There is a spot in the garden where the overgrown and seeded-out fennel was uprooted. The phantom scent of fennel lingers on, inexplicably.
Happy Valentine’s Day to all the romantics in bloggerland!
For the resolutely unromantic, a good anti-love poem, from Billy Collins’ The Breather
Just as in the horror movies
when someone discovers that the phone calls
are coming from inside the house
so too, I realized
that our tender overlapping
has been taking place only inside me.
All that sweetness, the love and desire—
it’s just been me dialing myself
then following the ringing to another room
to find no one on the line,
well, sometimes a little breathing
but more often than not, nothing.
***
A close friend in the village, older and seemingly immortal, has to have open-heart surgery and I fight a towering wave of anxiety on hearing this news. It will be fine, it will all work out in the end, hope matters, we each live by the flickering brave tiny light of hope. But fear is the dark wave sliding down again, rearing overhead, the sheer towering unknowability of it all in this life.
***
Poetry floats me through the day. From Tony Hoagland
Windchime
She goes out to hang the windchime
in her nightie and her work boots.
It’s six-thirty in the morning
and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest
tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,
*
windchime in her left hand,
hammer in her right, the nail
gripped tight between her teeth
but nothing happens next because
she’s trying to figure out
how to switch #1 with #3.
*
She must have been standing in the kitchen,
coffee in her hand, asleep,
when she heard it—the wind blowing
through the sound the windchime
wasn’t making
because it wasn’t there.
*
No one, including me, especially anymore believes
till death do us part,
but I can see what I would miss in leaving—
the way her ankles go into the work boots
as she stands upon the ice chest;
the problem scrunched into her forehead;
the little kissable mouth
with the nail in it.
Perfect poetry selections today, love. I may steal Billy Collins’ for my Facebook status. While there is a Motorcycle Man, I am most certainly single and, well, this poem speaks to me.
You are loved in West Virginia.
You too Kristin. The right love will come along –
Here I am, reading about the woman in the boots on an ice chest with a nail in her mouth, thinking of all the horrible incidents that could result. I guess I worked in insurance for too long. (I wish I didn’t think this way)
No, no, Mary Christine, I think that way too. I call it ‘the imagination of disaster’. I would be hovering around giving advice and annoying the loved one.
Wow. The little kissable mouth with the nail in it. These lines in this poem really illustrate how poetry can do what no other form of writing can. What a perfectly structured poem. Its telling such a great story of a moment, and them it is all brought to an abrupt halt with those lines. Happy Valentines. xoxoxo
It is a powerful poem, isn’t it? I can’t imagine a day without poetry. Happy V yourself Susan.
I LOVE the Tony Hoagland poem–best Valentine gift ever!
Such a worry about your friend, but I hear South Africa’s a good place to be if you need heart surgery. Wishing her well.
She is a he, Susan, but yes, we do have excellent medical facilities here as far as heart units go. The first successful heart transplant was done in South Africa in 1966.
I am in it until death do us part. I would miss her too much and her kissable mouth as well and all the other kissable parts that I love. I am a romantic for sure.
Love that romantic in you. Syd!