Slowly, Slowly
Something is My Miracle on the Days of Nothing
I’ve been not moving for the last few weeks in a way that is so unfamiliar I ended up having a lot of time to do not much with. I listened to podcasts and I puttered around my new studio, around the keys of my computer, and around my camera. I read. Not altogether unfulfilling, but robotic, unfeeling. This strange unmoving is not yet comprehensible and sounds a little like something won, but it was not, or, and it was.
Only this morning, after sleep and a reprieve from what ails do I finally feel alive. The air is cool and autumnal and the dry hillside begs for water. I fill a big bucket and haul it up the hill and sloppily splash it around the desperate Witch Hazel, Rattlesnake Master, and Smooth White Aster — areas too far for the hose and rain still days away. I pull some missed honeysuckle and resilient stiltgrass, I good morning the Jack in the Pulpits still standing, and then with coffee, sit on my stoop, and finally sit down to write today’s poem.
When I am stuck, I count 5,7,5 and fit words into those lines. I don’t know if this is enough to make them Haikus, but they are something and something is my miracle on the days of nothing. These last few weeks I forgot about my 5,7,5s even.
Looking over my poems, I find these from 8 November, 2023:
Fifteen
Søren in the morn
ing, with a cup of Earl Grey,
a book, and a blanket.
There isn’t much to this, yet I am brought straight back to those near winter mornings to Søren at Fifteen, preserved in a kind of amber.
and this:
Memory No. 2
How do you remem
ber? Sometimes nothing at all,
Not even darkness
After my mom died, at the nudging of my cousin Rebecca, I did 23 and Me and completely unexpectedly discovered that I have two APOE4 genes. It felt too much and too distant to devastate me, and became a door into so much learning and change. And too, for better understanding my mom whom, though undiagnosed, I feel certain was suffering with Alzheimers among other things. Here, she is, as a little girl, found in old family photographs, paired with the poem:
We can never imagine how we will unbecome.
It is strange how time is broken up and what I am cramming together here. It is mid-August and I am nostalgic as the school year is about to begin. Silas, Thirteen, after six years of homeschooling, has decided to go to the local middle school for 8th grade. He wants to play soccer and meet new people. Though we are in the suburbs and a few miles from a college town, the Five Acre Wood and it’s nineteenth century buildings can feel isolating and time-travelly. Good for me, Walter, and Søren, but not for Silas. He is a different kind of creature.
Here is another poem, from June:
Starfish
It is pouring out and
Silas, in gorgeous form, kicks
the ball anyway.
This all feels a bit melancholy, but I'm sure I crawled out of that in the night!
ps: Pearl with her new quilt I found at the Fleas last weekend
You seem to balance the beauty and the tragedy of life in near harmony with your writing. Your words always touch my heart, Margaux and help me understand myself further.
Absolutely the beautiful morning read I needed Margaux. The way you feel through the poetry of change and shift, into the nuances of time as a life: garden time as life, art time as life, mother time and the list expands.
"We can never imagine how we will unbecome." I am stopped in my bear tracks.
It's very hard to share certain things,(we have discussed). In the sharing seems another becoming, which is a known from the outside so reading here I am seeing the insides of us all more clearly--thank you for humanizing us each and all. You are ever the most interesting person to become/ unbecome alongside Margaux. So thankful for your voice.