Wednesday, June 30, 2010

BLIND MICE

Manhattan, we are bringing back your son...
The sweet, the brave, the little smiling one.
We bring him back to you, exploited mother.
"All of her sons," he said, "I call them 'brother',
My hunger, it is theirs, and theirs is mine..."
He died today upon your picket line. Irene Paull.
Yesterday I told Cedar that some people are making their clothes from bamboo. "What!" she shrieked. "Yes, I don't know how they do it." She looked at me closely, her brow puckered with dismay then she replied, "I suppose they use bamboo skin. They are poachers," she hissed. I told her bamboo was a tree. She relaxed and we rode on in silence. We entertained a vision of the trees full of bamboo-baboons safe and happy among the leaves.
Mae Sarton wrote today in 1982 of a sweet white flower... "an old-fashioned rose with a crumpled face." Then she reminds us that writing is a craft as well as an art. "But as an art I always come back to my belief that what a style transmits is a vision of life..." Yes, a particular life lived under uncommon circumstances that produce a profoundly unique vision.
Mary Oliver speaks of expectation. "...maybe something will come, some shining coil of wind, or a few leaves from any old tree."
Yesterday in Grand Rapids we saw a small mouse outside the credit union. We could not leave because it had found shelter and safety under the car. As he scurried about in confusion I suspected he was blind. Later at the library I found a book about mice and read that they are born with sealed eyes. It takes weeks for them to open. So I finally understand why the 3 nursery rhyme mice pursued the farmer's wife... they were really very blind.
Mary O had a vision of the goldfinch, "little dolls of gold fluttering around the corner of the sky."


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