Matins
You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?
Louise Gluck
I’m in one of those phases where language, spoken or written, feels like a sock that doesn’t fit around the heel. There are times when just digging, whether for weeds or clover, is the only gesture that feels authentic. And in that silence I can detect the slow shifting of a hibernating beast, my own, moving in its lair down deep in the earth.
i know also how it feels…
Haunting poetry. Truly beautiful and wise. I love your metaphor about the sock that doesn’t quite fit around the heel. I’ve gone through many-an-odd-fitting-sock and I know it feels like being in limbo.
As a musician, I have always believed that the process is often more important than the product; that the act or art of ‘digging’, even and especially when we know it’s the only gesture that feels authentic at that point in time, is what defines us.
BTW, I am so ashamed of this but I think I was careless and made a mistake replying to your comment last Sept. Please read my real reply and accept my sincerest apologies. Thank you.
I just read a collection of her work – another serendipitous event!
I know what you mean. Sometimes you just have to work with the body, get your hands messy. I wish I were a painter sometimes just because of that. Cooking sometimes works. But basically, it’s an internal process, right? Seasonal, like the poem says.
Whether it is painting, music or poetry, we all seem to have a sense of what digging means. Thanks for bringing the power of this poem full circle.
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