so overwhelmed by unfinished projects that I became depressed and quit doing anything at all, which just led to more unfinished projects. During the spring, I attempted to get the yard in order, and I found that I could accomplish a fair amount if I worked a little each day. If I worked too much, I became exhausted and discouraged and resented having to work the next day.

Then summer came, and I participated in the National Writing Project Summer Institute, which was a wonderful experience, but left me as depleted as any outdoor venture. Consequently, all projects were once again put on hold.

Now, the yard is worse than before, and I've again been overcome by that sense that it's just all too much. The kitchen garden is overgrown with lush carpetweed. It's almost beautiful. It is beautiful in its own weedy way, green and flush. The collards were long ago devoured by cabbage worms, which I couldn't entirely detest because they did become the loveliest cloud of cabbage whites. The tomatoes, all except for one hearty bush of golden orange jelly bean tomatoes, died horrible deaths at the hands of summer heat and too little calcium in the soil. They exist now as skeletal brown cobweb plants. The pumpkins dried and withered, as did the squash and even the zucchini which I'd had such high hopes for. The watermelon, God bless it, has thrived, sending vines with the daintiest sunlight yellow flowers climbing up the makeshift fence, even dangling watermelons there. The zinnias didn't do too poorly, sprouting in the decay of the pumpkin leaves. However, the cucumbers were a hot mess, yellowing and swelling and lying like bloated corpses on a Civil War battlefield. The morning glories and moonflowers grew and overtook the fence as I had hoped.

The foundation beds around the house are full of quackgrass and bluegrass, and then again the pieris that had finally bloomed in the spring for the first time in years, drooping white bells, disintegrated in the heat of July, drying up and turning crackling brown.

Everyday, I walked out in the yard and felt a heaviness on my chest and a hopelessness. How in the world can one woman manage this?

Today, I worked in one bed for ten minutes. That's it. I cleared a space of approximately one foot by one foot before I retired. For a moment, I allowed myself to feel that inevitable sense of despondence that comes from looking at a foot of cleaniness situated pitiably in two lots of shamble. But then I decided that if I worked for ten minutes a day, I could accomplish much more than if I didn't work at all. In that light, much could be done, and so I tried not to appraise the rest of the yard, just my little bit of labor right here and now. Granted, it won't ever look like a yard in Better Homes & Gardens, but it won't look as ramshackle as it does right now. And then, what would be the benefit of having a Better Homes & Gardens garden anyway?

In the meantime, I'll have to bear in mind Sei Shonagon's passage in her pillow book when she declares that the garden of a woman who lives alone should be overgrown and dilapidated looking because it is more romantic than a neat garden. I suppose the single woman with an overgrown garden has better things to do. If she's always working in the yard, she must not have a life.

The old door

I have avoided cleaning my house for months. Months. I was so unhappy for months, and that state of mind was just not conducive to cleaning or any other activity. Which is funny because a vicious cycle ensues. Which is also not funny.

So I began cleaning last week, determined to set things right before school starts back. Because, as I say every few months to anyone who will listen, I really feel like I'm ripe for enlightenment, like it's right there, and I just need to get my house clean enough to see it.

(That does not extend to cleaning the windows, which I have relegated to an ephemeral to do list that continues to grow as I proceed forward, like the sterile hallway of nightmares, which is just fine with me as I have no desire to wash windows. Still, not cleaning the windows may be the one little foible that has prevented me from attaining enlightenment thus far.)

I cleaned out the kitchen cabinets, something I've vowed to do for years, really purging them of canisters, scraps of paper, five year old bills, empty jars, etc, and revealing space that I didn't believe I had. Now, it is dauntingly bare, but that was intentional, as I want to renovate it altogether. Clear out the old linoleum countertops, repaint, the works, and the stuff was standing in my way. I kept thinking about the hassle of having to move it all. So now it's not there. No move necessary. No more excuses.

I also cleaned out the rainy day cabinet, disposing of paper towel tubes, tin cans, old Christmas light bulbs disembodied from their strands, and a box of broken things that I believed in all earnestness for five years that I would eventually repair. More space.

(Of course, the very next day, I decided to finally create a movable brontosaurus puppet with my son and there were no blasted paper towel tubes to be found!)

Yesterday, I tried my hand at a yard sale, which was a flop. I made six bucks before packing it all in and shipping it off to Good Will. However, while I sat waiting for the hordes to come and pay me for my detritus, I became restless, and started roaming around the house grumbling about things that I haven't done, such as cleaning the windows, weeding the garden, and re-painting the door.

The door, painted a dour black by the former inhabitants, has been peeling since I moved in. I can't open it without waving in a cloud of paint wisps. I walked in and out of the door a dozen times during the yard sale, refilling my coffee, talking to Fain, scouring the closet for that one item that would draw buyers, and each time, I muttered at the peeling paint, finally returning with a chisel. I got straight to work.

It's odd how something will peel and peel for a long as you cuss it, but the minute you give in and decide to acquiesce, all of a sudden, it's stuck like epoxy. Tiring from the chisel, I pulled out the sander. I barely put a dent in the paint when I finally wore myself out. There's a patch of raw wood now, exposed to the elements, surrounded by peeling black paint, a fringe of little middle fingers from my door to me personally.

I mentioned this to some friends, and they said, "Well, at least you'll have to finish it now." Which is utterly not true. Everything in my house is chipped and half painted, and I've rarely been compelled to finish any of that stuff, rather just to murmur threats as I pass.

So I feel like there's a metaphor in there somewhere that I can't see. Dirty windows and doors in a perpetual state of disrepair. Enlightenment and laziness. Maybe I'll get to it later.

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.