Numbers

Today we became a fully vaccinated household. Both of us have had our second shot. Truthfully, I did not expect this day to happen until fall at the earliest. Even after President Biden was inaugurated and made his 100 million in 100 days, I thought (based on what we had seen prior) that he’d overpromised and that other factors would go forward to slow progress down. Not only are we vaccinated but those we love and look forward to seeing soon have had their first or second (or, in one case, one) shot.

During the Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919 it is estimated that 675,000 people died in the US. Right now, from COVID-19, we’re at (about) 564,000. Every day I watch the numbers of US vaccinated, those infected, hospitalized and deaths. Even when a low number like 256 deaths was reported the other day I said, that’s Lostine or Ukiah or Halfway. It’s Ellis Grove or Verona or St Johns. Little towns everywhere. People that have families and friends and had plans. It ripples and ripples and ripples.

Well.

Here’s a flowering tree I passed on my walk yesterday. Be safe, be kind, please get vaccinated.

Just a Tuesday

 

Today was voting day here in O’Fallon, Illinois. Mayor, Alderman, City Clerk, School board members. We went over to Saint Nicholas, which is our normal precinct, and it took about five minutes to have our information found and then ballots filled out. The mayor is running for reelection and is unopposed, so either he’s doing a great job (I have no complaints) or no one cares or no one wants this job.  Jerry thinks it’s a combo of all three. Aside from that my day was filled with prepping the flower beds for the finishing touches, rocks and mulch. I was putting weed barrier down when the local nursery let me know they could deliver today if needed (yes! please) so Jerry and I moved about a ton and a half of rock before we voted. Nothing gets you ready for the democratic process than some good physical labor.

Tomorrow I get my second dose of vaccine. Kind of excited. Making some plans already, looking West. More than that I’ll cover in email with select friends and/or family. 😊

Here's today's poem followed by the prompt:

Another poem for Ursula
 
The cardinals are ransacking the feeder, fresh filled
with sunflower seeds. They torpedo in and their sounds
ring against the house, echoing into the open windows.
My blind cat sits, answers their tunes with a cry
her eyes turned toward them, but it is only the nerve
recalling how to zero in on wing-beat and song.
I write this new poem and hope that what is killing
                                              her finds calm; will ask for more words.
 
  
Today’s prompt
Write a short poem (rhyming not necessary) that  includes each of the following 5 words (anywhere and  n any order). Poems should not exceed 7 or 8 lines:
                                                          write, beat, nerve, sound, cry.

Half-heathen, half-jester

This fourth day of April was warm, almost 80 here today, luckily the humidity is low. The birds were showing out, the trees blooming, church bells were pealing and Jerry called me a heathen for finishing my last bit of landscaping,  requireing blocks and fast setting cement, on Easter. Like I care, like he hasn’t gone into hundreds of churches (hyperbole? maybe) and NOT been struck by lightning as we enter. Yes, I do have a tendency to view these “houses” of worship as missed opportunities. I want to ask my neighbor so badly if the extension on her church is to house people. But I won’t because I would be obligated to go to the other churches and ask what they do with their tremendous amounts of space. And my neighbor’s church (literally she’s the senior pastor) feeds people every week and they scrambled to make it all take away for the past year. 

It’s all in half-jest. Amen.

Today I found another poem from the MOOC and it made me think, my brother doesn’t show up in a lot of poems, and I’m almost certain this might have been one of the first; I’ll spend tomorrow pondering.

Excercise 5 

We shared endless days of catch in the field
beside the barn. The smack of ball to leather glove,
what sufficed for sibling love, witnessed only
by crowds of cattle and the bored stare of lambs.
 
I had a super arm, a deadly rocket swing
but, being a girl, I never had a chance
to charge the plate or lead a team.
 
He went onto summer Little League, then an All-
Star in Babe Ruth. Of all those hours we worked
at play this truth still holds me hard, I turned away
and those innings I never saw. I turned away
from the game and in that turn abandoned him.

From slate blue to lavender*

From a MOOC I took once, I didn't remember the poem but I remember this process: And in fact it is something I should use more. Happy Poetry Month day three!

Exercise 2: M.E. Hope _ Repurposings_reduce/reuse/recycle

Some of these are darlings that have been cut over the decades, some are things that reoccur. Here are lines cannablized (repurposed) from other work followed by the draft of something new.

1) Like ether my warm breath
    on his neck pulled me to quick sleep
    sanctuary so wholly mine;
    his heart against my palm.
 
2) …and like a lost dog
    3,000 miles from home
    they come back,
    thin and bloody and just as familiar.
 
3) They scuffle across
    the floor & settle near his feet
    like subservient dogs.
 
4) The lamb shed was built 40 years before we arrived
     and through its thick walls, cradling sawdust, little passed;
     sound lay muffled on its dirt floor like a hostage.
 
5)  I am like the bee outside
     your hothouse window
     humming with patience
     for you to slide the pane.
 
6) where his steps are muffled
    in moon dust.

***Ex 2 Poem***

Memories like summer wasps tap at my window.
There are certain days of the year when a slant
of light, golden or olive green, will plant me
on a hay trailer at sunset. Sweat rills through alfalfa
dust on my arms and circles my neck, and for half
a second I’m there: the air, scented by cut hay
and gasoline, cools. The mountain rotates color
*from slate blue to lavender. A whistle sounds
from town as the mill marks shift change.

Our lamb shed was built forty years before we came
and through the thick walls cradling sawdust
little passed; sound lay muffled on the dirt floor
like a hostage. And here is memory again
caught up in the heavy dark, the accumulated
odor of straw and animal piss, ammonia and soured
milk, sheep drying after a snow storm or summer
rain. The iodine used for disinfectant stains time.
We slept here in lambing season, rotating shifts
each falling into the set up bunk, to the other’s
perfume. Even now, forty more years on, I catch a whiff,
Baby Love or Herbal Essence, and I am following my sisters (still).

But the hardest memory, the one that plays at the edge
like that lost dog, is of my father. Though he is gone from me
he exists, just like the old farm. Before sleep,
before dreams are allowed to collude with thought
I think of him, how when I was four he would hold me
tuck my head under his chin and like ether my breath
lulled me to sleep, a sanctuary wholly mine,
his heart tapping on my open palm.

The way it is

This morning I had a number of errands to run, I was glad it is Spring Break and quite cold, that keeps people in first thing in the morning. But after turning off my street I saw a dog running in the road. This is one thing I’ve rarely seen here, a dog out on its own. Last summer we had a young dog run up to us on Quail Run, luckily a woman we know, I was in love with her ancient dog Willie, told us the dog lived one street over and belonged to the daughters of the man who lived there. So, an easy return.

This dog looked familiar and then I realized it was, Joy, the black and white sheltie that lives behind us. I was immediately concerned as I’ve never seen her not on a leash. She’s always with one member of the family. I pulled over and tried to get her to come, but she headed toward home, so I followed a couple of blocks and then heard her person say Joy! Come! I got back to my car and drove over to their house. Joy was just trying something new, lighting out for the territories! Of course, the husband and wife were relieved, I was glad it was just a runaway and no one was down (they are older). They have three dogs right now as they are looking after their son’s two little mixed poodle cuties while he and his family are out of the country for six months. I did note that when I was out this afternoon checking the plants around the house, I saw Joy on a very long tether.

In cat news, my next-door neighbor believes he’s been adopted by the cat that lives down the block. He’s not really pleased, but he’s also intrigued as she brought a mole and left it on his front step. So, not thrilled to have the cat hang out, but he’s been working on getting rid of the moles for a while; and his almost two-year-old son loves the cat: conundrum. (Which would be a great name for a cat.)

And it’s poetry month, day two. I’m getting some words emailed to me from Center for the Humanities at Washington University as part of their Life/Lines poetry project. Today’s words were: burgundy, river, doorway, footstep and decision. Here’s my poem:


The way it is

The river is a doorway, a place where the burgundy-sided
trout sleep, silently waving in the shadows. Boaters dip
their oars like footsteps along the liquid trail which glows green
and gold: sunlight, snake grass, yellow headed flowers
that only grow here. This decision wasn’t made
but became the way it is.

Day here, an Egret watches her reflection, still
except for the water’s tell, the vee pulsing around her leg.

It's Poetry Month!

 

Here's a poem from Poetry Month 2005 :

My daughter wanted a poem about our cat but the poem turned another way

Snow is swirling around the basin this day. Three grey does come out of the slough & stand in the neighbor’s field nibbling sage as we drive past; the yearling steers rest heads down, tails to the wind ignoring the deer that seem to ignore the flurries. I imagine that we seem like the deer in our day to day roving, oblivious to the looks that come at us – a white woman with a black man – in a town where the echoes of internment camps and Indian wars still flavor unrealized slurs – “he’s working on Indian time”;” it’s a Jap cabin”; “don’t try to Jew me down”; “Oh, yes, he’s that Chinaman” – ask if they know what they say has meaning beyond metaphor, simile, injustice, lie. Somehow we ignore the ignorant and meet each storm head on; let the cattle turn away, stampede from the coming thunder.

~~M. E. Hope

Day after day I hear doors shut*

It is the end of March. A year of pandemic lifestyle changes. Poetry Month is coming up. I’m revamping the look of the flower beds out front, a new edge and rock to fill between plants vice mulch. I’ve pruned the shrubbery back, moved some bulbs to a pot, found the Hostas and marked their space. The weather in perfect for outdoor work, sunny and a little breeze. I dug up some of the Mondo Grass which has grown so tight came out in giant bricks of sod. I’m hoping I can separate some and transplant. I cleaned the raised beds this weekend, added some topsoil and will turn in a little fertilizer soon. I’ve been calculating how much mulch I need around the house for areas not getting rock. All of these activities come in a week where I have three appointments that can’t be shifted, so I’m also calculating how much I can get done between days. Next week I’ll get my second dose of COVID vaccine. Jerry gets his (second) the week after and then we enter the two week “after that” period. Then we see what happens. I won’t stop wearing a mask. I may never stop wearing a mask, readying for the next pandemic and the anonymity is spectacular, though it really is just the gloss over what comes from just being a female of my age; that’s probably enough.

I think of this distinction often. Invisibility, the “not seen” and then there is the not-not seen. The invisibility of a graying woman is a nuisance. The always in the open and watched and ignored that my love gets is (for me) heart wrenching. I remember reading an essay once by a white poet about her daughter of mixed race and her saying her daughter will never be able to go into the world as she has. And it was one of those shaken awoke again moments. Of course. How many times during the week do we repeat to each other (and mention one of our friends that we owe money for the saying) I’m surprised that you’re surprised over some new slight or injustice. Then, too, we have a Dave Chappell quote we like when things really get going, from Mr. Chappell’s opening on Saturday Night Live November 2020. What kind of a man would do that (referring to 45 and his ilk)? A white man. I use that one a lot, I think of that one a lot. I worry for my family, I worry for my friends, I still worry for the Palestinian woman in Connecticut, who after September 11th, was afraid to take her children to the library.

The interesting thing about being invisible is what you can see and hear under perfect cover.

*Invisibility by Renato Rosaldo