why, like Roethke, I take my waking slow
Waking means doing things.
It means waiting, which means impatience,
everything takes too long, and then
it’s over too soon, or it drags on endlessly, not
as satisfying as I’d imagined, or I lack
the one tool needed to do it right
or at all. By “lack,” I mean the tool is somewhere,
always,
where I’m not.
Waking means the perpetual slow-down
of the bathroom ritual, and instantly, daily,
I reassess the wisdom of mornings
as a starting place, but finally
the promised day seems to begin,
largely unused, still possible, until I notice
the loaded dishwasher, remember an overdue
birthday card, can't pass by the unmade bed
or the cat's litter box, and if none of those things,
there's always my shattering mind and
its debris field, its overlapping fragments
and figments, and
so the day shrinks before it's barely begun,
a constriction that threatens each moment,
because it’s all all all
already too small, too filled,
and I feel finite.
I look outside repeatedly.
Today I just want to do everything
at once: make breakfast with fresh local ingredients
and grateful focus, eat it attentively and slowly while
I read email, meditate, and play with the cat --
the unremitting cat whose day is large --
as I go outside and take photos in the garden,
go outside and don’t take photos but only witness,
water the garden while I do and don’t take photos,
and weed it, and prune what needs pruning,
and harvest the suddenly seen small tomatoes and giant squash
and stop and absorb it all, breathing. My hands balance
a smooth green breakfast bowl, chopsticks, the frisky cat,
computer, camera, pruners, perfect long-handled weeding tool,
blue watering can, container of tomatoes and squash -- and now
a cucumber, some arugula necessitating absent scissors --
and I also want to plant something, or transplant it,
with the shovel that’s in the shed and the mulch
piled on the driveway’s edge, the not-enough compost
in the backyard, and the one watering can, left elsewhere.
© MMWms 2020
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Landing Page for write 31 days – dreamscape
Featured image: me with tools, May 2018 (manipulated with deep art effects)
This is exactly how I feel almost every day! You have distilled it perfectly in this poem. I’ve started staying in the bedroom to read in the early morning, waking up slowly with coffee and a good book postpones the inevitable sensation of time slipping away.