MindSpinner

The smell of the boys’ locker room -
pungent sweat soured -
comes as no mystery when you stand with the players
at the edge of the football field
your camera in hand
in case a play stampedes close enough
for the chance of a good shot.

You stand only as high as these boys’ chests,
and you rather hope they notice you are there
when excitement takes them.
They are rapt, they are wrought with
alternate agonies and ecstasies,
and they are dripping.
Behind you, the noise of the crowd
and the approximate music of the pep band
crescendos, subsides and crescendos again.
Coaches’ barks and bellows
sound across the field
like cannons in the 1812 Overture.

Above the glaring lights
and the sober scoreboard,
in the velvet night,
the moon hangs still - a shimmering,
cratered pearl, like a pendant.
And as you walk outside the yellow fence
to the far side of the field,
straw-colored September grass sweeps
round the shoulder of the hill like a shawl
and falls alluringly away
toward the woods under the moon,
into the sound of crickets.

The orange tent out back
will come down today.
The blue cooler still partly filled
with ice and cans
of Coke and Ale 8
will be emptied.
Diverse sleeping bags
will be wrangled into rolls,
more or less,
and stashed away.

The boy who invited his
best buddies over for a rolicking
midnight Airsoft battle
(and when he was two
strode straight into the roiling surf
of his very first sea)
will be leaving
on Tuesday for eight
months of training.
His Special Forces unit
has already been calling
to see how long
’til he’s ready.
Military Intel people,
so it seems, are needed yesterday.

On the other hand,
last night’s 6mm plastic BBs
will be unearthed in my garden
for the next thousand years.
Green. Blue. White. Yellow.
I swept up the ones
strewn across the driveway
near the car and the wood pallet
stood on end for defense,
but I will not pick up
the ones fired and fallen in the garden
among the carrots and the onions,
the thyme and the slender
green blades of iris.
Not even one.

“I love your dress,”
the preschool teacher
told me this morning,
after admitting she’d
forgotten my name.
I don’t wear this dress often:
the bottom buttons,
modestly secured according to
the dress code for teachers,
impede purposeful strides,
the sort that get me to the copier
and back to the classroom
during the last five
minutes of lunch.

In the spring of 2000,
during the long beginning
of an ending,
I bought this dress
for a business trip to Hilton Head,
a planning meeting.
(Once upon a time
and for a little while,
I did freelance work
in Web design.)
I carried a suitcase
containing the dress
and other things new,
a laptop and a 10-pound cake
through three airports
to deboard a tiny plane
on the island, pausing on the way
to the rental house,
not alone, to walk along the docks
where people played in music and light
reflected on water.

Seven years later,
far from a shore I walked on for a day,
I have a dress
I sometimes wear to school,
a shell a little boy gave me
on a stroll down the beach,
a photograph of people at work,
ideas posted all over a pool house,
a memory of friends gathered
(these partners were friends),
the indelible surprise of a wrap offered
when I was cold, and gracious goodbyes.
I have songs.

According to MapQuest,
I am 633 miles (and seven years)
from Hilton Head today.
Funny that I was ever there,
in another world.
Funny that a dress is here
and a shell - artifacts.
Funny what remains.

In my bedroom, beneath the gable, an arched window admits stars, sometimes the moon, white clouds dry-brushed on blue sky, inky washes of storm clouds, and the blended pastels of morning. Blinds obscure my view of the neighbors’ house below during the day and the neighbors’ view of me slipping out of clothes at bedtime, but the half circle at the top of the window remains uncovered to frame an arc of sky, a succinct heaven. I’ve long rejected the notion of concocting window treatments, the window being the point.

Beneath the top of that arch, a tiny spider wove unseen a month or two ago a radiating web not larger than the spread of my small hand. It has gathered dust now until it is a proper cobweb. One or two of its delicate threads have been torn by tiny wings, but it is still near perfect. The artist in me has overruled the fussy Victorian housekeeper who would swat the web down with a broom lest visitors glance up to see it. I feel too much affinity for the spider and the web to sweep the work away.

I think in webs that span void, circumference and even contradiction. It seems to me that there is nothing that is not connected to something else and even to its own opposite. There is no strength that is not connected to weakness, no virtue that is not connected to flaw, no ending that is not connected to beginning, no beginning that is not connected to an end, no gain that is not connected to loss, no gift given that is not also received in the giving, no selfish choice that does not incur loss as well as gain. Reality and consequence and perception are always webs, as interconnected as the forces that generate the trajectory of the ripple that rides the wave there and back again, in a foam of physics calculations the nimblest mind cannot follow. The web also represents connections felt across spans of distance, forged in conversation yet not absent in silence or difference or even death, rope bridges spanning roaring chasms between souls, precarious, yet sturdy enough for white-knuckled crossings.

The spider web at the apex of the arched window that greets morning, midday, and night, is mute. It only reverberates a little with currents of air and clings to the anchors that suspend it two inches from that plane where the world within meets the world without. I look to it daily from my chosen spot on the side of the bed nearest to the light and nearest to the dark.

So ends my apologetic for lapses in dusting .

It is early in the morning. This is writing time. This is the hour when I can feel poems stirring awake. There is one about the rootwork trees do in winter, when they only seem not to be growing. But no, there is the imperious clock instead, and the appointed hour for harnessing mind and body in the familiar yoke of school days and yearbook deadlines. And if I am to arrive by the bell, this instant I must rise, slip off my clothes, bath, dress, pack bags and go. And I must do this over and over again until I am old and hope the poems will wait for me, as seeds do for spring.