Something bout everything

What does not change / is the will to change

and

when the attentions change / the jungle leaps in

and

Not one death but many,
not accumulation but change

The Kingfishers, Charles Olson

A woman with a hunchback like a hermit crab looks up with her old blue grey eyes. She tells me of her troubles with the century link telephone company, with her car, with her broken computer. Then she takes some coins from her purse and puts them in our jar-the one for the animal shelter- and smiles. She buys the Milagro Beanfield War and for a moment I feel like less of a monster.

Townes Van Zandt on the college radio station in the grocery parking lot as I eat sushi, 55 degrees from the sunroof; all of it dripping onto my overalls.

I’m trying to write a poem about everything, I say.

The customer who bought a good stack of books told me she’s in between cataract surgeries.

“I can’t wear makeup. It’s the worst thing in the entire world…” and we both smile a small bit, knowing that it feels better sometimes to know that, yes, there are infinite worse things in this world, but to say this, today is forgivable.

She tells me that what surprised her the most out of everything is that the light changed. “I’ll miss the amber light… my whole life, I didn’t know. Now everything will be fluorescent. I’m mourning it even as wait to lose the other eye.”

I tell her that I’m sorry and I mean it. I look out of my own eyes and try to imagine soft amber views.

I’ve been trying real hard lately to change my perspective.  Things beyond my control are happening ( of course, yes, duh, humans) and it feels like the worst thing in the entire world.

I’m understanding like a slow sigh that things will keep happening beyond control. Beyond reason or grip of vice.

There is a lesson that is uncomfortable here. In between sharp focus and old soft habitual amber light is where my liminal choices lie. My friend tells me of a sonnet poem that talks of the doors and opportunities in each life. There is a window, then it closes. We don’t realize this as often as we ought to. I wake at 4 am terrified of the closing doors. The choices I could make and the ripples that make up this path. The light changing.

Another friend buys a bag of bugles from the five and dime. “I think the openings got smaller”, he says as he tries in vain to make them fingernail claws. And we smile a small bit knowing that we’ve changed and it’s okay to mourn that, for a small bit.

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
         Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
      when roads of light and storm
      open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                 God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

-Annunciations, Denise Levertov