Speckles

Inspired by a quote from Gary Snyder’s book, “The Practice of the Wild”

Back when I had time to write only

poems, I’d spend the speckled parts of

one day reading the thing that was penned

by inspiration in the shower – changing

a word or letter or comma, here or there – till

the thing was quite fixed over by day’s end, and it was

all done in those flecks of time, for I had all

the daily vacuuming to do, the black and white

kitchen tiles to mop – and many full meals –

and much washing and bed making too, for

nothing was short changed or skipped – and  

yet I wrote the poems – about housewifery, most

of all, for that was my vantage, and the seeing of

speckles and dapples and shine even when

the dull tedium added up to nothing, everyone knows

housework has that reputation, must be

shined and polished daily, and even then, it’s at

best a pot or pan, window, mirror – face it . . .

to most.  I’ve never had the authority

to call it more or make it sound

like a way to polish one’s life, or to live in the

present moment, or to say it was the

“highest calling of my 24 hours,”

which I read in a book the other day – the highest calling

of the 24 hours, and so I laughed to think that   

herding children into a carpool van, or shifting numbers in

major business plans, or directing people in the role of

boss or dictator – that it’s all the same, the most important

work of the hour, he said. 

I have struggled to think the same, make myself feel

more than I was, all in the practice of making dull shine;

I have made the black squares blacker

and the white squares . . . whiter.  It’s the practice of the

kitchen floor shine, albeit bent over, and

knowing dullness and routine and the hour.

It is not lofty work, not even to me, the one writing

this poem at the hour – and I have no authority

to make it sound so, not from this inner vantage, still bent

over this or that – it is a practice, to stay alert,

a path of sorts, to walk or skip or drag the feet

along black and white kitchen tiles – everyday, the hours . . .

in spite of dingy

windows and carpets and walls – days when

everything is cast as shadow and blur – always the practice of

finding speckles and sparkles to keep one stepping,

one more day, another chance

to practice it, to get it right, to make the

black tiles blacker, a comma act brighter, or white tiles  

whiter.

Fully Workable Hands

Coming home for breaks from college in the 70s, I would sometimes ride with a young man from a neighboring small town.  I knew he liked me-liked me, and I felt so uncomfortable with him that I often, I’m sure, said nothing at all on the six-hour drive home, except to answer his endless questions as succinctly as possible so as not to encourage him.  I knew he was searching for a date with me because of the types of questions he asked, such as, “What do you do for fun?” and “Do you like movies?” and “What kind of music do you listen to?” and “Do you like to dance?”  There were other signs too, of which young girls are acutely aware. 

I don’t remember his first name, but I remember his last name started with a G, because at one point he said, “We have that in common, both our last names start with G!”  That made me laugh.  G was friendly and outgoing and smart, and he is what people called back then a “thalidomide baby.”  He had very short arms that stopped somewhere up around the biceps, and small hardworking hands that emerged from the short-sleeved shirts that he always wore.  His chest was folded forward and his upper back was stooped from a lifetime (19 or 20 years) of having to function with arms that never reached a school desk, or a tabletop on which his fork and plate were placed, or, in this case, the steering wheel.  As he drove, his chest was nearly lying upon the steering wheel and his chin was touching the top of it, while his hands grasped each side at 10 and 2 as we’d been taught to drive back then.

He showed no self-consciousness of his condition; this was simply the way he knew his own life – just as I am accustomed to arms my own length with the relative “handicap” of not being able to reach across the room.  But I was young and extremely self-conscious at the time, and I tried always to avoid looking at him in the driver’s seat as he talked endlessly and asked questions to draw me into the whirlwind that he seemed to create with his hands as he drove and gestured.  I’ve always known better than to say this, but G’s hands were disturbing to me, poking out of his short sleeves as they did, like heavy wings that were trying to fly away.  They were small and somewhat deformed, and they worked so fast and independently of the rest of his body, that it seemed like two additional people were there in the car talking to me.  His hands did all the work of pointing and waving and gesturing and alternately steering the wheel.  Once he asked me what kind of car I liked.  I had no knowledge of cars back then, and no anticipation of owning a car, and no opinion about cars – but he kept pointing at cars, every one that passed us, lifting his hands and pointing and calling out the make and model and even the year, until finally I said, “I like that one.”  It was a Karmen Ghia, he told me, and that kept him silent for one minute.  Many years later when I owned my first car, that is the car I owned.  G was that kind of person, always working hard to engage the world around him – a whirlwind – and I suppose he influenced many people with that manner of his.               

But I was the person that I was, very introspective, self-conscious, and content to be quiet.  With G or not, I would much rather have looked out the window for six hours, thinking about the books we had been reading in literature classes I was taking – or any number of things I liked.  My favorite author at that time was Sherwood Anderson, and my favorite book of his was a collection of interconnected stories about the characters in a small town, called Winesburg, Ohio – and my favorite story in that collection was called “Hands.”  It’s about a man named Wings Biddlebaum whose hands are always nervously fiddling about as he talks.  In hindsight, I don’t know if I noticed G’s hardworking hands because of that being my favorite story, or if “Hands” became my favorite story because of noticing G’s hardworking hands.  It was all related.

G was studying pharmacy at UNC where we both attended, and he would one day take over his father’s drug store business in the small town near mine – that was his plan.  His father had provided his mother the thalidomide when she was pregnant with him – my mother told me this, for people in small towns, even neighboring ones, know these things – for her nausea, and of course no one knew at the time what the effects would be.  My mother said this one time after G dropped me off at our house and politely came inside to greet my mother and to shake my father’s hand.