Redoubling Our Efforts

Today is the first day of summer at my house, defined by the fact that no one had to get up before daylight arrived. Walker got his cast off this morning, and we were going to go swimming, but have decided to wait until the end of the week, hoping it will warm up. Even if it doesn't, we have a trip to South Carolina to look forward to pretty soon; it's always satisfyingly hot by the time we get there. I love hot weather! And I love a lull in how busy a household with teenagers can be.

Like all parents, sometime in May I start thinking I need a clone just so everything gets done and each child has one parent for each awards assembly (have you ever been to one where the child is asked to point out his parents and he has to admit sheepishly that they're not present? I have.) When I read Bob Hicok's poem "Redoubling our efforts" I was in that needing-a-clone mode. I still have work to do (a stack of finals to grade, an annual report to write before we go on vacation), but I don't have to coordinate everyone else's schedule at the same time I'm trying to get it done. There's a chance I can actually do a task, cross it off my list, and then sit back for a moment and consider it well done, rather than already be running for the next thing, already overdue.

Anyway, here's a poem for the overly-committed:

And a double would be handy.
While I talked to Charlie yesterday
as he fixed the leak in the hot water heater,
my double could have gone to Charlie's house
and slapped his son, who wants to join the army,
infantry no less.

But I hear you, Noam Chomsky.
Violence as a means of ending violence is illogical.

Sometimes I think there are three of you, Mr. Chomsky,
or four, given how busy you are
saying and writing smart things, though my wife
has issues with the one of you
who doesn't believe in Israel, being Jewish herself
and trusting there are structures in the brain
that crave a homeland. I know you like the brain too
is why I'm comfortable getting into this
with whichever Noam Chomsky does the brain thinking,
probably Noam Chomsky One.

I'm not smart enough for Bob Hicok Two or Bob, The Sequel,
maybe I'm a prequel of myself, I sometimes sense
a presence running ahead of me, saying hurry up,
that there's a rocket over my head, a kind
of diacritical like the umlaut over the a
in doppelganger, suggesting the way to pronounce my name
is really whoosh.

So Charlie's tooling away, he's got this crescent wrench
as big as Noam Chomsky's thigh, he's taken the nipple valve
off and found the leak, we're talking about the army
and then somehow the Klan, which he saw as a child,
they gathered on a highway east of here, hundreds of men
dressed like beds, and we're each of us saying
the country might have stepped over the line
into fascism, and I'm thinking, I could send my double ahead
to the future to find out, to warn them, and stay here
and eat my double's share of ice cream and enjoy
his share of investigating the topography of my wife,
and Charlie fixes the leak and leaves and the cats
come out of hiding, and I'm walking by a mirror and noticing
the guy walking by the other side of the mirror, and I stop
and he looks at me like I bet it's better in your world
and I look at him like I bet it's better in your world.

So we're tied, you see, the two of us, when it occurs to me
that either one or both or all of us should be driving
to Noam Chomsky's house with enough pencils and paper
to work this all out, the why do we kill each other stuff
and the where does language come from stuff.

The only answer I want when the night taps me on the shoulder
and asks, did you try, is yes, yes sir, hard and double hard
and harder still.

For now, I've hung up my book bag that says "May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." But I've hung it on a hook where I can see it. I'll find another use for it; I know I can find another even though I've already tried hard and double hard. I can try harder still.

Even if you're not on the kind of academic schedule that lets you change gears in the summer, what kind of good intentions and plans do you have for the next couple of months?

Emptiness

This weekend we are having a lull in our overscheduled lives. Eleanor's high school musical, HMS Pinafore (she plays cousin Hebe), had intensive rehearsals this week and will rehearse even longer next week before the show opens on Friday, but they have the weekend off. Walker's soccer season is over, and he hasn't signed up for a winter sport yet. My symphony concert was last weekend, and we play a children's concert with most of the same music in a couple of weeks, so I don't even need to feel guilty about not practicing. The trustees have come and gone at the local college, so Ron doesn't have to go into work on the weekend for the first time in several weeks.

I don't even have any pressing deadlines today; my mind feels kind of empty. It feels like this poem, Empty Similes, by Bob Hicok:

Like standing in front of a woman who says thank you
when you tell her you love her, that stuck

sound of a crow, pulling the one nail from its voice
outside your window and you

going down to the sea too late, where it was
three million years ago, waving your little towel
at the shadow of waves, like dropping

your stomach when you drop the phone,
a voice spinning at the end of the chord, your mother,
father, everyone

dead, even the person telling you
gone, and you
waving your metronome arm, and time

inside the trees making clocks we check
by cutting them down.

Maybe part of the emptiness is post-election letdown as the days get shorter. I've put away my campaign signs and tacked plastic sheeting over the end of the rabbit hutch for the winter. It's a little past time to take in our garden hose and the clay pots with blackened begonia and basil.