foxtales

My baby has a garden inside
That’s never grown as planned
Weeds and sprouts and oddball things
But nothing on demand.

For 30 years she kept her watch
As the garden just lay barren
Even worse came uglier things
Borne of toil, blood, and barrow

The garden blossomed only twice,
Once in summer, once in fall–
Two wild flowers, but constant and true
Who grew, but that’s not all–

Their tendrils twined around our hands
Their blooms up to the sun
Their gentle stems a balm to us
Their roots where they’d begun

And now we see the garden’s gone
But oh, what’s left behind–
Proof that when the world’s gone mad
The best buds stay behind

“Alone, rising from the level of the plain, and appearing lost in the open country, the two steeples of Martinville ascended toward the sky. Soon we saw three: wheeling around boldly to position itself opposite them, the laggard steeple of Vieuxvicq had come along to join them. . . . Then the steeple of Vieuxvicq moved away, receded into the distance and the steeples of Martinville remained alone. . . . We continued on our way; we had already left Martinville a little while before, and the village, after accompanying us for a few seconds, had disappeared, when, lingering alone of the horizon to watch us flee, its steeples and that of Vieuxvicq still waved good-bye with their sunlit tops. At times one of them would draw aside so that the other two could glimpse us again for an instant; but the road changed direction, they swung around in the light like three golden pivots and disappeared from my gaze. But a little later, when we were already close to Combray, and the sun had set, I caught sight of them one last time from very far away, seeming now no more than three flowers painted on the day above the low line of fields. . . . and while we moved off at a gallop, I saw them timidly seek their way and, after some awkward stumbling of their noble silhouettes, press against one another, slip behind one another, now forming, against the still pink sky, no more than a single black shape, charming and resigned, and fade away into the night.”

–Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, “Combray”

Sidewalk blocks move fast,
Being about the length of a stride,
And to the right and left, grass blurs by,
But a tree 20 feet away moves slower,
And a tree 20 feet beyond even slower,
The first tree moving to eclipse the other,
Which moves then from the left to the right,
As roofs, steeples, other trees further off
Move the slowest of all, eventually eclipsed
By even the second tree.

It’s all illusion, of course–
Everything moves at the same pace,
Which is to say, nothing moves at all, but you–
You are the only thing moving
(except that everything is moving, the earth spinning,
but that’s another story).
A firetruck approaches from behind,
All those tightly compressed sound waves wailing,
Or making a trick like wailing,
And when the truck passes you,
The sounds quickly blurs and fades
As you are left in a wake of wider and wider waves,
Scattered.

Time is the same, as events nearer to us speed by,
And events in the past are frozen in mind, eye, and time.
You can’t change them, and as soon as the near events pass,
You can’t change them, either. It’s all past.

There must be a formula for this, I think,
Like when I learned that the ratio of sides in a 30-60-90 triangle
is 1x to 2x to the square-roof-of-three x.
I spent a summer once measuring the height of trees with this formula,
A string dropped from a branch and held to the ground
To form the 60 degree angle, and the height of the tree
Was then exactly twice the distance of that angle of string and ground
To the trunk.

Sure, I could have just dropped the string straight down,
Then measured the string, but where’s the fun in that?

This is how my brain works. This is why I loved geometry.
This is why I still say that, in terms of learning to write.
Taking Geometry was the best thing I ever did.
Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes–they figured it out,
Did the calculations, wrote the proofs, all while moving
–at their own pace–
With their own pasts frozen on the horizon,
Superstition, magic, wild guesses to make sense of it all.

They ended all that because they knew,
As surely as a sailor knows that following a particular star will move him “north,”
That time and sound and light and space
Don’t move with us, but simply seem to move with us,
And faster, too,
The closer they are to ourselves.

I want to go home in the spring–
Run the Parkway’s green hills,
Packed thick with Loess soil and history,
Accidents of birth–
Roads curling beyond themselves,
The creek, the ball fields,
The secret places along the way,
Hidden by trees and shrubs,
Into the woods, deeper, deeper,
So much unexplored, even by me,
But passed by on the way to the pool,
King Hill, the water tank on top, and below–
Stockyards, empty now but teeming once with life
And death, and dust, and cries, and stench . . .
And to the north, all the way across town,
Wyeth Hill, near the Parkway’s other terminus.
Sad town, slow town, hugging the brown water,
The highway and streets and the bridge crossing the river.
This is the Genesis, the home of sins (original and not),
The Alpha and Omega.
The long summer days of bicycles, golf balls, and beer cans,
Begin here and end here and in between,
Only the lilting funk of sweat meeting spring.

I am my mother’s son
I stay open to change—
A bridge builder who hopes,
But keeps what I expect
Behind the veil of me.

My mom adapted fast
While I create patterns
That give my days a beat
that make me me, but also—
Bring out the best in you.

But—

With her and you I learned:
Eyes open always, ears wide
To music bearing witness
Of wonder all around,
For no one knows when love
Breaks out, or grace will come around.

My problem is,
I still remember falling in love,
Even at my advanced age,
Like I remember learning to drive at 16.

That split-second feeling
Of knowing you have lost control
But still being in control,
Riding alone in your automobile—

A slight movement of your hand
Can send you a careening,
An adjustment of your legs, out of control,
And yet . . . all right . . .

Or learning to ride a bike
As Dad lets go of the back and somehow—
It’s all just happening,
Though you don’t know how

And meanwhile,
something you cannot touch has changed within you—
Like water flowing under ice
on the first warm day of winter

The writer watches the woodworker
Who shapes and molds inert wood to his whim
Carves and curls, the thin wood peeling
In almost translucent strips.

How did this gene skip him?
He wonders, this weird skill to look through wood and see
Life within it, shapes concealed,
And then revealed,
The wood made flesh …

The woodworker keeps peeling
The shape unseen becomes seen.
He stops to sand it gently,
A lover’s hand on naked wood,
Switches to a knife,
Carves and cuts more carefully, 
The wood falling now in slivers, not slips,
at his feet.

Finally, he hands it to you,
This wooden miracle,
A thing that did not exist before
Except as a block, a stick, a fallen limb
Picked from the forest floor and dead as Druids.

And you, in turn, hand your paper to him,
Also wood, at some point,
Where you have been scratching as he’s been carving.
He reads it, then turns to you and says—
“How in the fuck did you do that?”

Water, unwanted,
Rises in floor drains
Weeps through basement walls
Pours from an angry sky.

In a flash of light it seems,
The creek is around us,
Swirling family being sucked down …
I am vulnerable.

And vulnerability becomes everything.
It teaches me to plan ahead—
Put things on bricks
Have blankets ready
Watch forecasts anxiously—
And never let anyone in.

I think of a fish,
Flopping and gasping on a dock.
I think—who is more evolved?
One who pulls oxygen from air,
Or one who pulls it from water,
Who moves fluidly in this world,
Who only knows the wet,
But who also knows enough,
To still pray for rain?

Blinded by paradise,
All I see is beauty and hope.
The woman at the shit store
Complains that no one will work for her.
It’s a problem all over Florida, she says,
People living off unemployment,
But she could never sit still that long,
She’d go crazy, she says.

I think of her, working in her shop
One of a dozen up and down the strip
Of 1950s architecture and rotting seaside motels,
Putt-putt and Subway and the place that will take you,
For $65 a head,
Out onto an ocean that appears to be free.

She works and worries and somehow survived the pandemic,
Maybe with stimulus money? Who knows,
But here she is,
A survivor like all the others,
And therefore,
A winner.