Neighbors all

Wrap the mind up every moment you remember to, and deliver it again. Even and most of all when you feel nothing much, give it to God. Tired to nausea with the world, refer it to the Lord. Stagnant in prayer, offer it up. Unable to offer it up, offer this up. Now you’re getting it.

~

In one lighted window, a man sits bending over a table. In another a woman gets up from the piano and walks to a built-in bookcase. For a heartbeat, I share and do not share an intimate moment. I am at once outside in the darkling evening and inside these cozy domestic rectangles bounded by black—until I walk by, and the geometry of togetherness collapses.

~

A neighborhood committee of hens was inspecting the sidewalk and adjoining grass, probing for life. Not wanting to interrupt their work, but desirous of making myself known to local leadership, I knelt and held a hand out. The nearest shifted nervously away. Ah, they can smell a northerner a mile off, these native Austinites. One does not get recognition here simply for adopting the y’all pronoun, or for putting on a burnt orange T-shirt. Academics come and go away again, and big tech may rise and fall while highway interchanges are erected and demolished. A community endures, fat times and lean, riding the waves of real estate prices as best they can, enduring scarcity of yard insects. Summer and winter, taking no sabbaticals, the matrons govern the old city.

~

A poet would get to know the cats of the neighborhood: the one who sits in a window in front of the blinds, a perfect profile looking out; the one who comes to the end of the sidewalk to tempt pet-inclined strangers, and veers away nonchalantly, tail rising in a graceful gesture of unconcern; the one who waits on the step like a child who was told to go play, but is bored. Neighbors all, give me your blessing.

~

Two trees presented themselves to me in my walk. They were beautiful, white trunks and living green leaves. I wished to have something to say about them, catching that beauty in the net of words. The thought came that likely enough I would find no way to do it; nothing interesting would come to me to say. And in the despair that followed I discarded the trees themselves like crumpled-up paper.

Be warned by me, ye that look on, and flee the poetaster’s way.

~

The old, tired flesh resists a run, yes; but as a longtime initiate of the body, you have your ways of bringing it around. You put on the getup, lace up the shoes. That’s painless enough, but effective: The body is finely attuned to the ridiculous, and it would be very ridiculous to get all dressed up like that in the special, swishy fabrics, and never even head outside. Meanwhile you keep the mind at bay with the thought that perhaps this morning you might decide instead to walk the miles rather than run. You make it outside and lock the door—nothing for it, now. You do walk the first block to your official starting point, and take in the calm morning with the hooting of the doves—acclimating, acculturating, swinging your arms. The gate in the fence closes behind you, and now sheer habit sputters to life, sending your feet kicking out behind you. Before long you’re halfway through; and that’s just as good as done, since by then running has become the quickest way to a couch.