To King Solomon

William Blake's The Judgment of Solomon

We all learn your story when we are young: two women, each had a new baby, but one baby dies. One claims the other switched the living baby for the dead baby in the middle of the night, and they argue over which baby belongs to whom.

 

They stand before you. You are young and new to all this king stuff. Your kingdom has little faith in you because you are really just a boy. And now, these two women are in your court. Between them, the baby squirms and cries. He is just days old.

You will be known one day for your wisdom, the one gift you asked for from God. But today is not that day. And though you have asked for wisdom, you can’t know you have it until it is tested. And you can’t know how clear or intelligent or meaningful it is until you make the call. 

And the baby just keeps crying.

“Bring me a sword!!”

We know how the story ends. The woman who pleads to save the baby is clearly the mother. Only a mother would rather have the baby live.

But there was a moment--it must have felt like falling--before either woman spoke. A moment when you could hear the blood in your brain. You are holding the sword above the baby, and around you, your guards and servants stare. You hope this goes as planned. You cannot look at either woman as you wait. You will have to follow through, be a man of your word, if they both agree. One woman says yes, go ahead.

You wait for the other to speak.

You will be known for your songs and your prayers, but the one you say now is one you will never write. You never want to say it again.

To Men Who Wear Make-Up, Not for Theatrical Purposes

The truth is, you look like shit, right?

You wake-up after a night of night sleeping and your worst face stares back at you. Those circles? Those little lines? An ill-placed pimple? You feel it, too. Admit it. You’re 46 but you’re thinking you look older. And you’re not ready to go there.

Not today. Not with the Henderson presentation at 3:00, by which time you will look even worse. These things don’t get better as the day goes on. Not with all the talk of “change” and “progress,” which you know means one thing--your job is on the line.

Do it. A little moisturizer, a little extra around the eyes. Let that sink in. You admit, just barely and only to yourself, that you like the way it feels. You begin to know your face in a whole new way. One eye is a little bigger than the other. But damn, that dimple is hot. Let’s work with that.

Lean in. Take a closer look. Look at those eyebrows, the little grey ones. Your cheeks need a little something. Look closer. How big are those pores? What do you do about that?

Embrace this. Spend the extra 20 minutes every morning, now that people think this is what you’re supposed to look like. You look so healthy. Maybe your son catches you one morning and you turn and take a brush to his face. Just a dab. Just for fun. 

But 7 years later, he’s stealing your concealer, complaining that you always buy the wrong eyeliner. He will save his money for just the right blush.

To My Job at a Greenhouse in Kalamazoo

1995--the year of jobs. Between the two of us, I think we had 6 or 7 jobs in a year’s time, most of them simultaneously. Part-time gigs, mostly, stringing what we could together, our newly awarded degrees in poetry still crisp and useless at helping us make money.

 

Winter in Kalamazoo was the worst I had ever seen--worse than New York, worse than Indiana. I never imagined a place could get that cold for that long, that the snow could get that deep. Some days, the mail was not delivered.

One job was as a home health aide, a job for which there was no training but should have been. The one patient I took care of was a man dying. Granted, all I had to do was sit with him and watch TV. I brought my students’ papers to grade. He mostly wasn’t lucid and slept a lot of the time. But he would cry; he was in pain. I would call the agency and ask what to do, picking up bottle after bottle, studying all the charts, looking for a medication to ease whatever I could. I went three times until they called to say he died, but they had another patient for me.

No, thank you. I quit.

The paper lists a job opening at a greenhouse. It’s late January and I can’t imagine what the job would be exactly, but go, apply and I’m hired right away. Kalamazoo, as it turns out, is the bedding plant capital of the world, row after row of arched greenhouses in the southeast part of town.

Driving up, I park in front of snowbanks taller than the car. I think sometimes the wind will break me. But inside the greenhouse, I strip down to a t-shirt and jeans. Somehow the sun collects around us and we spend hours sticking seedlings into plastic 6-packs filled with potting soil. We are almost all young women, dirty and sweaty, pushing flats of dirt between the greenhouses on handtrucks. We tie our hair back in bandanas and eat doughnuts that the owner brings in on Saturday mornings.

In a couple months, the flowers are blooming large. The snow and ice outside is melting, and the impatiens and begonias have been fooled into believing it is May--or even June.

Every chance I get, I volunteer to take something from the annuals, several houses over, to the perennials. When I do, I get to pass through the primrose house. These low-growing flowers remind me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz, when they come to the clearing just before the Emerald City and the flowers dazzle. They smell like sugar cereal. I walk very slowly. The primrose path.

Delude me this winter. Promise me this is real and that work always leads to a moment like this.

To White Noise

A room, south of Minneapolis, is the quietest room in the world. 

Everyone hates it.

This is the quietest room in the world.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91792-hallucinating-sound/

 We think we are oriented visually, that we place ourselves in relationship to the things around us--a wall, the chair, my kid, the avocado I will have for lunch-- but people who have spent time in the quiet room quickly become unmoored, like losing gravity.

Listen right now. The hum of an appliance in the next room. A car in the street passing by. A fan above you. Listen deeper: the light bulb buzz, a clock ticking, the soft bend of the wood floor under some unseen weight.

And then deeper still. When all the other sound is gone, you are the only thing that makes noise. You hear your breath, light then heavy. You realize it’s never really the same twice. Though all you are doing is breathing, it begins to feel like you can’t, like you don’t know how, like you have to try to breath, you have to think about it.

You hear your clothes move against your skin. You hear yourself swallow. You hear the swallow in your throat and in your ears.And then you hear your eyes blink.

And then you hear your own heart beating. You can feel it in your chest, your arms. The rhythm of you. You listen harder; it seems more than a double beat. And then you try not to hear it. You try to hear your breath; you swallow hard.

But you are in the quietest room in the world. You see the floor, the walls but they tell you nothing about where you are. You cannot move against your heart beating. You are the only noise.

To My Chemistry Set

Fifth grade maybe? Young enough that I never actually had a chemistry class. What I knew of laboratories came from Saturday afternoon black and white movies shown in  the UHF channels. The smoke pouring from beakers. Coils with electric sparks bouncing around them. The scientist, always mad, always male.

 I didn’t have a plan for something I wanted to discover or invent; I just wanted to see what would happen, what all the heating and mixing gets you. The process seemed both dangerous and intelligent at the same time.

Everything else on my Christmas list that year was token. Mom kept telling me I was too young for it. But on Christmas morning, it was there, a big white metal box. When I open it, the very names of the chemicals intoxicate me: aluminum sulfate, cobalt chloride, potassium chloride, sodium carbonate. Reading them, I was already smarter and I hadn’t even touched them yet. A microscope, slides, and the iconic test tubes. Mysterious litmus paper. And joy of joys--a burner!

As we would say today: the shit’s about to get real.

I set up a lab in my parents’ wet bar: a tiny space covered in wood paneling. The cabinet was filled with dusty 10-year old bottles of liquor from the party they had when we first moved into the house. In other words: a tinder box. But I was not a reckless child, just curious. I pulled out the burner and followed the instructions for heating up some crystals that would turn colors. I mixed potions and tested them with litmus paper. I examined and compared this and that under the microscope.

I had no idea what I was doing. I loved it.

I never blew anything up, though secretly and in the name of science, I wished for a small explosion. I didn’t burn my eyebrows off or cut my thumb on a broken test tube. I never tasted something labeled poison. I never spilled a toxic liquid for the dog to find and lap up. 

But I could spend an afternoon asking, “What happens if…” and though the answer was almost always “not much,” I never grew tired of the possibility.

To Permissions Granted

Today I’m granting permission.

Not that I have the power or authority, but I don’t see that anyone else has the job or is doing it, so I’m volunteering. You can be the permission granter tomorrow.

I grant you permission to:

eat pie and ice cream for breakfast. And lunch. And for all your snacks.

not take a shower today. And tomorrow. Or to take a very long one (which, if you live in California, now means 5 minutes).

not make your bed. Or make it, even though your partner hates a made bed, the sheets tucked in. Go ahead, enjoy your bed.

run today. Run 7 miles even though you have only ever run 3. You will be fine, a little sore, and it doesn’t matter if it takes you 3 hours. You can stop as long and as often as you want. You can invite your friends.

or don’t run today. In fact, stay on the couch or in bed or in the recliner. Get a book and a beer and read all day.

Don’t answer your phone today: not the calls or the texts or the emails. Pretend it’s broken and when people get impatient, when you talk to them tomorrow, don’t explain it or acknowledge it.

Go blueberry picking and eat all the blueberries as you pick them.

Wear whatever is most comfortable and go to the grocery store. Do not hide when your friends see you. Talk to them, give them a hug.

Write. Badly.

Imagine your other lives. The ones you didn’t choose. The places you left. Imagine the apartment on Chopin Street and the small back porch that looked out onto an alley. You wanted to believe it was romantic but you also knew it wasn’t. Imagine now that it is.

Imagine you are living in Ilha Grande, Brazil. You have learned Portuguese, though it’s not flawless. You live alone and you track sand into the kitchen. Your friends promise they will come visit but they never do and that makes you happy. You have permission now to spend the day looking for a particular yellow, just to see it. You have permission to grieve this. You do not need to be grateful today.

To Brevity

You rock.

To Break-Ups

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

 

It’s never me. It’s always you, at very least because you were there to get involved with in the first place. Maybe it’s “us”, but it’s not me, not just me.

Even if we want it, even if we know it’s best for us and everyone involved, even when we are so tired of being together and do not want another day of this, it’s never clean. Never simple. And all the reasons seem dwarfed, as if placed next to The Relationship in a picture for scale, we study it and say, “This? Really? This is it?”

And then comes traveling the terrain the of break-up. No two alike. Sometimes it’s a city, all concrete and skyscrapers, and we are forever looking up and looking down, so that we keep bumping into people. Sometimes it’s a small brush-by, but then we spill someone’s coffee. It’s all over our book. We see our ex and trip. They dissolve into the crowd.

Or we are on a boat, a ship really, only it’s so ancient we think it’s a boat. We have to use antiquated tools like a mariner’s compass and the stars to find our way. We spend the day asking, “Who does this??” and wonder why there are no people left in the world. Except there are. We hear them. We use follow the shoreline, listening to the voices drifting across the water. They sound so easy, so natural. We want to call out but can’t or won’t. We keep rearranging the sails, trying to catch the wind to move us closer to shore.

Slowly, we make our way back. Like any weary traveler, we don’t know yet what that trip really was, but we know it was not what we expected. We didn’t expect to run out of money so quickly, for the maps to be so wrong. But we didn’t expect the Turkish coffee on the patio, either. We didn’t know the afternoon light would be so blue. We never imagined water so clear, we see everything swimming around us.

To The Drunk Guy in McDonald’s When I Was Six

Going to McDonald’s was a treat and though I don’t know what the occasion was, I know my dad took me. Maybe it was just the two of us, but more likely, not.

 

I remember sitting down on the molded benches. I remember the hamburger in front of me, checking to make sure it had nothing on it--no pickles or onions or ketchup--nothing but a thin grey burger on a bun. I remember fries.

Toddst2 at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

 And then, I remember a man on across the aisle. I remember a long beard or long hair. He had a drink and he was not really sitting up the way my dad did. He started talking to my dad, at my dad really, and I remember thinking he seemed maybe angry or upset.

 

He was very skinny. I remember his arms.

He was asking my dad questions, but not real ones. Things like, “You know what I mean?” and “Am I right?” He pulled out a cigarette. Perhaps my dad did, too. Maybe he lit my dad’s. Maybe my dad lit his.

Maybe not.

I keep listening and I feel fear creep in. I can see his eyes aren’t really looking at anything and I hear him get louder and then softer. I know, even this young, that people don’t normally talk like this to people they don’t know. Especially at a McDonald’s. Especially when with a little girl sitting there. I’m here with my dad and the drunk guy doesn’t seem to notice.

And then he says it.

“Fuck it. Am I right? Fuck. It.”

I freeze.

Even a six-year old knows this is wrong. We understand we are supposed to be guarded, protected from language like this. We know when adults are saying it, right in front of us, something is wrong, the situation is bad. The adults who are supposed to be in control are not.

I look at my dad. He is smiling in a way I’ve seen before, a way that says he’s going to be polite but that he doesn’t like you. I know his I-like-you smile and this, this is not it. He looks away from the drunk man, but he doesn’t look at me. Not directly. His moves here are subtle and I watch him closely. Will he scoop me up and take me away? Will he point to me and ask the guy to watch his mouth?

My dad puts out the cigarette and is the very essence of calm. He makes no sudden move as he pulls our trash together and slides out of the booth. Whatever small, potent chaos the man is pulling him towards, my dad escapes it with ease, a kind of 1940’s nonchalance that gives absolutely no regard to the rants of this drunk guy.

I’m safe in my dad’s calm.

Later, I will remember the drunk guy, the fear.

And then I will remember driving home. The windows open. Dad singing “Splish Splash” like it was every other day. Any other day.

To Being Clueless

Without you, I might be paralyzed.

 

Not knowing what’s coming is one of the greatest assets I have.

I probably would have gone to college, but without you, I would not have fallen in love, certainly not so many times. Telling a woman, a friend of a friend, a stranger, at lunch one day that I was I was in love, it was my first time, amazing. Like we were the same person.

And she smiled a God-they’re-so-cute-when-they’re-young smile and told me she remembered her first love. “It’s great, really. Enjoy it.” I was furious that she would lump this love, this one true deepest expression of the meaning of the universe in with whatever sorry-ass experience she had 15 years ago.

She was right, of course. And if I knew the lesson in store for me, if I knew the years it would take to tangle and then untangle, I’m sure I would have refused it.

I might have refused moving up north. I knew about snow and short winter days. I didn’t know about spring, the thankless tiny blooms of snowdrops and crocuses, the snow in May. In Texas, by May, the crepe myrtles are showy and roses crowd around fences and up gates like noisy party guests. Texas doesn’t wait patiently for spring, does not applaud the smallest, most imperceptible signs of it. But here? We are grateful if the furnace doesn’t kick on all afternoon, grateful for a light jacket and not the parka. We have faith the warm weather will come, though we do not feel it yet. Had I known this was spring, this is spring every year, I would have never moved.

Had I known, I would have never bought a house. I would have invested more when I was younger (though I don’t know with what money) and I would written more with less fear. I would have cared less about what I was trying to say, the point I was trying to make, and more about the words I have and even more about the words I did not.

I think about what’s ahead, knowing more now than ever. I have a better sense of what can go wrong and how deeply it will hurt and how long that hurt will last. But I don’t know what form it will take so I spend the day saying yes, more, please. Thank you.

To The Birds Who Fly into Our Picture Window

I'm sorry you can't see us in here, the TV set, the sofa, the two dogs sleeping. I'm sorry you don't have echolocation that you could throw out, the warning coming back to you that something, however invisible is here. Turn away.

I'm reading about injustice in America when THUNK. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of the sparrow flying away, stunned mid-flight for not even a second. It takes a dip and then swoops up again.

You think: It looks so open, so full of possibility, so free. I could really get some momentum going there, you think. Do some loop-the-loops and maybe some barrel rolls. So you charge ahead, wings beating a little faster, speed gaining.

And now do you carry this with you? A certain fear of large empty spaces? How many windows do you have to fly into before you begin to hesitate? How many before you stop flying altogether? You watch the others, see one, she's young, begin to pick up speed. She's almost smiling. You want to warn her and though you squawk and screech, she can't hear you. She heads right into the clear open space. You hold your breath and shut your eyes. Listen. Listen.

To “...And More!”

Ambiguity is not an art, despite what teenagers and politicians would like us to believe. 

 

But you can’t resist, creeping in at the end of the radio ad, the big 4th of July sale happening now! Weed whackers, barbeque grills, lawn mowers, garden mulch, bedding plants AND MORE!!

Our minds run wild, filling in the scene. Not just a lawn mower, but a little shed to put in. A little shed that looks like a tiny house with shutters on the windows and painted tulips around the edges. Patio furniture that looks like living room furniture, a big netted tent to keep out the bugs and let in the breeze.

“And more” means 9:17 on a Friday night. We will have worked summer hours,which means we’ve been off since lunch time. We have gone for a hike, say, and it’s clear that everyone else in town has taken the afternoon to find a new path to somewhere cool or towards something sweet. At the end of the day, we will slice tomatoes for hamburgers, drink gin and tonics out of plastic cups. We end up on the patio, reclining on our “and more” lounge chairs, the stars sharpening in the dusk, our worries, for now, as distant.

It’s like the childhood road trip game Madlibs that can only be answered in the positive. Fill in the blanks. “...and now I feel as [adjective] as a [noun]. I have always wanted more time to [favorite hobby] and now thanks to this [treasured item], I can spend [number] of hours a day doing just what I love! I never thought I could be so [happy adjective], but thanks to [favorite retailer], I am.”

http://www.fastcompany.com/1677633/
marketing-mad-libs-next-biggest-tsunami-headline-generator

 You depend on us, on our imaginations, on our troubled and complicated lives.

And more.

ALL this, all this!

And MORE.

To The Placebo Effect

You are some powerful medicine. The doctor gives the patient a prescription for nothing, really, and two days later, improvement. A miracle really. Nothing else has worked. This stuff is great.

 

“I shall please.” If the pill is the right color and the doctor seems caring enough, the hospital seems  professional and trustworthy, and the patient believes, a lot of healing can be done without medicine at all. Pain dissolves, blood pressures come down, anxiety lifts and the world seems friendly again.

 And the science shows it’s not simply a patient’s perception, but that actual physical changes occur. Tumors shrink. Blood changes. 

 

Somehow, you are there all along. Somewhere, in between some neural pathway or tucked between this lobe and that lobe, you wait for the smallest of coaxings, the gentlest of callings. You must know how badly we need the relief, the hope. You unfurl like a vine, reaching out to nerve, curling around a vein, growing across a muscle. You sing a song like “Trust in Me” and we do. We relax into you. We feel you. You know us.

I wish I could call you out, not just for the pain in my back or my asthma. I have some memories I’d like you to heal. I would like to be better at math. I cannot for the life of me remember when to use “bring” and when to use “take” and I consider that something of an illness, given I teach writing for a living. Heal that. I would like you to come heal my distrust of bridges and restore my faith in the democratic process. I know you’re in there. Move me.

To County Fairs

Bring your Amber White and Gold Star chickens, your Berkshire, Hampshire, Yorkshire and Blue Butt pigs, your Arabian and Quarter horses. Bring your Flemish Giant and Angora rabbits and your Red Ear Slider turtles. Bring all the guinea pigs you can carry and all the sheep that will fit in the barn. Dairy cows with their big baby eyes.

Children wearing cowboy boots as much for work as for fashion tend to the animals as much livestock as pets. They brush the animals until their coats and feathers shine, humming to the radio they have plugged into the corner of the stall. One girl has decorated her horses stall with white stars and red and blue crepe paper ribbons. She has a collage of pictures hanging on the front of the stall, photo after photo of her face next to the horse, sometimes one smiling, sometimes the other. One is named Daisy and the other is Macy, but it’s not clear which is which.

Home Arts is in the next barn: cakes decorated like bouquets of roses, Little House on the Prairie, an Model T Ford. Quilted scenes of sunrises and sunsets, knitted sweaters for babies and dogs and the people who love them. Pickled beets, eggs, asparagus, carrots, cucumbers with jalapenos. I leave dizzy with the optimism/realism worldview combo that every booth delivers.

But the best are the rides, few of which I can ride given the warning signs that list all the conditions that make the ride a bad idea (back conditions, heart condition, lack of muscle control, dizziness, motion sickness, seizures), which is simultaneously the list of conditions you will leave the ride with. Whit is old enough to ride the Scrambler, and I volunteer to ride along because I can do circles, but Keith does heights, so we trade off. The ride goes around in a big circle, while the individual cars spin on their own axis while also going in towards the middle and out towards the edge.

When it starts, we are holding on to the bar tightly. Whit pulls and pushes himself against the force throwing us around, and as the ride speeds up, we whoop and hollar. But after a few minutes, the motion is frightening, and after a few more, it isn’t exciting, and after more, it isn’t fun. We spin in and out of view of the funnel cakes booth and the merry-go-round. We see Keith and then he’s gone. We speed past the crowd in line for the next turn, the carnie standing by the power bar. He’s not smiling when he tells the kids to move back. When I see him again, he is looking over all their heads at something in the distance. He starts to wave, but then stops and shakes his head. “Time’s up!” he shouts.

To Jobs I Would Like to Have

Namer of Colors

 

The pressure is intense; you’d be surprised. The new spring line is coming out and there are 7 new greens. The line is called “Millennial,” which, aside from knitted caps and crowdsourcing, has no connotations whatsoever. And somehow I have to think of a new way to say “green” that also suggests this “new” century we are in. I grab my coffee and a biscotti and head over to the paint shop, where they have the freshest versions of the samples.

The color-makers complain sometimes. “I just can’t LOOK at another magenta today!” but I don’t get it. You add a few more drops of yellow and a little blue #4 and presto! a new beige. Whether it’s pretty or useful is of no importance. Whether it is a color in nature matters not one bit. But I will have to name it.

Nano Haze. Knitted Cornflower. Sing The Oldies. Green Over Toast. Gilded Pumpkin Latte. Localvore Greenbean. Sweatervest. RayBan Blue.

But what I love about my job are the dreams each night. I can hear the colors, the hum of yellow, the green in C minor. I feel the words, the rough edges of “teal”, the way “grey” feels like the petals of a magnolia flower.

Sommelier Exclusive to Spanish Wines

I want a reason to train my palate to taste all the parts of a single sip of wine. It must have more to do with your brain than your tongue, a skill of attention more than muscle memory. I would even drink a cabernet, even a riesling to get this job. I could learn to love them.

But really, I just want know the Spanish wines. The garnachas and the riojas. The daring tempranillo. The salty whites Rudea Verdejo and Vina Gravonia.

I’m leading my clients through a tasting, pouring quickly enough to aerate but taking care not to bruise the flavor. You should first taste the olives, which is really the wind that comes up from the olive grove before it reaches the vineyard. Next you taste the revolutions, which come from the soil. This one is from Catalan and is the most bittersweet. The finish is dry, which is the dust settling after the bullfight. This was Picasso’s favorite and he saved it for Tuesdays.

Futurist

What makes a good Futurist is not the ability to predict the future, but a clear sense of the past as well as a deep knowledge of Shakespeare. Everything else is just connecting the dots. Let me tell you what the future holds:

“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat

of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”

So, you, you will be the fisherman.

Mind Reading Waitress

I have been a waitress in the past and I was horrible. Some nights, I actually lost money. But as a mind-reading waitress, I'd be excellent. People would stand at the bar for hours just to be seated at my table.

I'm actually not going to read your mind. I'm going to read your soul. We will have a short but meaningful conversation in which you indirectly reveal something about your soul. I will take into account what you are wearing, not in a judgemental way, but in the way that our clothes reflect our mood. Are you checking your phone a lot? Do you talk to your date when I walk away? Do you look tired? Are you celebrating? Or is this just a way to get out of the goddamn house for once?

Steve Jobs said, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them," and so I relieve you of all choices with the confidence that what I will bring you will satisfy you on every level. My chef is that good and she makes things on request.

For you? I am guessing by the hand woven wallet and the dog screensaver, you are a vegetarian or at least not opposed to meatless dishes. But you laugh a lot and tell a lot of jokes, even though you have clearly just come from the office. You need a big Bloody Mary to start and stuffed mushrooms with a small bit of truffle oil. For dinner, not pasta, which is what you always get, but a vegetarian shepherd's pie, with lots of root vegetables and a touch of blue cheese in the potato crust. Your date wants to celebrate, but is trying not to overwhelm you. Considerate that way. Not a drinker, though, so I bring a ice tea and lemonade in the tallest glass I can find, float fresh lemon on top. Crab claws are rare enough and have the added bonus of keeping the eater busy. For dinner, smoked duck in a dark Peking sauce. The chef has been making it for days. For just the right customer.

I don't accept tips. I'm paid well enough. You will leave happy and full. I don't even learn your names, but I remember you when you return.

To Dr. James Caleb Jackson, Inventor of Granola

Today I made what was probably my 357th batch of granola. I do not go many mornings in a row without granola, and I’ve been known to travel with it, even to foreign countries.

Dr. Jackson and his hipster beard--before hipster was a thing

 And I have you to thank, good Dr. James. You were the kind of doctor now we would refer to as “crunchy granola,” the kind who believes in the whole mind-body-spirit connection, always referencing things like “balance” and “character” and the healing powers of water. No tobacco, no meat, no alcohol. Lots of walking followed by lots of resting, but not too much. Clearing the mind means cleansing the body, all the Good Lord’s work should not ruined by those misguided human impulses.

So you say in your books: Hints on the Reproductive Organs: Their Diseases, Causes, and Cure on Hydropathic Principles, How to treat the Sick without Medicine, American Womanhood: Its Peculiarities and Necessities, and finally, Christ as a Physician.

If you were here, I would serve you a bowl of my granola and I suspect you would hate it. Too sweet, maybe. Too much cinnamon, though the nutmeg is nice. I think you will have something to say about mixing nuts with milk and why that’s such a bad combination for digestion. I tell you that tonight we will have lima beans. “Good,” you say, “Good copper.” You wonder how it is we are living longer when we are do so much so badly. Vaccines, antibiotics, better surgery and cancer treatments.

“Yes,” you say, standing in front of the open refrigerator, looking at the cheese in plastic, the leftover pizza, the turkey lunch meat and the jar of mayonnaise, “but what about the food?” You bend and lean deeper into the chill, breathing in an air you could never imagine.

To Giraffes

You should be lonely.

 

And tired. Tired of the tall jokes. “How’s the weather up there?” Tired of the questions, “How do you sleep?” Tired of the looks the baby rhinos give as you make your awkward drinking motions and the momma rhino says, “Don’t stare, dear” as she keeps staring. Tired of the way, behind your back, the dromedaries imitate your walk, exaggerating their steps, leaving aside all your grace.Tired of always being above the shade.

Oh sure, the humans love you, but with love like this, who needs enemies? Poached for your tails and your skins and meat. If they keep you alive, they ship you to cold countries, which despite the never-ending supply of leaves and the rotating enrichment activities, is still a cage. The children point and stare. You don’t know what to do with them, for them, about them.

Even in France, delivered to the King Charles X and living in the Jardin des Plantes. The lines to see you were the longest in Europe and soon, the Parisians were walking around in brown and white reticulated coats, painting the walls of their dining rooms to match you. Mere flattery you say, until the next new thing, until they grow tired of looking up.

You dream of an empty savannah, no lions to fight, no humans to step over. The sun rises, the light a golden thread between grass and sky. The acacia tree waits for you. You can smell the leaves at the very top, tender and sweet, the size of the wish you think but never make.

To Worry

Why are you a verb?

When I worry, I am the very opposite of any kind of doing or being or becoming or acting.

Worry (Noun): a state of mind one enters into, mostly involuntarily, but regardless of intention, one’s mind is now nothing but worry.

By Leena (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I try distraction--school work, walking the dogs, even this letter--but my mind is worried; it IS worry, I am worry. I don’t think about being worried or even about which I am worried.

I just think worry.

My mind is an ocean of worry and all my thoughts sail it.

Maybe the French, because they are good like this, say, “I have worry” the way they say “I have hunger.” But maybe, even better, they say, “Worry has me.”

Worry has me at retirement, at my health, at the health of all the people I love. Worry has me that my son will never grow up and worry has me that he will. Worry has me that the dogs might escape out the back fence and I check the gate again and again. Again.

Worry does not have me that I will be alone.

But worry does have me that everything, all of this, is not enough.

No, you are not a verb. You are a noun, solid and unmoving, whole.