The Peace of Wild Things

I called in sick to work today. For some reason I was just tired of going to work. I was tired of being in charge, but not really being in charge. People line up outside my office with problems to share, or call me with complaints. My boss, bless his heart, is a kind and understanding man, but that makes it harder for me when I disappoint him. Sometimes he must think I'm crazy the way I send poetry out to him and my group via email. (And they are always very politically correct poems, too. I hide the edgiest ones so as not to offend anyone.)

So I spent the day doing as little as possible. I let the cats in and out, and fed the birds, and chased the squirrels away from the bird feeder.

I'll be back at work tomorrow, hopefully hanging on to some of the peace of today.


The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Numbers

When Beth was a young child, about 3 or 4, and just into nursery school, she asked me one day, "Mom, what's the last number?"

I did my best to explain infinity -- there is no last number -- any number you pick to be the last, you can always add 1 to it and make another number. Numbers just go on forever.

What a brilliant child, I'm thinking -- so young to have such questions.

"Well," she answered with a little giggle, "At my school, it's 99."


Numbers

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancer dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And the multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrow take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.

There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mother’s call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.

Mary Cornish

Swings

One of my earliest memories is of swinging on a swing at the back of our yard. I couldn’t have been more than 3, because we were still living in the house on Dean Avenue, across the street from the Fairgrounds, and we left that house the summer I was 3 and a half, after my younger sister was born. My father probably made the swing, cutting and sanding the wooden board seat, and knotting the stout ropes that hung it from a tree limb. I remember he taught me how to pump my legs so that the swing would go higher and higher without being pushed. After we moved, we would walk up to the school play ground to swing on the swings there. They had metal seats and chains, with pea gravel underneath them to cushion our falls.

Carolyn Butler had a swing set in her back yard, one with tubular metal legs that weren’t very well seated in the ground. If you swung high enough on her swing, the legs would come out of the ground and threaten to tip the whole thing over. There was a rumor that someone had once swung so high on Carolyn’s swing that they went right up over the metal bar on top and down the other side. I don’t remember who was supposed to have done this, or who, if anyone, saw it happen, but it gave us all chills to talk about it. One of the best things to do on a swing is twist it around and around, until the chains make a tight spiral, and then lift your feet off the ground so that the spiral unwinds fast enough to make you dizzy. Sometimes we just pumped the swing up as high as we could and jumped off. It was almost like flying.

Do kids even swing anymore? Or has someone decided swings aren’t safe enough? God forbid a child should pinch a finger, or scrape a knee, or whack a head. I know kids don’t roam the neighborhood from dawn to dusk like we did, playing whatever we wanted, twisting round on swings seats until we were dizzy enough to throw up, or jumping off swings to fly. Now kids spend their summers at day care, or day camp, or play dates, carefully supervised to keep them from getting hurt – to keep them from flying.


The Swing
Robert Louis Stevenson

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker

My husband Tom took a suit coat back to Norstroms last weekend to see if they could repair the damage done by his shredder. He had the coat over his arm while he emptied his pockets after work and leaned too close to the cross-cut shredder in his home office. The shredder was on automatic, so it reached out and grabbed the corner of his coat and shredded about an inch and a half of the left front bottom edge. Vincent, who had sold him the suit 6 months ago, is a tall, thin, impeccably groomed and suited, gray-haired gentleman. He has the quiet reserve of a butler, or maybe an undertaker. He listened to Tom's story of sartorial accident with only a raised eyebrow, but when Tom asked to have the coat shortened by an inch and a half, a small twitch of the lips gave away Vincent's true opinion. Vincent took the coat back to consult with the tailor, another exemplary gentleman. They both murmered about proportions and style, while trying their best to hide their smiles. Finally they agreed to see what could be done to salvage the poor coat. Vincent offered to sell my husband another suit - something in a 39 or 40 short, he thought. But Tom said he was waiting for a 40 extra-short.

So, of course, I thought of these lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

Cooking

My mother put a pot of white beans on to soak one evening and went to bed. My father came home from work late, and hungry, and ate a bowl of the beans. Gave himself the hiccups for three days. My father would eat anything, and love it, which was a good thing, because my mother was not a good cook. Yet, every day at dinner, my father cleaned his plate and said "That was the best meal I ever ate." He probably said that about the raw beans.

I've cooked for 34 years for a man who doesn't really much care about food. He'd just as soon have MacDonald's as a home-cooked meal. He can be happy with a bowl of Frosted Flakes for supper. This poem is for him.


After Forty Years of Marriage, She Tries
a New Recipe for Hamburger Hot Dish


“How did you like it?” she asked.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“This is the third time I cooked
it this way. Why can’t you
ever say if you like something?”

“Well if I didn’t like it. I
wouldn’t eat it,” he said.

“You never can say anything
I cook tastes good.”

“I don’t know why all the time
you think I have to say it’s good.
I eat it, don’t I?”

“I don’t think you have to say
all the time it’s good, but once
in a while you could say
you like it.”

“It’s all right,” he said.

Leo Dangel