Drinking a Fifth
March 4, 2008
“It is estimated that Americans now spend, on average, fourteen years of their lives watching TV.”
“We tend to over-report our good behavior, under-report our bad behavior.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Fourteen divided by seventy-four — a life span.
Multiply the quotient by one hundred.
Nineteen percent.
About one-fifth of your life (if you’re average, of course).
Sever one leg completely from your body.
Take it from the hip down.
Now run fast.
Take your house and board up a room
(without first removing anything from it).
How cramped do you feel?
Are there five in your family?
Shoot one.
How long will you grieve?
Drop your salary from forty to thirty-two thousand.
Burn eight thousand one-dollar bills, on by one.
Cover yourself with their ashes.
What is twenty percent of our vision?
When gone, are we legally blind?
Lose ten points from your IQ:
Slam your head against a brick wall
repeatedly.
Can you still understand this?
And if all this is too daunting, go down easy:
watch others live their lives.
Disregard your own,
the real one,
the one slipping away.
Rain Like This
February 11, 2008
When rain falls like this
on the near side of silence
just before reaching unnoticed,
falling at a pace commensurate
with the ground’s thirst,
infusing green uncut garden grass
with vigor after a winter’s numb,
And when it falls as it does now
onto the goldfish pond,
birthing antiphons of ripples
whose voices diffuse
into a symphonic blend
of crest and trough,
I imagine myself as a fish
gold and languid
unaware that little pieces of my world
fall from on high
just above my plane of knowledge,
bending my resilient canopy,
suffusing water with air,
moving me with vernal pulses,
creating a larger pool in which to swim.
Abbey Pond
February 11, 2008
seven stalks of broomsage sway
on a raised clump of turf
arcing up over a lip of icy pond;
siblings wrapped in a rug of swirled oak leaf.
Their ribboned cossicks,
sensate to the breeze, tremble,
balance in the air, touch
their tawny, filamental bodies in myriad ways.
Finely spiked hair frays from heads
curving downward, a parabola of prayer
and fascination.
Over their pale gold crowns
a lone mosquito jerks by,
drunk with cold, shivering into oblivion.
On the far shore
a wan sun has kept at bay
by a bare margin the full reach of ice.
A solitary goose steps gingerly
in the thin seam of winter water
periodically plunging its beaked head below.
Sated or not, off it flies in unhurried flaps.
They fall on my ears like faint waves
breaking double-time on a distant beach.
This breeze, that mosquito, a goose
feeding or in flight, broomsage
along icy pondshore —
there is a mystery here, an enigma of being
my profane eyes may never see.
But alone and quiet I sometimes receive
intimations of an enfolding of essence so deep,
a conjunction of place and time so dense,
an intersection of life so intricate,
symmetry so terrifying,
that a single note begins to distinguish itsel
fin the background, arising from nowhere, everywhere
one pulse ample and pure,
so astonishing in beauty, I tell you
so heartsplitting that i stagger
for a brief second
under its sway.
Light of the World
February 11, 2008
We roll slowly toward dawn
the day when walls of light unloosed
flood over the world’s rim
over rooftops spraying crowns of trees
drinking photons,
the sun’s exhalation,
drawing strength,
gaining loft, gaining depth
enlarging their presence
among us.