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Ho Hum
The heat is downright demeaning today.
I’ve watered the potatoes
twice already because of the wilt.
It’s a day where the breeze doesn’t matter.
I don’t notice I’m thirsty,
I just accept that my mouth is dry.
Let me drink.
Let me lick dew off the plastic turf,
since the grass is nothing but yellowed tinder.
I won’t be running today, not to
nor from anything. My new arthritis
is singing in my 46-year-old knee.
A few someones have asked me what
my plans were this summer and I thought:
Live.
Not camp.
Not concerts.
Not see the world.
Not even rage at the moon—
just tend this one, tender, little plot of earth
within the right angles of my city backyard.
That’s it, that’s all I’ve got.
Every morning I let the dog out,
open the patio umbrella and sit with
my coffee and count the bird species.
Yesterday, a flock of tiny bushtits
bushtitted (as they do) into the irrepressible
bamboo I have failed to tame.
They began to preen simultaneously,
lined up in little groups of two and three,
pressed close together, touching
so that I couldn’t tell if, perhaps,
they were preening one another.
Two osprey called back and forth
while circling high over Portage Bay—
their cries high and Jurassic.
And this morning, the shrubs
I haven’t bothered to name, the ones full
and drooping with conical ivory flowers,
began to blush pinkish-brown as they faded toward fall.
I’ve been around the world.
I’ve slept under the stars.
A younger me would’ve judged this older me,
but a younger me
wouldn’t have understood
this hard-earned contentedness.
This afternoon I noticed a deerfly bite,
on my arm— swollen and still bleeding.
The cutting mouthparts had torn in deep,
expecting a more difficult hide, not
my thinning perimenopausal skin.
So focused was I
on the birds, on the beauty,
that I never even felt it slice me and drink of me.
Ho hum, the world is ending
and the wonder is still immeasurable—
even the regretful iridescence
of the gasoline slick in the marina,
even the blossoming invasive,
even the smoked-out sunsets blazing red,
how dare I admit it, how limitless the beauty is. |
