something someone will want to hear.

I don’t know how much or whether

we can say it ourselves, but I hope

we will be near each other and warm,

wearing flannel and patiently,

like noble waiters grasping, lifting,

offering to others what we mean to share.

This little video of Tomas Tranströmer and his wife Monica made my heart so happy—

http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1638

I’m so delighted by the warm fire in the fireplace, a steaming bowl of rice with butter and sugar, vapid purring cats, that I’m barely listening.  But wait!  I know that face.  Why… That young reporter from Politico…  Why yes it is!  One of the kids from a senior high class at the Presbyterian church I attended, in part for its excellent arts programming.  One of many PK’s I taught/managed/mentored/endured.  He does well!

Well, well.  I turn off the news, make popcorn, glance at the draft, and, for curiosity, Google his reporter’s bio.  Princeton, Columbia, Chicago Tribune, Livingston Award, time in the Afghan desert for the Washington Post, and part of a Pulitzer finalist investigative team.  Well, well.

I glance at my draft.  In the mid-90’s, this kid spent several weeks looking up all occurrences of the word “ass” in a Biblical concordance and snickering.  So now he’s become a writer.  A journalist.  And I’m still a writer.  With a lot of writing to do.

It just doesn’t feel the same as it did twenty minutes ago.

Everything has a name.

The tiny clear plastic ball on the end of new gel pens, for instance—someone must know what to call it.  Factory work leaves no time for long-winded description of the thing that needs to be restocked or dumped in a hopper for a machine to jam on the end of the day’s million pens.

This afternoon, sucking up sun before it disappears, sweating in a double layer of fleece, I raked leaves off the driveway and street.  Under them and immune to raking by merit of their size, was a layer of tiny leaf chips.  leaf debris?  leaf flecks?  leaf confetti?  There’s got to be a name.  Someone must know it.

But I swept it—them—one hundred fifty feet of them like waves.  Each broom stroke left behind smaller and smaller particles.  Leaves, leaf fragments, flecks, powder, memory.  I brushed them all under the bushes.  Anyone know that name?

I love that poem in the mind thing–where a line gets stuck and I walk to its rhythm. It’s never annoying like an obsessive song from the 80s that grinds around in a slo-mo brain blender.  My obessessives are miscellaneous lines of Wallace Stevens (she was the maker of the song she sang) or lines I can’t identify but probably took a quiz about in the murky past.  The poems I read these days are not, so far, giving me lines that stick–but I’m not sure the problem is with the poetry.

I actually did pick up Wojahn’s World Tree tonight and throw it in a bag before being accosted by two small daughters who needed to have their hair done for a roller skating costume party.  That was just after 5 pm.  One needed a “messy ponytail with the curling iron” so she could dress up as a college professor.  The other had her pajamas on and needed curlers so she could dress up like a sleep-over.  The 19-year old called and said she could find the curlers but couldn’t come home just then and I would probably be killed trying to get them where they were–I didn’t ask.  Making fake curler hair with hair bands took a while.  Spouse had to get to a meeting and the pace of everything picked up so I could feed everyone before skating.  We had Burger King which I’m politically and nutritionally opposed to in practically violent ways.  Ate it anyway.  Skate rink 6-8.  Book in a bag several feet from me while another mom (and very groovy friend I’ve written about before) talked about her cancer-survivor husband sleeping too much and asked about birds-and-bees talks with her 6th grade son and 4th grade daughter, then the 19-year old showed up to see her sisters skate and talked about her boyfriend.  Got home in the rain.  Conducted bedtime while spouse called to say he was going on from his meeting to a jam session, his friend Jim and wife are coming over soon, and he’ll see me late, and by the way the jerk who’d called the meeting didn’t even show up.  Mother of a kid I’ve tutored for his college entrance essays calls to agonize a little over son’s procrastination with college entrance essays.

(the ever-hooded tragic gestured sea)

I comfort everyone in time for 19-year old’s boyfriend to show up and be directed to several food sources.  One small daughter is still awake and has to come downstairs to say hi to big sister’s boyfriend.  One of the cats has started sitting like a sphinx on the open piano lid.  I pour a glass of wine.  I answer classmate Jeannine’s email about AWP.  Nineteen-year old and boyfriend giggle in the living room for a while then go somewhere to hang out with a friend.  The wine’s gone, Wojahn’s still in the bag, it’s too late to plan classes so I’ll wing them in the morning–I think a librarian is coming in as a guest speaker anyway.  It’s 11:20.  An allergy pill, David Wojahn, Laura Kasischke, my journal, and me are climbing in bed together in a minute.  I will be a bad date to all of them and will probably give my cuddly spouse a groggy snort in my sleep when he returns.

This has little to do with poetry.

Then again, women can always weep… or rant… or write poems.

(there never was a world for her except the one she sang)

My sabbath teachers today (swiped from issue 386 of The Sun, February 2008)–

“We say that if a temple, or a symbol, or an image helps you to realize the divine within, you are welcome to it. Have two hundred images if you like. If certain forms and formulas help you to realize the divine…have, by all means, whatever forms, temples, whatever ceremonies you want to bring you nearer to God. But do not quarrel about them: the moment you quarrel, you are not going Godward; you are going backward toward the brutes.” Swami Vivekananda

“Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit, and simply never leave.” Susan B. Anthony

“I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the ghighway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? … The owner of the car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.” Frederick Buechner

“It is said that if you take only one step toward Him, He advances ten steps toward you. But the complete truth is that God is always with you.” Mohammed

As an art major, my friend Pam noticed that faith-based projects usually got crummy grades, and the down-graded fussed that the university art establishment was anti-faith.  She also noticed that the fussing art students, having chosen transcendent subject matter, set aside everything they’d learned about craft while in art school.  So, with no particular faith of her own, she made a senior thesis with religious content, jammed on craft, and aced it.

There’s something in that.

When I tell people I’m a writing instructor, and get either, an insecure “Oo, I’d better use complete sentences,” or an elitist “Ahh, one of us,” they don’t really care about my belief in words and the ways people use them—they’re afraid of English Teachers as grammar police or arbiters of class and worth based on vocabulary.

I don’t care much for the vulgar accusation of fence straddling.  Even the word “straddle” implies discomfort.  It comes from people stationary and smug in their lawn chairs, and gets lobbed at anyone who would pass through the gate rather than stare at the fence.

I work with artists, who must have community or go insane in their solitude like Vincent did, but have trouble establishing common ground a lot of the time because of their absolutist faith or suspicion of faith.  From atop the fence, both groups look myopic.

If I say “shit” out loud, my Christian friends are scandalized.  If I say “Jesus” without irony, my humanist friends stop inviting me over.  Those two yards are mirror images of each other, absolutely reversed.  And because they’re all just sitting there, all they see is fence, not each other.

All of these people are my friends.

I was glad the Robert Frost era was over, but then I actually re-read “Mending Wall.” Instead of fixating on its last line, “Good fences make good neighbors,” I watched the neighbor moving “in darkness” to rebuild the wall unseen forces will destroy a stone at a time.

Couldn’t we just all stand up, rest our elbows on the fence, share a glass of wine—or grape juice—and have some real communion?  Then let roots or elves bring the wall down.  We’ll be too busy building friendships to crave fence.

My big act of responsiblity for today was washing and hanging two loads of laundry before 11:00.  It’s cool today and the air is moving a lot, no rain is forecast, and I’m pretty sure everything will end up dry before dark.  To be more precise, my big act of responsibility was to begin the action of laundry.  As with most things I do, the beginning is what gives me trouble.  I can think my way through anything–multiple anythings simultaneously–brilliantly!  But doing?  Ah.  Too much in residence in the cerebrum, not enough in the body.  Which is, of course, odd, since I’d liken the movements of my mind much more to my childhood body than I would any cognitive system I’ve encountered since then.  You’d think I could keep the two in communion, but no.

Once I was actually hanging the damp clothes (having successfully remembered that they’d been washed and were waiting for my next move) the world was so good.  I was Tillie Olsen in the yard, mind and body in perfect harmony.  All things coalesced into one time and place.  Here was the fantastic repetitive sensory experience of weights and textures of wet fabric, bright-colored plastic clips, the splendid and efficient Breezecatcher, wind, gray clear sky, trees, the first falling leaves underfoot, our mature and generous garden, all our efforts to make our garden paradise, all our prospects and intentions to keep working, the ways we’ve made do, each child who had worn the clothes, my own wardrobe of the past two weeks, garments of my best and greatest only love, memory of thrifting trips, all the work I still have to do, satisfaction about something done, reading I will do this week, writing I will do this week–yes, the critical review I still somehow need to finish from notes and marginalia today yet know somehow that scholarly effort will be helped by the human act of breathing windborne organic-lemony detergent vestiges now, by gathering sun-fresh dry clothes later, by folding them and stacking them into the next shape of readiness, by family love in the form of domestic continuity–and here’s grass we need to cut maybe today, peace I have about not cutting the grass if we don’t get to it, stones laid and stacked, plants from seeds from cuttings, from friends…  And that was just part of the first basket.

Could I even begin to transcribe the lightspeed whirlwind of historical associations carried up from the basement and out on my hip with every heavy basket?  Grandma’s house, back farther to pre-electricity, back farther to a medieval garden–any medieval garden, anyone’s wash.  All those are there too.  As are volumes of Kathleen Norris-style Benedictine wisdom about work as prayer, like the nun-doctor in Alabama interviewed on Religion & Ethics Newsweekly who doesn’t have time to politic about health care but works and works to treat and tend her brothers and sisters in the delta who have no health care and live in a nation that will let them die.  Some of them will, too, sooner rather than later.  My work is small by comparison, but that I do it with my heart reaching for her (this,too, is prayer) and with willing, grateful, capable hands makes me, I hope, a worthy sister.

So while I’ve been writing the drum and mallets have been put away.  Now there’s only Emma’s radio, the cat on chair behind me, the a-rhythmic clatter of mind transcription, Aya narrating her animate universe in front of the still cool fireplace, and the knowledge that Tosca’s and Martin’s voices will be added to those of friends before we all slide away from today’s sunlight.  I’m sure there’s something more I should do, and it’s been good doing thoughtspace with my fingers for a time.

Is disunity even possible or is it a mistaken impression? In the film Wall-E for instance, the plot brings the whole human idea of earth down to a forgotten model in the bridge of the Axiom. It’s so far from anyone’s awareness that awareness is even forgotten.  It’s just this one thing that got way out of hand—there were too many competing ideas about what it could and should be—and, to all appearances and perceptions, they wiped out every good possibility on Earth.  Except the idea of it and a stock of details a computer preserved.

In the beginning, all things flared forth from one point that went bang or pop or said “now” in God-speak—we don’t have instruments to confirm the way it happened, just consciousness and senses to assure us that it did.  But however it happened, there was one immeasurably small flip from nothing to something, from wasn’t to is, from unity to multiplicity of will.

In the film, which is a splendid concatenation of most of the motifs I know from the Bible, the only thing which remains is love.  Its various vehicles and offshoots don’t look like any Sunday School lesson I’ve read so far, but hey, this version saves humanity to give Earthlife another go.

After which, I suppose, we’d botch it up again after a couple dozen new millennia—dividing and dividing and dividing until, sigh, once again, we’re sorted, sifted, smoothed, sheared, slimmed, simmered, sunk down to the point of a single Idea that, by acknowledging, we are all saved.

Other benefits of our new Breezecatcher include these: sun- and breeze-dried clothing which smells great and probably has far less bacterial flora which can cause odors later; righteous sensation of me standing in the yard saving energy for my family; hideout for my smaller children when it’s fully loaded; getting the laundry done early enough in the day to hang before dusk; green bragging rights in a neighborhood less likely than most to hang its drawers outside; electric bill savings enough to have paid it off plus shipping and handling by the end of summer, probably.

Perceived drawbacks could include bird droppings and crisp cottons, but in truth, droppings are rare and the phrase “soft, fluffy towels” is, let’s face it, advertising copy from our grandparents’ generation, not an ethos.

A guy I heard interviewed on NPR, one who writes a column on frugal living, spoke about living within one’s means and mentioned that his family saves between $35 and $50 dollars a month by not using their electric dryer.  It might not be that much in our neck of the woods, but any penny helps.

I found one American-made brand on-line, but also found reviews about how fast its aluminum arms would bend and how likely it would need to be replaced yearly.

Ours is steel.

My grandmother’s clothesline was two poles with cross members–one in the border of flowers and shrubs around the vegetable garden, the other far out into the yard toward the pasture–with four swooping lines and several slim support poles that could be moved to lift the heaviest loads up out of the grass and clover.  When I was a child it served as a divider between the civilized land of grown ups nearer the house and the vast meadow of imagination toward the neighbor’s house.  When Grandma hung sheets, the land beyond the clothesline was entered through a snapping and whipping labyrinthine passage.  On the far side was the swingset (flight), the marble table Grandpa set on four sturdy treetrunk legs (laboratory, podium), two apple trees on mounds (jungle, sustenance, ammunition), the compost pile (worms for fishing), and what felt like acres of land.  On the far side I was horse, was falcon, was captain.

I have a Polaroid of the garden end of that clothesline taken after an ice storm.  The north wall of Grandma’s house is in the background, there are icicles on the line, and the gooseberry bush undergrowth is tall and uncontrolled.  The post itself looks like a Calvary-style cross–in snow.

So the Breezecatcher clothesline becomes the place where I can hang a whole slew of paradoxes, and there they flap–childhood, imagination, faith, family, and the life of the writer.

A breeze caught, after all, would cease to be a breeze.