4/23/11

If I broadcast a handful of grass seedling over the plot of dirt scraped bare by the snow-plow, a flock of birds will fall on each seedling before it can germinate, settle inside a furrow. Who can tell when the next frost will come, whether planting spinach or swiss chard is worth the bother, throwing down or casting seeds aside, hoping for the happy accident when the taproot catches. The vibration of tires on the paved road unsettles the stones and even rattles the storm windows if the passing semi weighs enough.

Once, from the railing, hurled a whole ambulance sliding off black ice, a six-wheeler nose-diving onto the state road. That all survived seemed a miracle, no patient on board. To the sunset a slickening rain freezes, and reifies, from becoming to being. Cease to exist commands the sunrise. But ice laughs last, hours before the sunrise happens. Between this hour and the next I do not know who I am.

When it happened I was untangling the dessicated vines of the pickling cucumber from the stems of fruitless pepper plants. Or untangling egg-tomato vines from the soil on which, along with frail lettuce-leaves, they’d matted, layer of dead tan vegetation. The word loam I learned when six from a story of someone my age who’d been buried in a murder case. Was loam beneath these reed-colored wet remains of a garden planted weeks too late to yield foison ready for the tongue, nothing but green egg-tomatoes, a handful of beans, fibrous stalks, a root system, or more than one of them, holding the garden bed together, while the radiator of the nose-dived ambulance released a cloud on the horizon thicker than a storm-cloud or cloud of vapor from a soup tureen, or from a chimney stack, nearly as thick as the liquid element from which the cloud exhaled.

Loam was in the nostrils of the boy they’d found in the news I’d learned about when I was six. Loam was not only finer than the soil in which I’d tried to plant these prickly cucumbers and fibrous hard tomatoes, it was more fertile than compost, and the breath that had been stopped may have been thicker than the cloud of steam that rose from the ambulance with such abundance I thought it was the ambulance engine that would never lose its life or stop its exhalation. I thought the ambulance engine would not dive before I reached for the cordless. When I ran for the cordless headset, my hands were dirty with the work of digging up what hadn’t really grown enough.

Loam the word I learned at six. With my tongue I taste the word, roll it around a little, as light as foam. After the season, I regard this little garden bed, a quilted fabric roots hold together/quilted fabric whose particles roots bind together. Ahead, a six-wheeled ambulance hurls from the highway guardrail, glare ice the verdict. With hands folded from unplugging the roots and matted vines, dessicated and flat, cucumber from egg-tomato, bean stalk from shriveled lettuce-leaf, I draw my cordless to report news already minutes old.

The loam that stopped the nostrils of the schild-victim sounds finer and more fertile than the soil that lies beneath me.

From the crushed radiator unfurls a column of steam as thick as foam, thicker than the clouds from chimney-stacks, joining rain-clouds and jet-trails above the south-bound overpass.

Loam that is finer than the soil whose purls and chunks break apart in my hand whenever I weed or plant, more fertile than this compost, and much like foam can, permeate and plug airways.

Any engine releasing such a column of steam for so long must have much life within it, more life than my hapless garden planted late, as much life as the loam that stops the breath but in which the taproot finds succor.
As I dropped the cordless in its cradle a crew arrived to cut the survivors from the half-crushed cab.

That’s a sign of life in how the engine breathes a column of steam, which broadens as it rises beneath the underpass, thicker than the clouds from chimneystacks or vapors from soup tureens—

But as thick as foam forcing me to think of loam, finer and far more fertile than the garden-bed I’m planting.

How do our engines move without a life inside them. How close to us must the spark inside them be, explosion, spasm?

Fingering through the garden bed for dead vines as I watched the steam pour from the crushed radiator.

A composted apple, porous and almost terra-cotta or incinerated orange, comes apart in my fumbling hands.

In the Gospels, Christ speaks of some broadcast seeds flowering, others not.

From the cab the crew cuts out drivers while I drop the cordless back into the cradle with my compost-stained fingers,

Soil far coarser than the loam of French gardens and burial mounds.

The life on this bluff is monotonous, but not boring—
With books along with my yardstick I can stay busy.
Each year I seek to rehabilitate some corner.
By fall most of the lawn has been repaired.
There is a stark difference between monotony and tedium.
Routines are monotonous, but not tedious.
Immanuel Kant walked through the same public square,
Passed beneath the same clock at the same hour
Most of his adult life, except for the storming of the Bastile,
The single day when Kant did not pass beneath the clock at the appointed hour.
This is called monotony, not tedium.
Tedium spends human energy without reward.
The only compensation for a tedious job is money.
But the more tedious position the less financial compensation
To the more tedious position goes the less money.
Even in cases in which more money is rewarded to
The worker with the most tedious job, the expense of spirit
Is rarely compensated by money alone.
To the grave goes this postal worker whose obituary
Can barely relate any detail more memorable than
That he fished or was a member of a VFW post.
The time he had from tedium of labor was just enough
To rest, regain his bearings from another tedious week.