To Patience

Mom sends a text: “Dad has pneumonia.”  New antibiotics and patience.

St. Monica
The Patron Saint of Patience

Mile 10 of a 13 mile run. Distraction and patience.

I’m late for work but the dog needs to go out. Car keys and patience.

My son still doesn’t eat chicken. Cereal and patience.

A student thinks commas go wherever she pauses and she wants to pause a lot. Resistance and patience.

The handle on the van door is broken, the back hatch won’t stay up by itself, the check engine light comes on randomly and the back windshield wiper is broken, but the engine starts every morning and gets me where I need to go. Savings account and patience.

It’s almost May and the heat is still on all day, the windows are closed. Light sweaters and patience.

My friend is angry at all the injustice. Writing and patience.

7:30 commute downtown where there is a traffic light every two blocks, yet still the SUV behind me insists on cutting people off and racing ahead even though we all end up at the next light together. Loud music and patience.

To Jack Myers Reading Robert Creeley in Creative Writing Class

The first time I saw Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of The Metro” on the blackboard in English class my junior year of high school, I was stunned. You can write like that? I thought. Just that? This isn’t tennis without a net; this is high wire walking without a net. Nothing is safe and everything hangs in the balance.

I wanted that life.

I make it to Jack’s Introduction to Poetry Class at SMU. I’m a freshman and think I have finally come to meet my fate: this is where the real work happens and Jack is so clearly the teacher. He seems cranky, but only for a second. He has a beard and a cigarette all the time. He says things like, “for cryin’ out loud” and I can still hear how his hand would softly land on the desk when he ended a sentence.

Jack Myers
http://www.smu.edu/News/2009/jack-myers-dmn-30nov2009

Mostly, he read to us. Poem after poem after poem, he would stand, a little tilted, a little slumped to one side, with his hand his pocket. One day, he read Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole” and he got two lines in and took his hand out of his pocket and began to punctuate the lines, slightly, more like he was playing an instrument than reading a poem. I heard that poem the way I saw Pound’s poem and again I wanted that. Whatever life one has to live to get to the moment when I sit down and write something like that.

And then, one spring day, he brought out Robert Creeley. He may have slipped and called him Bob. And again Jack gets up and again he plays along as he reads and again he shifts from side to side as the lines move him and he just keeps reading poem after poem.

“For love--I would/split open your head…”

“Pain is a flower like that one/like this one/ like that one/like this one.”

“As I sd to my/friend, because I am/always talking…”

Jack smiles at the end of each one. Class dismissed. As if we can just walk out of the room. As if  the magnolia trees aren’t drunk again. As if this day wasn’t created out of nothing. As if the steps down Dallas Hall don’t lead to another life that I have to go live now. A life with lines like this in it.

Before that day, I thought simple meant easy, but after that, I realized simple was the hardest thing to write.

The last line haunted me all day: “drive, he sd, for/christ’s sake, look/out where yr going.”           

To Those Extra Large Bars of Hershey’s Chocolate

Source: http://pimentocheeseplease.com/

It would seem likely that in a house with seven people, a kid might feel crowded, and though that was often true, more often it was surprisingly lonely. People are busy. Even kids. Even in the ‘70’s, which we imagine as a time when children were free to roam about untethered by phones and schedules and practices of this and that. But there’s always been homework, always been sports to play, always been a reason to stay after school for a club. I wasn’t much a joiner and afternoons in the house were quiet, maybe just me and my little sister watching TV. Maybe I’m reading. It’s quiet.

I admit the mornings were different, especially for those few years we were all still at home and had all reached an age when it mattered what we looked like going to school. I remember, getting in the shower, hearing a voice on the other side of the door remind me, “Limit your showers to three minutes please!” I often think my habit for waking early developed purely from a love of hot water. Sleep in, and it’s nothing but cold. We flew in and out of the kitchen in bursts. Cereal bowls crammed in the sink. Lunches in brown bags lined up on the counter to grab on our way out. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Maybe twice a year, maybe more, on a Friday night, Mom would notice that for some reason we would all be home together. And not only that, there would be a something on TV that we all wanted to watch. Brian’s Song or a NOVA special. Without a word, even without us noticing, she would make a run to the drugstore after dinner, before the movie started.

The den was the smallest room and we crowded in, three on the couch, two on the loveseat, two on the floor with the Big Pillows. Mom would take a pillow. Sometimes I sat with her. And without a word or a fuss at all, she would pull out of nowhere a giant Hershey bar. The kind as big as my face. She’d just start passing it around. This chocolate is different that the regular bar. It’s thicker and takes longer to bite into. There’s just a hint that the sugar isn’t completely dissolved, but it’s still creamy. I let it melt in my mouth until I couldn’t stand it anymore and just bit it.

We are watching a special on PBS about lions. We are all in one room. We are all complicated. We are all confused, though we don’t all know it. We are all moving in different directions, though the trajectories right now are so close together that we can’t see how much they widen. We are all working something out. We are all quiet and we all love the chocolate. Even Dad has a piece. And when we finish the first bar, she does it. She brings out another one.