Coping Well II

I don’t want to be told I’m doing a good job

in labor: what my body is doing is

against will

against reason

what my body is doing

is a trainwreck of an idea,

for which I deserve as much credit as

beating my heart.

Complimenting labor always seems

condescending, a strange distraction:

how should I respond?

And in this massive state of indignity,

to think of a polite response

only reminds me

how impolite this state of almost-born.

If I could help “doing well” –

to will or unwill it—

what would that even mean?

Withhold the prisoner on the verge of

making a break for it?

Hardly a prudent plan.

On the other hand,

if I could grant him clemency,

release these prison doors,

distribute personal effects,

I’d be glad to help:

sign the papers,

look the other way…

But I am neither

guard nor bailiff:

I am the earth he tunnels through,

part of nature in this moment,

part of quaking,

part of being

not choosing,

nothing moral,

no act of the will.

Only being broken,

being stormed,

being flooded,

engulfed,

separated.

Say I’m coping well.

Only

Only at sunrise and sunset do I

Think of him. Only at the color of the sky

Or smell of hazelnut in coffee

Only when reading Huckleberry Finn

Or teaching multiplication.

Only if I wake at night unsleeping

And find a child awake

And make a sandwich and play a game

Instead of watching old westerns.

Only if I have to carry sleeping children to their beds from mine

(A thing that hardly ever happens)

Only if I smell the beach or cooking meat

Or hear the stars and have to shush a chatter-child.

Only then and when I think of places that we’ve been,

But those are roads I’ll never drive,

And I stay indoors at night.

The Ontology of Three-Year-Olds in Mass

You ask me, “How was mass,”

and I don’t know what to say.

Are you asking about the homily,

whether the priest inspired, entertained?

Are you asking about the quality

of the presence of I AM?

How should I respond?

What could I ever say?

But I think that what you mean is something like

how did the kids behave?

I’m glad you’re home;

welcome back

to the day-to-day.

But still, you framed it up that way:

How was mass?

I don’t know whether to answer the question that you meant

Or the one you asked.

Shall I say that God is always God,

that mass is always good

(even if my countenance betrays my mood

which perhaps betrays a lack of faith

perhaps because the two year old

perhaps attempted to abscond

with, perhaps, the purse and hair

of the parishioner she could reach

with her toes—

can you imagine the indignity of someone else’s

toes

in your

hair

at mass—

that she—the two-year-old—forgot to put her panties on,

and I only noticed when she found a way

to hang

upside-down

from the pew, my face, the missal

by her toes—

yes, you’re counting right:

that’s three times I had to turn her over,

peel her from my face—

why, I wonder, did the Almighty see fit

to give toes to toddlers)?

These things have nothing

whatsoever

however

to do with the metaphysical question you just asked.

And so I stutter in the kitchen,

end up shooed away.

“She doesn’t understand these kinds of conversations,”

I hear him say apologetically,

and I’m grateful because here I am,

months later,

still wondering:

How was mass?

And thinking

(irrelevantly)

Thank God she’s three!

The End of Beauty

We would stand on the lawn looking up

like the opening scene of an alien show

every day.

We looked strange, I knew,

but I couldn’t help wondering where

the neighbors were—

how could they ignore this?

As other-worldly as an alien

invasion or a Raphael,

as fleeting as childhood

and immortality,

a gift fit for gods

but we live close enough to peek

to taste the spilled ambrosia

to see the colors altered

by an altered sky.

Why would we go past this,

go beyond—to what?

We don’t believe in a beyond-truth or

a beyond-goodness, but past

doesn’t always mean surpassed:

maybe we’ve just missed our turn?

Maybe if we stand on the lawn,

they’ll notice us, and no one

will overshoot their destination

or at least they can make a u-turn

at the end of the street,

pull over before

they give up and deem beauty medieval,

antiquated,

before they decide we’re too wise for thunder gods

and roses. I used to walk past

them, there at the front of the grocery store

where penitent and forgetful men can buy

redemption

before they get to the chips and soda

and forget.

I used not to notice;

they’re not advertised, after all, to women.

We’re meant to walk past,

Distracted by children and grocery lists,

beautiful bursting blossoms

invisible to us

(except for office parties,

customs of social investment,

when we walk into a separate place

with petty cash

and make petty choices

for the requisite office acknowledgements).

We manage to see

past beauty

even when it surrounds us.

But if you stop to touch or smell,

you'll find roses

are soft like silk

and hold memory like picture books,

like the soft folds of my grandmother’s face.

How did we ever start with stone and papyrus,

when the touch of a rose petal holds

more memory and allusion

than a library filled with coded paper,

when it must have been that way

in Egypt, too?

But we’ve gone beyond beauty. Why?

Because we’ve found something better?

Never.

We in this century have realized that dancing in the rain,

leaning over to sniff the rose,

touching the shiny flow of silk

and satin in the fabric store,

the use of exclamation marks!

Sensory stimulations are childish,

And the worst thing in this post-modern world

is a child.

The Problem of Burying the Dead

Tell your children when they’re born

That now someone will have to bury them,

Death more clearly foreseen, more demonstrable

than birth.

Every time a person is born, a problem is created, re:

who will bury them.

They cannot bury themselves

(so much for bootstraps)

And their progenitors are never

happy volunteers.

In fact, it is usually the progenitors

seeking solutions to their own burial problems

in-house,

who compound the problem of their own birth.

Someone has to bury them,

so they breed.

Lt. Powell

When I was a kid, I was his Crunchy Girl,

And there was nothing but him and me,

Coffee on the porch.

When I was older, I began to realize I could reach through him,

Touch a World War.

I realized that his own memories would have

Touched veterans of the Civil War.

I did not come empty-handed, though—

Through me, he could touch the future.

What strikes me in the realization that we are pools,

Surfaces that go deep,

Is that his stories never focused on the

Major Events he’d witnessed,

Never on the World War

Or Vietnam

Or integration:

He told me how he struggled to make a living,

Buried the dead,

Fell in love.

Of all the stories he had to share,

Of all the things he had seen,

What he chose to pass to the future

Was the first sight of a long-legged girl

with black curls

in a yellow linen dress.

Theory of Education

Set before their eyes beautiful things.

Let them hear beautiful music.

When gray concrete-ugly engulfs them

With landlords and the unemployment rate,

When last year’s emergencies

Are still this year’s considerations,

When the compass fails to bloom,

And there’s no pavement, road, or sign,

They will find home

In the forty-first symphony,

In the Mona Lisa’s smile.