I saw

I saw a man standing there in the doorway of a house. I was on the bus. Window seat behind the back exit door of the bus. He was on the telephone behind the glass screen door of his house. He was wearing a white long sleeve shirt. He was behind glass. I was behind glass. He looked out of his house. I looked out of the bus at the marvelous 40 degree air, skin to marble air, winter, so this is winter air. He was on the phone. I imagined he had just moved in, gazing out on the newly his front porch, gaging what was now his view from home. A bus goes by every hour. Every now and then I am on that bus and this once I saw a man standing there in the doorway of his home wearing a white long sleeve shirt talking on the telephone.

As we passed, I almost cried. I do not know why. But I breathed in and looked forward on the bus. The warm bus air, used exhale breath and the seat next to me was empty.

Poetry

I have been thinking about the point of poetry. What is the point? Does it change the world? record history? change hearts? help explain? capture a moment of flux? Does poetry make us feel important. A.E. Stallings says on the back of her book: "This is not necessary. This is neither/Crucial nor salvation..../It did not need to happen, won't illumine/The smirch of history, the future's omen./Necessity is merely what sustains--/It's what we do not need that makes us human."

In my response to this and my musings of poetry i have written a poem:

Ode to Life

Sweep the kitchen everyday
Play basketball in the middle of the street
Collect the stringy-haired cats that cry in the night
Learn to make tamales and sell them from a shopping cart
Tear out the broke-down water heater
Run, walk or never go to the bus stop
Feed all your dollar bills to the juke box at the corner store
Eat nothing but chili powder and lime
Do your math homework with a sharpie
Order a large pizza and eat it alone
Write pages and pages poetry
Braid your sister’s hair into pigtails
Yell at your mother in a language she does not understand
Tear up all the grass with your soccer cleats
Break dance, play video games, learn to speak Korean
With your boss at the clothing store
Go ahead and chase the wind
Buy all your fruit from the man who drives the ice cream truck
Read the newspaper
Paint the walls light blue
Listen and watch the helicopters over head
Draw on pages ripped from telephone book
Buy bootlegged movies and watch them again and again
Wash your hair with handfuls of shampoo
Scrub the porch and the trashcans with hose water
Count the spikes on the cactus in neighbor’s yard
Carry your dirty clothes to the laundromat in a backpack
Recycle glass and plastic bottles
Listen to your music until the speakers blow out
Fly to the moon and back again
or stay there for all I care
Do whatever it takes
to lose the key, to forget
the locked drawer
and the gun inside.

A Sonnet for Hoosier Kitchens

Everything is easier here, including
washing the dishes and falling
in love. The large sink floods
with soapy water and the burnt edges
of casseroles and the fried fish residue
succumb to scrub brush bristles, sharper
than loneliness. There is counter space
enough to let the pans air dry
before returning them to the dark
cupboards where they belong
and where they wait for the next
dinner which requires them to be filled
with spice and sauce while they hold
their shape over the heated coils.


p.s. no, i have not fallen in love... poetry is not strictly autobiographical.

Hope

Emily Dickinson said Hope is a thing with feathers. As if she could not remember the word for it. depression held that word from here and gave her a new description. A bird is a thing with feathers. and hope is a that bird that tickles insides. Sometimes there is nothing worse than hope. Most time there is nothing better. I am hopeful today. Not only because Barack Obama and his family will be moving into the White House in January. Not only because I have warm boots on a cold day. But because God loves me and is patient, and wants good things for me and finish the good work he has started.

Alone-ness is different than loneliness. Loneliness is harder to admit. While I have been uncomfortably shifting between being Alone and being Lonely, I have been realizing that I need not let fear, worry, percentages, rule me. Birds are sometimes attracted to shiny things. While hope can be described as a thing with feathers, it is not attracted and swooping down at every shiny ring or glinting piece of string for nest building. Hope is a patient bird. Hope is a bird who sits on tree branches for hours singing singing a nameless tune. On the tree branch, i sit next to Hope, warmed by its feathers and I hope I will soon learn this wordless tune and join in on its song.