So summer is here, and we have all been feeling the sweet languor of it. Especially me, I think, since I still can't do much of anything with this boot on my de-bunioned foot. Will has been working a little and hanging with his buddies as they enjoy each other and the bittersweetness of their last summer before college. I can almost watch him mature in front of me. He went off to a friend's house tonight, and I was sorry to see him go. I must have shown it as he sent me a text asking me if I wanted him to come back home and hang out. Ok, what does one say to all that goodness? I said no, of course, but how nice for him to offer. Katie too has been away in Tanzania having a wonderful time doing good works, so it has been quite here. All of this is soon to change as the new medical school class comes in at the end of next week and all the craziness starts again. But for another few days, there is still some lovely peace around here. We have put a new patio on the back of our house, and I realize that we have an entirely new room and a brand new view into the back yard. We have never been able to do this, and even in the inner ring suburbs, we have a deep, wooded lot with so many wonderful trees whose leaves make constant music that is lovely and loud. A mating pair of cardinals claim our yard as their territory, and I have begun to recognize their call and response. And many days in the last several weeks, a deer has been lying at the very back of the yard, just lying there in the sun. Our wonderful dog is getting old, and her cataracts must be significant as she didn't even see her or smell her somehow. Finally, as I was sitting on the patio on Sunday, a huge owl flew right by me and perched in the huge evergreen in the yard and stayed there for several hours. Wow, a back yard full of grace, how lovely! Now if I could just slow the time down a little and lean in to all of this for a few more....years...but no! That I cannot do, and I will enjoy the new excitement of the students, but I could wait another month. Oh well. I'll enjoy it all anyway. Here are a few poems I have come across recently and really like. see what you think:
Designed to Fly (Ellen Waterston)
After ten hours of trying
the instructor undid
my fingers, peeled
them one by one
off the joystick.
"You don't need
to hold the plane
in the air," he advised.
"It's designed to fly.
A hint of aileron,
a touch of rudder,
is all that is required."
I looked at him
like I'd seen God.
Those props and struts
he mentioned, they too,
I realized, all contrived.
I grew dizzy
from the elevation
from looking so far
down at the surmise:
the airspeed of faith
underlies everything.
Lives are designed
to fly.
Wait (CK Williams)
Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was
for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.
It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,
relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw.
Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you,
you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,
my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,
trying to heave itself back to its other way with you.
But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran
as though for my life, wasn't I fleeing from you, or for you?
Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds?
Aren't I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it,
a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand as though I,
not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve?
Wait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am,
how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all.
Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over
the languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn,
to do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is "Wait!"?
We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be "Wait."
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