Poem Draft from the Wenatchee World Daily Crossword Puzzle for this Tuesday's WW


Well, I'm finking out on writing this poem, can't stop thinking about other things, especially since the first two "words" across are "kwh" and "tsp" and the third is the flat and unmusical "chow". How now brown cow where's your chow? Chew your chow now, won't thou? Sheesh.

Last evening, moon waxing gibbous (god I love to write that word), over the lake flat as seran wrap stretched over a bowl of really great leftover potato salad, Jim said, "let's take a boat ride," and we got into our boat with UNDERWORLD by Don DeLillo. Duh. We've begun to read it as a read aloud. We've had several halts on the read aloud front lately. The 1951 Dodgers vs. Yankees? Mets? crap, I loved the scene, but baseball team names fall from my consciousness like factual details so often do for me. Every trip down lake is a revelation - I don't remember the coastline, the mountain peaks. I do remember the Seuss house and the house with the Hobie Cats out front, the property with the fussy gazebo and mobile home by the shore. What else do we need to be happy along the lake? I forget constellations and which direction the earth rotates. I have the eye of imagination but the eye of organization has miazmal glaucoma. I'm reading Ruth Gendler's NOTES ON THE NEED FOR BEAUTY, which has a lovely bit about eyes. She cites an essay in Bill Holm's book, THE MUSIC OF FAILURE, which I immediately looked up on Powell's (no show) and then Amazon.com, where it is available for $38. Um, the credit card went back into the duct tape wallet at that point. If anyone owns the book and wants to photocopy the essay "Horizontal Grandeur" I'll pay for the copying and postage! The piece I'm going to quote really hit me since I'm going back to the high plains of Chiloquin, Oregon for nine weeks on the 18th. Here's the passage I underlined from Ruth's NOTNFB:

In a brief, beautiful essay, "Horizontal Grandeur," Minnesota writer Bill Holm distinguishes between two ways of seeing, which he calls "the prairie eye" and "the woods eye." "The prairie eye looks for distance, clairty, and light; the woods eye for closeness, complexity, and darkness. The prairie eye looks for usefulness and plainness in art and architecture, the woods eye for the baroque and ornamental."

Holm describes how someone with a woods eye looks at twenty miles of prairie and sees nothing but grass. The one with a prairie eye "looks at a square foot and sees a universe; ten or twenty flowers and grasses, heights, heads, colors, shades, configurations, bearded, rough, smooth, simple, elegant. When a cloud passes over the sun, colors shift, like a child's kaleidoscope... Trust a prairie eye to find beauty and understate it truthfully, no matter how violent the apparent exaggeration. Thoreau, though a woodsman, said it right: 'I can never exaggerate enough.'"

On the next page, she writes : "Because by nature I readily identify with the eye of the imagination, I have been deeply moved by exercises that strengthen the eye of observation."

It is easy for me to depend on my eye of imagination and my quick facility, but these limit what I write and what I think about - wall off possibilities and make it easy for me to stumble downward into not seeing anything at all. I'm always having to haul myself up out of the awful well I've fallen into because I wasn't paying attention. Did you hear the "This American Life" segment on cruelty? I listened as a man began a story about he and a group of friends out playing, hearing a man weakly calling out, having heard them. He set up how wordlessly the lot of them, after an initial burst of rescue motions, chose not to help him or tell anyone. I couldn't stand listening. The tension was horrible; I could not hang with the story, couldn't bear the thought that man might have died for lack of rescue by those boys. As a little girl I could not watch "I Love Lucy" once the plot began in earnest. I jumped up and ran to my room as my parents sat and guffawed, smoking their headache causing cigarettes, my father in that green chair with the coppery brads making a border up the vertical fronts of the chair arms. Dreading something awful in the offing I retreat. I label myself emotional coward. I am cowed by emotions and events that have nothing to do with me. Worse when they HAVE something to do with me. My father is 84 years old. His doctor recently said, "You look like a man of 60 and you're robustly healthy, outside of the strokes." My father says, "I sometimes wonder what I will be when I grow up." Is it a family trait to put off till tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow since we look so much younger than others our age that we really might have that much more time, or maybe all the time in the world? Maybe we like Highlander are IMMORTAL, though I would hate to have to be on my guard all the time, have to sword fight my way to permanent immortality, the immortality even being conditional. So what you hung out with Mozart? Today I lop off your head and get stronger! I move toward The Gathering getting more warlike every encounter! RARRRR! Immortality does not convey maturity. And see how far I've wandered?

Looking at Jupiter through our bad telescope, we could see one of its moons. Jim said, "people used to call the planets 'The Wanderers.'"

After a meditative moment enjoying that phrase, I thought how I've lived all these years and have never particularly noticed planets. I haven't had to of course, my life doesn't depend on the night sky for navigation by land or sea or even within my imagination. My thoughts garble in the day's news, other people's needs, and I need a post-it note to remind me to look up on a clear night, to lie on the ground and stare into that vastness and marvel if not remember or even note what's up there in a naming/knowledge way.

Yesterday Jim harvested several of our tomatoes and many of our basil leaves. I'd remembered to buy fresh mozzerella at the Chelan Safeway, so we made caprese salad, mozzerella slab, basil leaf, tomato slice, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, eaten on our deck staring at the placid lake, the wild mountain the other side of it, feeling the air so perfectly the right temperature it felt soft and no temperature at all. And then I awoke to Jim shutting windows and the french door, rain slapping the trex deck, smell of newly wet cement, Thor rolling his bowling balls along the lanes above the bruised clouds.