Little Things Find Their Beds

I had the day off due to yesterday’s holiday falling on a Sunday, and I made good use of it. Jinx and I moved half of a load of wood I’ve been putting off, and then I built a new door for the goat shed– another procrastination project. Mowed the front meadow and decided to go ahead and cut the entire yard, since it would be needing it by week’s end. By the time the sun was slanting down across in the west, my feet were sore and I was out of steam.

So I sat and read the rest of the day, procrastinating on my correspondence, too, watching it stack up like wood, growing like grass, swinging on its own hinges and slamming shut in my face with….oh, that’s too tortured a simile even for me.

I sat on the back porch and caught myself absent-mindedly stroking the page of the book I was reading. I was watching my own hand, absorbed in the regular movement, and it came to me that I used to stroke the onionskin pages of my bible in just the same way, back in my Protestant days. The hairs on the back of my hand were little arcs, like a field of tiny blackberry canes.

Jinx and I walked at sundown. On the way back, I saw a baby field mouse cowering in the grass by the driveway. I stopped and picked it up and carried it away from Jinx’s eyes and into the tall weeds and bade it find a home. I listened to the high breeze in the poplars and I thought of my sister, who lost an elderly friend some time back. She had visited and helped care for the woman, and was hit hard by the aged lady’s death.

I’ve been reading Elizabeth Jennings, one of my favorite poets in all my life. I thought of her poem, “Death of an Old Lady” and it reminded me of my sister.

Death of an Old Lady

The wind came up this afternoon and I,
Blown like a feather, shivering into
The small warmth of me, thought “Today you die,
Blown out also, clean gone, the whole of you.”
Last night I saw you lie

Sleeping, a little human bag of bone
With pallid skin stretched over it. You were
Alive, heart beating, one flame flickering on.
Then all the usual, human questions, “Where?”
And “Why?” pressed down upon

My three months love of you. The stormy night
In retrospect seemed part of all of this,
The quiet morning suitable with bright
Still air, a calm much like the fantasies
To which you gave me right

Of entry. There were no farewells for us.
The wind lifts branches now, is snapping small
Twigs and there’s a wind both boisterous
and grave, like death which needs no dirge or bells
But happens with no fuss.

1977 by Elizabeth Jennings

And now my wife is in her bath and the dogs are sleeping, Dixee on the floor beside my wife’s empty chair, and Jinx on the floor in the back bedroom, the faces of Christ on His cross and the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joan of Arc gazing down at him. My legs are tired, the way they used to be when I was very young and had growing pains.

I took the things from the day that seemed good to me, and now in the dark and settled hours, the thoughts circle me like dust devils on summer days. Why this, and why not that, and who decided this, and why am I powerless and voiceless in these days of the valley and the hidden moon and the silent woods?

I need a book in my hands now, and so I will reach for one. The world outside muffles itself in needful rest, and the little things find their beds, and the stars watch through the branches. My questions are not as important as I think they are. Perhaps someday I will learn this, truly believe this.

~ S.K. Orr