Site Work

Writing is to staring as breathing is to lungs.

I look at things. I guess most people do, but I wonder what everyone else sees when they’re looking. I suppose that’s what conversations are for. Conversations make me tired. I guess that’s why I’m a writer.

Across the street from where I’m writing and staring, there is a bulldozer ironing out the dirt into a pancake of land. It is slow as a cow, incessant as a fly. The soil is caked, like a graham cracker crust in a patty pan. What makes me laugh, is how it covers a lot of ground but doesn’t get anywhere. What makes me laugh, is how I venture outside of my house to write, to be inspired, to find some great insight, and what happens is that I find myself relating to a bulldozer.

The way my interior landscape is constantly undergoing some kind of excavation, some mechanical sigh at all hours of the night. Let’s run over that once more, just to get the lay of things. Back this way again. Don’t leave such a lump over there. Should we worry about roots and sinkholes? 

There seems to just be one vehicle driven by one person. The crew has vanished. There are shockingly large piles of dirt and three cranes at rest. The appearance of a tremendous amount of work to do. I wonder if God has any thoughts about us moving all His dirt around. I wonder if God has any thoughts about pie crust.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time considering my life lately, about whether I like the trajectory I am on. Which is why I’ve come here to write. Or, more truthfully, to sit. To stare. When I can’t parse out the details of wisdom and feelings and reality, it helps to go look at things. Especially if the things are moving very slowly and letting out moderate nosies. This is why people watch sailboats on water, crackling bark in a fire, ducks poking around a pond. There is not enough going on to be distracting but at least one thing is going about its business, tethering the mind to a form of consciousness. At least, this is true for me.

Today, I bring my life to the quiet and find construction equipment as balm. I am not the only one rolling an idea over and over and over, back and forth, backwards and forwards. Changing direction, flattening it first one way, then another. Looking a little disorganized but somehow impressive to passersby. I’ve been choosing to live one day at a time for over a year now, and I wonder about living one square foot at a time. There could be an entire ecosystem in that square, I could choose to learn about it and never go anywhere else. I could sit there until darkness, until some wondrous fox comes to dip his gallant toes in the earth and leave a trace in what had been smoothed. 

Is this how I am to show up in the world? As evidence to prancing?

Last week, my staring led me to a view I’d dreamt of but never seen in reality. I can do this: create an imagined place I feel I’ve been. But when it arrives and leaves an imprint on the ground of my actual, embodied landscape, I run for the heavy equipment. In my smoothing it over, I have a way or ironing out all of the joy. Now is a good time to remind myself that God said nothing of the straight and narrow being freshly flattened dirt the color of brownie mix. But aren’t we called to diligence and thoughtfulness? 

What happens in my assessment of a new thing is a sudden adoration for the old. Though I have longed for blessing and wide places, the comfort of what I know may as well be a church organ, suddenly gasping for me to stay. Stay feeling what I know, not what I don’t. Take the mouthful, forget the portion.

And this is how I know who I am: I am carefully preparing my earth and it is taking a long time. I like to think God is watching me like I am watching the bulldozer. Not because He is aloof and detached from my work, but because He is not concerned about the progress and He is interested in how I’m going about it. Is it wrong to envision God on a patio drinking iced tea while watching me loaf a bulldozer over my life? 

No more wrong, I suppose, than what happened in my heart yesterday. After hours of considering a new life opportunity, I was gently reminded that no matter how frenzied and confusing life is, I am a poet and language is how I always will make sense of things. My spirit had been interceding for my needs, and then somewhere, out of the blue, came a poem. Which happens to me quite a lot. I’ll be nudged but not ready to write. And I’ll let it cultivate on its own until it pours out. And I am newly wondering if the way my subconscious constructs poetry from what is hard is another kind of intercession. The spirit communicates to God what I can’t speak myself, and the poem is my way of understanding. I’m no theologian. I could be wrong. But I wrote it down. And everything is a little flatter now. 

How do they know when the soil is ready? Maybe it’s just a feeling.

The End Of A Thing

After dinner on Thursday
after the pan we cooked cod in 
has been cleansed 
of its brown butter sediment
after the blueberry banana muffins
have been set to cool in soft
irregular rows, I begin 
taking out the trash
bag full to bursting
and it does, burst

the bright blue, plastic tie 
off one side leaving me no choice
but to open the mouth
of another bag
in which to place the first.
I kneel both knees to linoleum
and hold the parcel
against my body
tugging the plastic into plastic
as though it were a child
I am helping into snow pants.

And I am struck by this,
to be on my knees hugging trash
how tender I feel
toward even the refuse 
of my life, that I would
wrap my arms around
what I no longer wanted.