I AM SAD TO HAVE AMASSED SUCH THINGS

When I go back to earth . . .

Be still, I am content,
Joy was a flame in me
Too steady to destroy . . .
I found more joy in sorrow
Than you could find in joy.

-Sara Teasdale

Things that make me think of the day when I go back to the earth, of the day I’ll take these things with me with me when I go.  An old pair of boots on their sixth resole.  A turquoise ring that I use to mentally calibrate my cloudy mind with the clear blue sky.  I will have these things until then and thereafter, as long as it takes for hide and silver and stone to become some other energy.    

Perhaps it’s natural to let oneself go.  Too much bad food and good beer.  The bicycling of my thirties replaced by a Harley Davidson in my forties.  I read that Gabriel Garcia Marquez smoked 30,000 cigarettes writing One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Before it was published his wife asked, “And what if after all this, it’s a bad novel?”

It is my practice to let a fly live after two failed attempts with the swatter.  It’s cruel to do otherwise.  But my dog Georgia just caught a fly in her mouth with a single mouth snap.  Case closed.  No need for moral scrutiny.  And a meadowlark sings to the wind or perhaps to me.  It is simply the sweetest sound of my childhood walking in knee-high prairie grass.   

I’m reminded that possessions and death are inconsequential to a dog and to a fly and to a mockingbird and therefore to me, at least in the wisdom of this brief moment on the back patio on the first day of spring. 

 

 

Santa Fe Plaza, Summer 2015