July 19: Searching for Beauty, Sandra Beasley, "Inventory"

I am sitting in my office at the university at the moment.  The hallway is dark.  The place shuts down at 4 p.m. during the summer.  Everybody goes home, and the lights, one by one, blink out.

I was looking for something beautiful to write about in this post.  I thought about sitting by a window and gazing out at Lake Superior.  I contemplated hiking into the forest and gazing at all the green around me.  Tried listening to music, reading some Sharon Olds.  Nothing is striking me as beautiful this evening.

Maybe I'm trying too hard.  There's an empty Diet Coke bottle sitting on my desk.  The fluorescent light is striking it, and it's glowing like an icicle on Christmas morning.  There's a ratty copy of Shakespeare's plays on my bookshelf, its binding frayed and torn, and it looks like it belongs in the Library of Alexandria.  My office mate has a picture of her two sons sitting on her desk in a filigreed metal frame.

Maybe beauty is always around.  I just don't take the opportunity to notice it very often.

Saint Marty is pretty hungry at the moment.  Food sounds beautiful.  A double cheeseburger would be the freakin' Sistine Chapel.

Inventory

by:  Sandra Beasley

We gaze into your eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes.

We forget the display is blind.

Your fanned tail really a cupped palm,

gathering each hen’s quiver to your ear,

your feathers the green-blue glamours of

reflective absence. No one

ever praises the ass of the peacock,

grin of quills that does the heavy lifting,

or how you eat anything from ants

to Styrofoam, from cheese to chicken.

Road roamer, flower devourer:

the one who’ll pick a fight with a goat.

Preen all you want. What I love of you

will be the bare undercarriage,

the calamus. I am done with beauty.

Only a blinking eye can measure the light.

Beauty's in the eye of the beholder . . .

May 4: Out of the Woods, Spring Rituals, Owning Up

Coming out of the woods, I heard loud shots; they reverberated ominously in the damp air.  But when I walked up the road, I saw what it was, and the dread quality of the whole afternoon vanished at once.  It was a couple of garbage trucks, huge trash compacters humped like armadillos, and they were making their engines backfire to impress my neighbors' pretty daughters, high school girls who had just been let off the school bus.  The long-haired girls strayed into giggling clumps at the corner of the road; the garbage trucks sped away gloriously, as if they had been the Tarleton twins on thoroughbreds cantering away from the gates of Tara.  In the distance a white vapor was rising from the waters of Carvin's Cove and catching in trailing tufts in the mountain's sides.  I stood on my own porch, exhilarated, unwilling to go indoors.

It is springtime at Tinker Creek.  Dillard comes upon this little spectacle as she emerges from the forest after a hike.  Everything is greening up, becoming lush and fecund.  The sap is flowing.  The garbage guys are showing off for these teenage girls.  Sort of like a peacock spreading its feathers or a silverback gorilla pounding its chest.  It's a way to draw attention, display masculinity.  It's a spring thing, I think, built into male DNA.  And Dillard finds this spring ritual exhilarating.

I participated in a couple spring rituals this evening.  First, I went to my office at the university and cleaned up my desk from an entire academic year's worth of clutter.  Piles of papers and books.  Empty Diet Coke cans.  I indexed and filed my classroom materials into 3-ring binders.  And I threw out a lot of stuff.

Second, I went Mother's Day shopping with my daughter.  We had exactly one hour to make our purchases.  We went to Walmart.  We crossed the highway to Target.  Success.  Not only did we find cards and presents, but also found a really cool Star Wars shirt for my daughter.  And we got some popcorn, too.

Third, I made some amends this evening.  I sent an e-mail to a colleague/friend.  For most of the school year, I neglected to fulfill some promises I had made.  It has been weighing on my mind a lot.  So, tonight, I apologized to my friend.  I hope that my e-mail is received with the spirit in which it was sent:  sincerity and goodwill.  It is always good to own up to the mistakes you make, I think.  It's good for the soul.  Keeps you grounded and honest.

Spring rituals.  Some of them are cleansing; some, a little painful.  It's all about rebirth and growth.  Letting go and owning up.

Saint Marty did a little of all of that tonight.

By the way--Happy Star Wars Day!