at 3:30am you wake
with a feverish (but sleeping) child beside you
tell yourself to go back to sleep
but The List and all it’s have-to’s seep in to rouse you
before eyelids have their chance to shut it out
by 4 you give up fighting
brew coffee
grab your journal and a pencil
archeological tools for a delicate excavation
select teardrops have been falling
you don’t know why
all of these buried artifacts, so fragile
the slightest brush
a breeze
can blow dust to reveal some treasure
an aged clue
you uncover moments
like the day your dad pulled away in an empty station wagon
the note your seventh grade boyfriend gave you, saying he wanted to break up
the sound of the screen door closing when the pregnancy test strip turned pink
that dashing gentleman’s voice conceding, “Hon, raising a child is exhausting.”
you turn these shards over in your hands
piece together how they set a scene
look at the new development around you
wonder what to do with these old remnants
you know sometimes
it looks like love leaves
just when the dig seems it may reveal some answers
your feverish child stirs and needs you
he’s warm and weary but he’ll be OK
this flesh of his
the evidence beside you
that once you believed
that love was all that mattered
that it would be enough to stay
it’s easy at the excavation site
to see the broken pieces
scattering proof that you were wrong
life can’t be built on love alone
but as the sun begins to rise
and the journal needs to be shelved
that List is inching closer to the fore
you can’t help but put some hope into this day
that somehow
there could be a bridge
between the ancient history of lessons learned
and the evolution of new buildings in the making
that love lives in the foundation
it can infuse architectural plans
course through the hands
some hands
whose hands?
these hands
that are willing to stay and build it
Jeb and I are at the outdoor shower, where he soaps under the stars. He doesn’t like to bathe alone in the dark and I keep him company while words fall from his mouth as yarn unraveling. It’s an end-of-the-day discourse that peaks at shower time and then falls with a thud on his pillow after putting on his pajamas.
As he rinses and recites, frogs rest and listen in the moss and fern shadows, just out of sight.
Jeb’s at the crescendo. Stories and descriptions of the day’s events come out as run-on sentences. A litany of Lego guy trading on the playground, a scene from a Bruce Lee movie he saw with his dad, and a new knock-knock joke.
“Knock knock”
“Who’s there?”
“A door.”
“A door who?”
“Adore me!”
“I do adore you. That’s a good one…ok, Jeb, get all of the shampoo out of your hair and come on out.”
I herd him toward bed as he finalizes his roll. The last thoughts of his head, draining.
Like an aging granny, I spin tales to Jeb about the ‘old’ days when I was a child.
“Back then, there weren’t even cell phones! In fact, most of the my time growing up, there were only land lines and they had cords attached to the wall! You had to sit by the phone. You couldn’t walk anywhere when you called someone.”
This isn’t quite like the tales of walking to school in snow, uphill (both ways!). But I see the wheels turning in Jeb’s imagination as he listens, not able to picture my world of curling cords and rotary phones.
“You know, there wasn’t even an internet. When I was a kid, if you needed to learn about something, you went to the encyclopedia.”
I remember the leatherish bound encyclopedia set on our living room shelf, representing all letters of the alphabet. Pages edged with a gold-colored coating, promising entry into all things of the known universe that began with the letter ‘A’. ‘A’ was a book, maybe two inches thick. For anything A-related, not listed, that was further research in the stacks down at the local library.
courtesy of Shishberg
Back then, should you have opened up ‘G’ (it may have been combined with ‘H’ or ‘I’), you would not have found an entry under “Google.” These days at our house, it’s a standard phrase. If Jeb asks me questions I can’t precisely answer (“how is dry ice made? what makes lightning?), he simply says “Let’s Google it.” In two clicks we have a plethora of answers.
In all my granny glory, I shake my head, cluck and sigh with amazement: “Oh, the times have changed…”
Instead of pulling down a two-pound bound edition from the shelf, the fingers of answer-seekers are weightlessly flying over keyboards, typing any phrase imaginable to find clues to their queries. Oh, the things that you can find on this new-fangled internet thing!
What are people looking for? And where do their searches take them?
Believe it or not, some of them find me. So intrigued I’ve become, I am introducing a new page here on the Archives called Little Engines that Search (see left sidebar, under About, and click). With WordPress tracking the phrases browsers use, I get a glimpse into the words that trace them here. Fascinating, indeed. So I’ve dedicated a page listing some of my favorite phrases that have brought people to the Archives.
Who would have thought that “highway grass”, “stirrup chairs” and “does anyone sell banana leaves in fresno county” all would have funneled cyber-surfers to this very ethereal locale? Inspired by these phrases, I’ve played around to create my own search term poetry. You never know, maybe this is the next big thing. So profound it could be published. Maybe into a hard-bound book to sit on a shelf…full circle! I can see the title now: “Words Sought in the Ether.” I’d definitely want the pages edged in gold.
WORDS SOUGHT POEM I (BEAUTY)
inspiring word
butterfly cocoon unravel
morning sunlight through my bedroom window
bottle french wine
who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land
rainbow colored honey
rock texture moss
desktop ocean
beautiful toes
barrel of love
wave tossed in the ocean
the honey peace of old poems
robinson jeffers
how do you know? Love
snakes of coastal bend
scary wave wipeout
succulent pocket
osho zen the lovers
chrysoprase stone
moons in our solar system
shroud of turin
desktop water love
a banana leaf miracle
vast
WORDS SOUGHT POEM II (JUST PLAIN QUIRKY)
klmit
hafiz you have been invited to meet a friend
spelling sentences
goat in heat charging
does anyone sell banana leaves in fresno county
highway grass
california safe tent camping
lone ovary
the anatomy of a compost pile
rumplestiltskin edward gorey
solar system for kids
fetus at week 23
how to cut down a banana tree
stirrup chair
red toenails
hornier neck lift
airline rush luggage tag images
charts and graphs on insomnia in children
screen saver crazy
uterus
kermit the frog
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