Labor Day

Grandma Hardy knew labor.
I mined her for stories when I was little,
until I learned that she only had three or four
retold over the years
emphasizing the ironic pride and bitter love
that she wore like a badge over her heart.

"When your great grandmamma fell sick,
my daddy turned a washtub over and set it next to the stove
and told me to make biscuits.
And so I did."

"With no one to show you how?"

"Oh I had learned from helping,
but I was on my own.
Those first biscuits were as hard as rocks!
Your GreatGrandDaddy spanked my bottom and told me,
'Don't you ever make them that way again.'
and so I never did."

Grandma Hardy was always a good cook,
but the habits she learned in the farm kitchen of her youth
would make health inspectors sigh.
Late in her life, when the doctors forced changes on her,
she served her beans with an apology,
"There ain't but a bit of lard in them beans..."

When her eyesight was failing and the phlebitis was taking her legs,
her sons refused to till her garden for her,
demanding, good-heartedly in their stinginess, that she stay inside and rest
but they didn't consider what that kind of rest does to a laborer's soul.
She stood up at church one Sunday morning and asked for prayers,
"I ain't had a vegetable in the past six months that didn't come from a can!"
and the congregation murmured in horror at the thought.

One of her favorite stories seemed to go back to the Garden of Eden in its innocence:
She told about the time she was running back from the tobacco field
in her summer dress, and how she jumped over a branch that slithered away
and how the serpent nearly took her breath away
and how her brothers warned her that it was the kind of snake that "threw its sting!"
and I'd try to show her my Peterson's Guide to Reptiles of North America
to dispel the myth,
but knowledge had no weight in the guiding light of her upbringing.

She showed me how to make creamed corn,
slicing the tips of the kernels with a hundred-year-old knife,
honed so that its original edge must have been an inch away
from the steel that bit and sliced across the fresh juicy cobs of sweet corn.
She'd turn the blade and use the thick back to squeeze the remaining juice from the corn,
and bits of sweet corn splashed and dried on our forearms and faces and the smell of the earth's
richness filled the tiny dining room where we worked,
and I felt the ties that bound us to the field and the sun and the bounty
of labor.

Petrarch and Laura and you

Petrarch, poor fool,
loved Laura from afar.
If Laura was anything like you,
who could blame the sad monk
for dreaming and desiring
and wiling away the hours
letting words do what he would not allow his body?

Like him, I have no peace,
I can not now make war nor love,
to impress you, except with words
and rough-drawn sketches on a flimsy page.

If Laura had ever kissed Petrarch,
we would never have known the beauty
of his rhythmic lines,
the nuances would be lost...
who writes a poem
when ephemeral love lies in your arms?
So if my lines tire you, there's an easy remedy:

His love lives on in the lines of his poetry
because he never tasted her lips...
in ecstasy and agony, he let his
pent-up passion pen his prayers.
Even when his words described
an idyllic woodland stream or a field full of lavender,
Laura, like you, was at the heart of each line.

So be careful when you kiss;
one might be tempted to believe that heaven
is wherever you happen to be,
then prayers and poems would have to wait
as I will for you.

Painting a moment

Late summer sun illuminates the outer leaves of the canopy
and dark shadows dapple the street beneath the oaks and elms and sycamores.
I'd love to be able to paint this moment,
capture the movement of each limb and each leaf
as the warm August breeze
rushes through the lacework of branches, making their asphalt floor seem to dance.

Inspiration exists in a moment and then is gone.
I remember being 20. Being able to seize the day.
Pulling my pick-up over on the shoulder of a farm road because a moment caught my eye.
I reached behind the seat and pulled my three-legged easel out
and set it up in the gravel and tickseed beside the road,
offering a casual wave to the curious rancher who slowed down to see what I was up to.

I painted a quick wash,
embellished the scene with a paint horse I had ridden with a friend the year before,
and then, when the watercolors were dry, I worked out some fine sketching, the details that would make the scene believable and purposeful.

I had the painting framed under glass, not knowing if that was the thing to do with watercolor art,
and I bought a bus ticket to Florida to see the friend whose image I had tried to impose on this idyllic scene.
You should have seen this young country boy,
holding the awkwardly-sized artwork in a narrow bus seat,
elbow to elbow with the cast of some rural tragedy.
There was the young Mexican man who smelled of oranges.
He got on the bus in some central Florida town with nothing but the scent of the fruit he had been picking.
I heard his stomach growl, so I reached into my bag and found one of the sandwiches I had packed days before. I split the sandwich in half and silently insisted that he take one of the halves, which he did, and he ate greedily, not saying a word, and looked silently out the window, slope-shouldered and alone.

In those days, I the urgency of a moment was palpable.
The lapse between impulse and action was a sigh.

But that was 20 years ago.
And time has lessons to teach the idealists.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, but know that once something beautiful is discovered,
it's only a matter of time before it will wither away.

She says she still has that painting somewhere,
and I still have that three-legged easel...

...but the inspiration is different
and my perspective has changed:
Waking from a long sleep,
my eyes are open
to see the day,
to seize the moment.
I've kicked my television to the curb
and I will have one less beer,
and I will damn my own complacency until I've burned every last molecule of inspiration.