These hard times shut down –open up. “Thank you, Thank you and have a nice day.”
So much Loving Kindness, of grieving safety. I’ve missed the sound of a stranger’s voice. I recognize unabashed gratitude and something like shame rises, with the aching need to ask for what is needed, the sound of a voice glad for the sound of another voice. A softening. Then ripping wide with innocence, with daring. Who knew the risks I’d take for birdseed? Today’s tears in the car on the short ride back from the corner Hardware. Something human in that strong boy’s blue-jean lope, his smile, his lack of protective garb, the way he handed me the receipt. Something human in my horror, the fear seeping through cracks in my well-protected psyche. We corral the most tender trees these days to save what lives from other living things. Deer grow fat lounging in the back yard. These mornings all about expectancy, as spring brings green and blood — so much violence coursing underground. A red fox with a rabbit dangling from its mouth skitters up the middle of the street. My questions are squirrel tails and snakes in the grass, ask who left those ghost depressions in the leaves. I see a great white dog resting on the other side of the fence. Someone else is searching for her (I know) and I report the sighting, I hear they’ve been on her tail for over a week. “She’s in survival mode”, the women speaks achingly into the phone. I am one in a long line of telephone reporters from the white dog’s wandering trail. We will find her, I think. I think she’s a totem then she turns into the trees and is gone. We are in survival mode, but are we?. Bellies full. Roof overhead. And ours does not leak. This spring storm will pass, though we don’t know when. Lately, I am faithful to my own inner wilderness, my skunkiness, my frightened brown inner bunny, my solid retriever soul self, waddling, skittering, breathing hotly into the air, she brings all the stuff I throw out there away from me back to me, presses what I try to throw away into my side. “Look at this”, she says with her dark pooling eyes. “Look”. And so I dream fawns in the kitchen, a fierce mother stomps, I am two places at once in multiple time zones, a fearful girl entering a world upturned. In waking life, my mother dies away from me by degrees, wrong turns, bad directions, while all along the Devil’s Backbone and down the hollers they report a Bigfoot creature you smell before you see. There are shadowy glimpses. “It’s there. “ They swear. This day rages. It blinks with what it cannot understand, weeping as sunlight dulls behind a confusion of grey Flannel skies, I think, then think about something else. My husband laughs uproariously in the other room. Like those children in the yard across the street, so much squealing delight at odds or in sync with these times, join the chuck chuck conversations of scrabbling chipmunks, the ping of my telephone, so many sisters on the line offer solace, seek rest in one another’s ears. These hard times, shut down –open up.
Early Morning Poems 