Rough Work

Painting by Paul Klee

Rough Work (in memory of Ann Bunting-Mock)

Let me just sit
and feel the morning change
into her winter clothes
again.
Summer’s breath
just passed across my hands,
undulating
like a line of pelicans
above the dunes
and hollows
of my palms.

I have become my age.
I can do anything.
I watch the cats,
I listen to the winds
that drive the surf
onto the island.

My front porch sings
the songs
these front line
mainland trees sing.
They keep the twists
the winds give them
and no one
shouts my name.
My lifeline
takes a little break
this morning,
a little pause
between serenity and pain.
The cats refuse
to keep me warm.
The morning is for sitting in,
not writing.

Replenish me then,
and when I’m ancient,
take me home.
When the skin of my heart
no longer holds the things
I’ve said and done,
collect me,
carry me in your arms
back into the changing room,
lay me out
among friends
and empty me
of witness and experience.

The six lifetimes
in one
you gave me this time
broke the doors
of my heart down,
broke the doors,
the bones,
the mind.

You do rough work.
I know it was invited
but your hands are rough,
sometimes.
Yes,
I begged the wide experience.
“Make me a proper vehicle!”,
I cried.
That’s okay.
I’m just telling you
that your old truck is tired.

The right side
of the morning
brings the sound
of bird calls.
Work sounds
cross the river
from the island.
Chain saws cut pockets
in the wind;
carpenters fill them
with nails and hammering.
Behind it all
the rocking ocean sizzles
through the sand.
Now a storm collects gray wind.
Something you said
has gobbled up the sun.

The left side
holds the silence in.
I am divided
down a center line.
One side full of words,
the other full of quiet.
You speak of small miracles.
I speak of time.
You speak of mystery
and remind me
of the cost of pride.
I remind you that
I know it’s price.
You ask me if I’m tired.
You know I’m tired.
You touch my wrist,
you slide your palm
beneath my palm.
ou are a whisper
across my skin,
I try to breathe you in,
I try to leave my bones behind
to meet you.
You say,
stay,
watch the rain.

The rain has many fingers
and plays to me so quickly,
hitting every key
so many times,
striking wave,
and dune,
and river.
It comes ashore,
hits the trees,
surrounds the house
and drowns me.

I could be the pelican,
the duck out on the river.
I could be the single drop of water
at the very end
of my cat’s chin whisker
or the way
she watches the world
beyond me.
I could be whatever mauled
and blinded her.
Instead,
I am the finder
and the keeper,
the one who gets to feed her.

The old cat healed her.
He snarled and hissed,
he circled her,
he hated her.
She sat calm and quiet
at the center
of his attention.
Two days later
he was nursing her.
What do I do with this rain?

I say, Mr Einstein,
there is nothing in my hands.
You say that’s okay.
Tell me about the seven lives, I say.
You’re on the sixth, says he.
I’m thinking,
thirty more years of this.
I’ll sleep more,
I’ll get more exercise,
I’ll give up cigarettes
and learn to like water.

The rain is a curtain
around my porch.
Someone on the island
drops a stack of boards
and the flat sound
carries through the rain
and across the water.

I am lucky,
I have always been shadowed
by love.
In this my sixth life
I am especially blessed,
it seems my fate and destiny,
my job perhaps,
to recognize it’s presence.

The rooms of my life
are filled
with love’s magnetic images
and icons,
and the day is a gray shrine
filled with bird calls,
pelicans,
gray wind,
rain,
a blind kitten,
hissing suspicion,
the river,
the ocean,
the distant sounds of boards dropping,
of hammering
nailing up the wind.

Rick Mobbs 2008