The Sky As With Bells, As With Nothing In It

It has been so outrageously gorgeous outside this week that even a reluctant-to-see-summer-go scoffer like me can no longer hold out against the many-colored, fluttering charms of autumn. I went for a walk yesterday, for no reason except that it was so pretty I needed to be out in it, moving around like everything else.

Snowbell, our bunny, has been shedding his summer coat for the past month, and today I notice that his winter coat has come in underneath, thick and even softer than the usual bunny pelt, which is the softest fur I've ever felt, except for chinchilla.

Ron has just come back from a trip and no one has another scheduled for this weekend, which makes me optimistic that soon I can cook dinner and gather everyone around, although we probably won't sit outside and grill anything, as we did last weekend (making Snowbell nervous, as the grill always does). I imagine it will be like this poem, The Sky As With Bells, As With Nothing In It by Arda Collins:

This bright day all together we eat a Sunday dinner.
We watch the sun in the wind through a mirror
that reflects the leaves blowing hard behind glass doors.
Yellow-green, turning violently and violently, and quiet.
The gilded mirror opens up to trees like a high gate
on a wall that leads nowhere, as to a room that lies behind--
a display for window curtains in a department store--
a window dressed up in its Sunday best, an organdy veil
under wool drapes, silky tie-backs with tassels, wall to wall carpet.
A light comes through the curtains as though the last afternoon rays
were coming through the curtains. The light that shines
from a small fixed bulb fixed to white sheet rock.

Come sunshine, finish powdering your nose.
The wind is colder, doors shrink in their frames and close louder.

I think I love this poem mostly for that final couplet, the reminder of the way an autumn day can suddenly turn bleak when the sun goes in, and the feeling of withdrawing indoors, the end of all possibility outside. I'll get that feeling even more strongly as the days get shorter and sunshine scarcer.

Department Store

We're still unpacking and arranging the things we brought back from my parents' house. I'm using the big antique Chinese desk that used to belong to my great-aunt, who always covered it in papers. After she died, it sat in state in my parents' living room with only a few art objects on its polished surface. Now it's going to get daily use again, and for the first time in its long span of years it will have a laptop on it (and a Magritte print hanging above it).

As I take things out of packing boxes, remembering where they were at my parents' house, I think about how the things are changed by their new surroundings, like in this poem by Arda Collins:

Department Store

You're a realist. It's a department store.
God is never there,

even when everyone goes home at night.

A saleswoman left her dark gray wool skirt
laid out on a chair when she went to bed.

The room was quiet while the woman slept.
The skirt didn't pray.

The skirt was lined with shadows from the blinds.
The lines moved around the room through the night.
The saleswoman breathed into the shadows.
Her breath, the heat, the faint smell of supper
she had made earlier passed through the skirt.

It was a long time since any speaking
but it was as though there had been speaking.

Night was long and day began forever.
The skirt was different than the night before.

The desk will be different after the smells of all our suppers. Already it looks at home to me, though.

Spring

It's the time of year when I'm tired of everything. Dark winter clothes. Piles of snow. Gray sky. Driving. My cooking.

I've been actually looking through my collection of recipes, going to the store, and making dinners that I haven't made in a year or so, just for a little variety in the days. Earlier this week I made a cabbage, cheese and beef broth soup that my mother-in-law used to make. Tonight we're having Moroccan chicken stew with olives, tomatoes, and chickpeas.

I think some of the appeal of trying to vary our diet is the smells. At the end of the dead of winter, I miss smells.

Yesterday I wore a brightly colored tank top underneath my winter layers, and when I saw it in the laundry basket early this morning, it looked like my swimming suit, which got me all excited for a minute before I fully woke up.

I think the speaker in Arda Collins' poem Spring is in the same kind of rut I am:

I was making a roast.
The smell wafted from the kitchen into the living room,
through the yellow curtains and into the sunlight.
Bread warmed in the oven,
and in my oven mitt, I managed to forget
that I'd ever punched someone in the face.
It seemed so long ago, I might not even have done it.
I went out into the yard before dark
and saw last year's rake on the lawn.
It was a cheap metal one
that tore up the old grass.
I did that for a while.
When I went back in the house,
the roast was burned black
and the bread was hard.
I sat on the couch and watched it get dark.
I was getting hungry, but I felt afraid
of seeing the refrigerator light go on.
Then I would have to turn on other lights,
and then what would I do?
I heard a car pass once in a while.
I thought about a time on vacation
when I bought a newspaper and tomatoes
from a supermarket I'd never heard of.
I remembered an old bathing suit I had,
but I couldn't think of what happened to it.
I could move away.
I could get in the car right now
and drive all night,
as soon as I had a sandwich.
Turkey, tomato, mayo,
Swiss, lettuce. It was exciting.
I still had my shoes on. I drove to a truck stop.
It was bright inside and I loved the world.
I bought a sandwich and ate it from my lap while I drove.
When I pulled up to my house it was quiet.

It was in the movie Buckaroo Banzai that I first heard the saying "wherever you go, there you are."

Because It Has To Be This Way

Sometimes on days when I drive an hour listening to an audiobook and then teach two 1-hour-and-50-minute classes back to back and then drive an hour home listening to my audiobook some more, I get a headache from so many ideas and images crowding into my head; it starts to feel too full. It felt like that today.

So I was sitting in the parking lot of the kids' school with my full head and instead of resting it, I felt I had to put something more in there; I was reading through a volume of poems I'd brought with me (It is Daylight by Arda Collins). When I got to this one, I started laughing, because somehow it seemed like the perfect epigraph to my day (at only 2:45 pm):

Because It Has To Be This Way

It's been a while since I've been so
blah blah blah, he says.
Blah blah, she says.

She thinks that the universe is expanding like a giant lily.

You don't know
these people. They're off
in a little theater. The set
is a bedroom with a modest
bed on which they lie. It's
lit with a bedside
lamp and rhythmic night sounds
come in from the dark
all around. He sleeps on his back
with his hands folded
demurely, waiting
to be exported by great forces.
She wonders if somewhere
there is a lake made of melted butter.
Outside the dark
the sky is golden-clouded
like a bible illustration. Jesus is there.
He's white, with a
chestnut beard and soft, brown eyes.
He's wearing a white robe.
His wounds are no longer
bleeding. He's doing a peaceful
pantomime, standing in the air,
two feet above the ground. And you know
what? He's really nice, and he has no
sense of humor. Or if he does,
it would have to do with
smiling and petting a deer, and
you feel like you might like each other
at first, but
you wouldn't. Jesus is hovering
in a green pasture, like in a storybook,
the one about the Country Mouse and
the City Mouse, which had a lovely
picture of the Country Mouse running
away over the hills, the smokestacks
soon small behind. He lets you run
over the green hills, and you never get tired.
He reaches out one arm
with his palm upturned, and raises it
towards the pasture. He tilts his chin
to the golden sky, like he's
singing, and taps his foot,
which is bare. Jesus has long nail beds
and a hairy big toe. Below,
the universe is forming other universes.
Jesus is doing an experiment. He needs to expand
right now. They'll mainly be used for storage.

Why was this poem the perfect epigraph? It's about rising perspective--to me, the part where she thinks about what's outside the dark of the little theater is like when you lift your eyes from what you've been reading and thinking about and notice that there's a world out there with leaves in the underbrush turning red amid gold and purple and green, and that you've been kind of missing it, even while doing something like piloting two tons of metal at breakneck speed down crowded 2-lane highways crossing deer-filled fields.

The part about smiling and petting a deer struck me as almost unbearably comical, after yet another afternoon in my long line of years worrying about confronting the blood and guts of one stoving in the front of my car. The bucolic ideal met the physical reality of deer in my brain, and released some of the pressure. I could almost hear my radiator hissing. Now my car and brain are home, quietly ticking themselves into silence.

Do you ever get yourself so worked up that you need to switch gears to restore perspective? If you don't use poetry, what works best?