“people stare carefully”*

In a yard on Broadway – in the Gateway to the Delta, not in the Big Apple, faraway readers – wisteria droops from an in-bloom redbud tree.  My pink-and-purple phase ended long ago, but that tree persuaded me back to it.

A dogwood tree blooms outside the church door, and other dogwoods flame white in the greening woods.

As I stood inside the church-door waiting for piano students, a church member drove down the quiet street and honked a hello to the church building. A train began a long sounding of its raucous whistle; mockingbirds talked over one another in the oak tree; a woman drove the wrong way along the one way street.

Stopping to see the blackberry blossoms at the pond-edge, I saw a bull-frog luxuriating in the mud. I pointed him out excitedly, but if the dogs saw they did not say so, and you, dear reader, weren’t there to see.

Tiger Swallowtails — the golden-winged gentlemen and blue-bordered ladies — have been falling in love all over the yard, and most especially near the pink and white azalea bushes, all day long.

Our yet-to-be-replaced lawn-mower permits the clover to bloom and allows dandelion “fairy wishes” to shimmer in the sunset. Though I lacked time to make a clover crown, I did pause to blow a “wish.”

But now it is dark sky and cricket song out-of-doors and me indoors, remembering that Marilynne Robinson also found that “solitude” is “a balm for loneliness.”

*e. e. cummings

ask me

“ask me the name of the moon in the man.” e. e. cummings

I shan’t have an answer for you, but I shall find the question charmingly mad, and it fits today, somehow, when everything is coming out green.  The oak trees wave millions of pollen-green catkins like handkerchiefs at a parade, and the sweet gums are speckled with tiny green buds amongst last year’s gum balls.  Green things emerge from the rotting leaves in the woods, and even the moss puts on fresh color.  I saw dandelions in the driveway this morning.

Leap Day was decidedly ordinary, but it served to launch us into spring, with sun enough today to tempt me into a swirly skirt and entice me out-of-doors and with wind enough to keep me clutching said skirt in perpetual alarm.

They’re decorating the courtyard for a Shakespearean drama.

One of my students gave me a muffin. Two others, delirious with caffeine and too little sleep, stayed talking of many things and writing calculus equations on the white board, long after I let class out early.

The tutor down the balcony from me advises his tutoree to remove the cats from his story and make all the characters human.

My thesis proposal received encouraging words in a professor’s office festooned with birthday streamers and balloons.

Along the sidewalk when our ways met, a friend insisted on the correctness of his wristwatch’s assertion that today is the second of March, though the rest of the world asserts that it is the first.

Ah, my mad, beautiful world, tell me the name of the moon in the man.

list(less)

Wind and rain spatters against the window pane, and five men in desert fatigues practicing their Army walk on the sidewalk below.

The last dregs of my tea have grown chilly, but I swallow them mechanically.

The clock with its minute hand perpetually on the half-hour carefully counts the seconds which I spend as if I had an unlimited supply.

Copy room conversation runs on whether my students are doing single-source or multiple-source research, and I neglect, again, to ask how to activate the staple feature on the copy machine.

Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies circle lazily, while I ignore the three stout articles printed and piled on my desk.

Crepe myrtles begin to be burgundy amongst the green, and a tree across the street sheds dull gold leaves.

Did winter trick fall into early retirement this year?  I think of inaugurating an office blanket. Soon.

minding, and not

Rain, and now gray humidity which makes brown paint peel from metal stair railings and stick to palms.

A tiny, black-haired boy runs across wet grass to a green bench.

People pause in a cross-walk, hoping the blue car will stop.

Damp sidewalks slip under the smooth soles of shoes.

The students are quiet, revising papers, but I am singing in my head and under my breath:

I am no longer my own, but Thine.
Put me to what Thou wilt; rank me with whom Thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for Thee, or laid aside for Thee …*

I told them my office hours, but they do not come, and I sit with my journal, my cup of tea, my foggy thoughts.  I don’t mind.

 

 

*Wesleyan Covenant Prayer

The carcass of a tree downed by Katrina six years ago returns to dust, lying in fragments where it used to be whole and sound, where we used to walk along it, leap off its end, use it as a target in games of disc golf.

Beaver-stripped gum trees bleed around their bases and turn gray where they did show fresh yellow wood.

The spring’s new toads are fewer and fatter than in the spring.

Wind blew today.

To the north of us, it rained.

The morning angle of the sun made the fish almost invisible.  Only the ripples from their hungry mouths showed, as though a small rain shower were falling onto the underside of the pond.

On the top side of the pond, no rain fell; I wandered the yard, water hose in tow, attempting to encourage downhearted vegetation.

A jumping spider crept nearer and nearer to the mist from the hose; it looked as though it washed its face.  I had never thought that spiders might miss rain.

Now I know.

The trees are low and clustering; the skies crowded with migrant clouds.

We heard turkeys talking.  Saw a perfect deer track in the mud of the pond road.  Squinted into the sun which multiplied itself into a tiny sun on each white eyelash.  Bade the black heifers a good morning.

I have gravel-grit between my toes.

At the very top of the crepe myrtle tree — where it ought to be trimmed away from the power lines — are a few white blooms.

A day for being quiet and noticing things:

A mother racoon and three babies, waddling away from us at the pond, and climbing high into an oak tree to peer at us from the place where the trunk split into a Y.

Wind coming with clouds over the sun.

The sound of hungry fish coming in multitudes to devour bread cast upon the waters of the pond.

A huge grasshopper crawling on a window-screen.

Gravel crunch under flip-flops.

Birdless feathers, the remnant of some feast.

Tiny foam from a small spoonful of sugar in a cup of hot tea.

A turtle in the mud.

Constant cicadas, even audible inside, with the air conditioner running.

In different corners of the world people celebrate and grieve; yet here am I, awake too late, and simply quiet, noticing things.

days

Dust rising and an earth-scent in the air above a field where two tractors ploughed at sunset.

Violent ripping of green husks to reveal perfect golden kernels beneath.

Tiny children holding hands and jumping up and down, unprompted, while I tried to lead them in a song.

Light shining through a white-fabric lampshade.

A room and closet newly clean.

Unnecessary remnants of a first year of graduate school no longer piled on and beside my desk.

Five boys laughing around the kitchen bar.

Mendelssohn and Chopin rediscovered on a pale blue evening.

Weeds pulled, soil raked, pine-straw spread, and a blister on my thumb.

Moonlight.

Shadows on the driveway; respite on the way back from getting the mail.

Time to sit and think of words and not feel as though there is need to be doing anything else.