The Hole We've Been Digging

This week will not be a big one for posting here, as along with my brother and a cousin I'm helping my parents clean out the house they've lived in since I was in first grade. I'm sure that along with the excavation of papers and photos, there will be some emotional excavation, and I'm hoping to be able to keep my cool, remember it's not all about me, and actually be helpful to two people whose reduced mobility has forced them to go from a big house and yard to a small 2-bedroom apartment.

Some of what I'm imagining it will be like is in this poem by Michael Teig:

Since I've come home, put on all my shoes,
Watched lawns, frankly green and unapologetic,
Lick up to rickety hedges, the neighborhood houses

Come into focus cautiously, like something dropped
From the sky, like memory, the narrow street
Sleepless trees, the cars postered in leaves and pollen.

I've come home and the pond is back
In a slate suit, suit of hours. I dig in the yard
With a stick, stop at the grocery, handle produce.

My mother is older, more urgent, less assuring
As she tilts into the stove with a cigarette--
We're rarely as good at ourselves as we imagine

And this could go on for hours
While only the radiator has something to say.
It's always time for work here, about to rain.

In the street, people you don't know
Don't talk to you, though they say heaven
Is a place of great civility

Where a statuette of diligence
Stands straight up, or some other
Virtue too mystifying to account for.

I'd like to believe it entails not getting dressed
For a day or a week, the rain-soaked and bikini-clad,
The under-employed with a halo of bar-darts.

That it happens here, casual as undressing.
My companions come and go as they wish.
We lay down in the hole we've been digging

And it's a pleasure, really, alone or with a friend,
Rarely looking at each other, thinking
You hear the screen-door, some recollected music,

The river and lumber trucks racing out of town.
The past is mostly just that:
I watch it all a bit strangely.

Thirty years ago on this street, my father drove me home
In a blue convertible, wondering like all parents
If he could simply keep me alive.

In my childhood home, with the people who did keep me alive, I always tend to "lay down in the hole" I've dug, as I think most of us do. But I'll try to resist too much of that this week, as it's not me who needs the most help anymore.

Milkweed

Between the fourth of July--my favorite holiday--and the eighth--my birthday--is usually the best weather of the entire year. Yesterday it was gloriously hot and sunny; we played our kazoos in the local fourth of July parade and then had a cookout and two croquet games and stayed out blowing our yellow vuvuzela until the neighbors' bedroom windows began to go dark and mosquitoes outnumbered the lightning bugs.

This morning we got out of bed later than the neighbors, who were already out riding their bikes and looking at our chairs and sticky marshmallow-toasting sticks all strewn about, while the garden is green and purple with spots of deep rose.

It's a perfect morning for this poem, Milkweed, by Michael Teig:

I've seen beauty;
It gets up earlier than me
And makes a few decisions,

Bullies the clouds and broken
Buildings into place,
the inky grammar of the birds,

And then it simply
Is landscape, the way
Your friends are, or your face, greeting you

When you take your coat off,
Put it on. I think it says go
Into the yard and I'm in the yard.

Like a broken wheelbarrow
On both elbows,
I watch a spider knit the grass blades,

Shaping its hunger.
When night comes a little wind
Undresses what's left of the trees

And it's easy to forget about
Morning and my companions.
I hope they are sleeping.

If beauty is before us in line,
If it is second-hand, then so be it.
I like the way the neighborhood's

Three-legged dog stumbles into my knee
At four a.m. and pawns its wet breath--
How morning lands hard on the doorstep

And each dawn almost begins
As a surprise, the mail
In the mailbox, the birds in place,

A neighbor I barely know
Stuffing leaves into the leg
Of his scarecrow's trouser.

I love sleeping until I've had enough and then seeing the morning's beauty "second-hand" after others have already seen it. That's my favorite line of the poem.

I find this poem as "accessible" as any by Billy Collins, famed for the accessibility of his poems. In fact, Stephen Dobyns, in his introduction to the volume (Big Back Yard, 2003) says:
"within the mass of contemporary poetry, there are many poets who use one unexpected turn after another and the surprise is meant to be its own payoff. The surprise exists for its own sake and the poems proceed through a series of arresting non-sequiturs. This is boring and intrinsically insulting. Hiding in the dreary background is some would-be poet saying 'Language doesn't really communicate. Authorial intention is a myth of the past. Communication is passe. Accessibility in poetry means failure. Meaning and non-meaning are equal."
But Teig doesn't do this, Dobyns says. He is actually trying to say something to you.

Does any part of this poem speak to you? What does it say?