Something Good

So peaceful.  Love it when there is quiet in the car for the afterschool pick up.  I do not speak.  Isaac does not speak.  We hear the sounds of driving a 1987, 325is.  The sounds of pages turning as he reads to himself in the back seat.  So quiet.

1. March Poem is at the iron gate in front of the house on Aloha street.
2. The end of the oyster season is here.  The water is warming up the oysters prepare for a spawning season; creating a flaccid and gritty oyster.  They can become rather unsavory and too fishy/ muddy/ acrid.
3. Tiger Crocuses are the first in the flora race to come up; delicate yet hardy. They pop-up in purple, white, yellow and variegated violet.  It is even more exciting than Groundhog’s Day.  Which is the earliest spring indicator.  Though in Seattle, it seems premature for it precedes the Love Day-  another favored and highly anticipated day (I would say is midwinter and not early spring).
4. Garden planning begins.  In twothousandten  I waited far too long to start seedlings and plantings and garden planning.  I did not start until the season was warm and then of course, it was too late.  The garden/s harvest were unimpressive.  A late summer breakup deterred the greatest little harvest of the year’s warm season so that the succulent, colorful fruit hung heavily on the branches until they fell off and rotted into the ground.  Make of the rotting fruit-to-relationship metaphor what you will.  I should have gone back to pick the harvest.  But alas, this is a new year- the year of the rabbit, even.  I’ll take that metaphor and run with it. 
5. Warm showers make the air heavy and wet all of the concrete and cars and soil.  
6. Moods lighten up all over.  

Different Places to Pray

Everywhere, everywhere she wrote; something is falling-

a ring of keys slips out of her pocket into the ravine below;

Nickels and dimes and to do lists; duck feathers from a gold pillow.

Everywhere someone is losing a favorite sock or a clock stops

circling the day; everywhere she goes she follows the ghost of her heart;

jettisons everything but the sheperd moon, the hopeless cause.

This is the way of life unfolds: decoding messages from profiteroles,

the weight of mature plums in late autumn.  She’d prefer a compass

Rose, a star chart, text support messages delivered from the net,

even the local pet shop- as long as some god rolls away the gloss

And grime of our gutted days, out global positioning crimes.

Tell me, where do you go to pray- a river valley, a pastry tray?

-Susan Rich