A Contender

Damn it and praise it. Life is piling up so fast. I'm thinking Make the chowder first, cook the fish before you get trapped in the rest. I'm thinking this could be a good day for cleaning house, I could use the new dustpan with its special contraption for trapping fallen hairs that rarely consent to being caught, that float back out to the floor or stay stuck in the broom. But I'm thinking, too, that I could've been a contender.

I've could've been, way back when, way back before I got that bee in my bonnet (about having a child on my own, then braving it alone. My own finely engineered conundrum, no doubt about that. And also no regret, even though I'm now caught up in the bumbling hum of the humdrum -- and past my prime).

I've got russet potatoes, frozen corn, milk and cream and bright white sole. I've got bay leaves and onions, paprika and fresh green thyme. I own a fancy slo-cooker, a hand-held blender. But I could've been a contender. I could've turned it all into iambic pentameter. There's a poetry submission deadline impending, one of many on the horizon. They've been out there all along, but I've ignored them. I could try to catch up today. I could set out on a belated hunt for lyrical choruses and luminosity. I could hunker down into creating enchanting rhythms. I could swim deeper into the surreality of being sixty, of having raised a son who now lives in Berlin, of having spent too much time jabbing needles into my squirming abdomen.

I could labor some more over the latest poem, revising the lines again and again until I've redone my soul a hundred times over. Or I could sweep the grimy floor, stare at a pile of wispy hairs that look like they could have come from the head of the old woman who lived in a shoe, or if not a shoe, a wheelchair at that rundown nursing home in Small Town, USA.

An orderly has pushed her out into the hallway, locked the brakes, and left her there, next to a trash bin and a mop bucket. She's waiting for a nice young teenaged girl to come along, a volunteer who'll wipe the drool off her chin, shape what's left of her coif into pin curls, to be combed out later. She wants to look pretty for her dead husband when he finally arrives and they can share a nice dinner together.

Posted at 09:08 AM | Permalink