something shimmers, something is hushed up

T H I S   R O O M
by John Ashbery

The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.

We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.

John Ashbery, “This Room” from Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems. Copyright © 2007 by John Ashbery 

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I have a half an hour of quiet left: I squandered my other two and a half hours of quiet by laying on my bed thinking about a bird call I cannot identify—and then in a flurry of guilt—by placing an order online for a bunch of household items in need of replacement. I also worried about my kindergartener who reportedly fell hard on the way to school—both hands deep in his pockets, no doubt fingering some crusty piece of Manhattan schist. Maybe too I wiped the breakfast crumbs from the table, reheated my coffee; I surely browsed amber necklaces on Etsy for twenty minutes. 

In a few minutes I will make my way a few blocks north, toward the park, and into the cloistered stone walls that surround the Catholic school where my daughter goes to preschool. I will stand a little away from it all, the mothers and teachers and nannies, feeling both pride and dread by small degrees. But mostly responsibility: the vague anxiety of being a mother heightened by the vigilance of a small business owner. Always ready for things to go awry.  

But for a moment I have this quiet. And a poem by Ashbery that reminds me of a less earnest Rilke. Something shimmers, something is hushed up.

when I'm a wee bit stressed

This is what I do when I'm stressed: I become obsessed with some project—embroidery, sewing, photography, and I throw myself at it so that the hours pass without me noticing. Hours where what color or what fabric become the most important thing. Like this morning when Ike asked to paint the sticks he collected at the park yesterday, and I sat for an hour after he was finished dabbing paint on little sticks while he ran around the house with paint on his face and hands, smearing things.

Tonight we have an open house for the Wooden Button. Not the sort of thing I love doing: events, talking to strangers in a group. I don't even go to the playground. But sometimes things must be faced. And I've learned to trust that in general things will develop on their own, as they are wont to, without any pushing and shoving. We do our best, and that is plenty. Hopefully tonight we will find enough committed, laid-back parents to send their children to join Genevieve and Luna in their class at the Wooden Button next year.  But if not, that is OK too. Things generally work out.

pumpkins, fairies, and the prayers of Mother Cabrini

 
T H E   S A D N E S S   O F   K I D S
Barbara Ras

No archaeology. No ladders. Our bodies smooth
as tube balloons the guy at the fair twists
into any shape you'd like. A little scrape
and tears ready at the surface, Gimme that band-aid,
I'm bored, Get me out of this line
where the candy is at eye-level and I've already touched
each piece many times, my penance for being small,
six Lifesavers, ten gums, four sugarless, six not,
and all of the countless packages I've never gotten
inside of. Who needs language, faucets
out of reach, grownups—why do their hearts beat
so slow in such big bodies?—always with their hands
on things, knives, keys, preoccupied with heat,
moving parts, all the appliances that break
anyway, making them angry, their mouths busy forming
holes you can't put your fingers into or shut tight—
inventing new arsenals of no's, don't touch,
hurry up, a big favorite—occasionally a story, little
bears, big meatballs, stuff you can understand,
though you gotta stop them at the best words,
skipper, rooty-toot-toot, make them show you the place
so you can see they're not making it up,
like those old lines: Thunder is the mallet and you are the drum
and Garlic is good, it'll make your guts grow.
I know some things they don't.
Like hummingbirds feel fatigue. Like the gazebo at the farm
is for have sex outside. In my poem,
the pumpkins wait and wait.

© 1998 by Barbara Ras, from Every Bite Sorrow

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Anyone with small children, or who remembers being small themselves, knows about fingered drugstore candy. This poem captures so much of what it is to be small observing the world of adults. And although I don't understand the last line exactly—it reminds me of the way a kid might end the poem, and perhaps this is the authors intention. (What are the pumpkins waiting for, after all? For a couple to come out to the gazebo? For city children to arrive on hay bales pulled by tractors and unleashed in a field to chose one? For the Great Pumpkin?)

Life has been crowded with work and responsibilities, taking care of myself has gone to the bottom of the list. I can't continue this way, my skin feels rough and tired and I long to go to the salon and the gym. And yet there is a joy in just doing, in moving from activity to activity when you know that each task is a good one, one you ultimately want to be doing. My design work for SVS Press has always come with this reward, and now too my work for The Wooden Button.

The Wooden Button has attracted a bit of negative attention lately, rumors and gossip mostly. For example, the silly accusation that all the students have to wear neutral colors to school. But let's face it: Waldorf schools can be a bit odd. I am helping run that odd school, with all its kooky Waldorfiness, and I'm fine with that. I've always found it easier to be part of a subculture than to mainstream myself, and running a Waldorf school fits perfectly. Our lovely teachers are ever gently preaching about the problems of children and media exposure. This rubs some people the wrong way apparently, but I don't even hear it. I've been preached to about the problems of media exposure my entire life; heck, I'm a product of limited media exposure. Gossip away. I myself am a little suspicious of all the Waldorf talk about fairies and gnomies. But every kid believes in fairies, just like kids believe in Jesus and Santa Claus. It was a sad day when I realized that the characters from the Chronicles of Narnia were not real, and didn't live somewhere. Fairies and gnomies are the least of my problems.

But the sad fact is, that despite the general enthusiasm, not everybody wants the school to thrive—perhaps some are envious of or threatened by it. And honestly, school options in New York City are so politicized, so competitive, so ruthless, that I am not exactly surprised by this. We, the moms running the school, were complaining about this bad energy to our highly-trained, calm-spoken, Waldorf teachers last week. Their response? A little delighted: "Of course! It's taken people this long to start gossiping? It means we're doing out job! Don't mind it at all." And then one teacher said something that really stuck with me. She said, "We're not located in a shrine for nothing."

Our school is located in a shrine! Somehow I'd forgotten this in all the bustle of starting the school. Our classroom is in the building where the body of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini lies. A Catholic missionary nun who—among other things—founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1880, started Mother Cabrini High School in 1899 (just one of the 67 different institutions she founded), and became a naturalized citizen in 1909. And did I mention the street we live on bears her name? She was canonized a saint in the Catholic Church in 1946, 29 years after her death.  Whenever I walk through the gate, past the substantial stone walls that surround the grounds of Mother Cabrini, I sense a calm presence, a joyful watchfulness even. I've always been delighted by this, and only now has it occurred to me that what I sense is her prayers and her life, her presence there. With faith and tireless work for the poor, she and the sisters hallowed the grounds where our children now play.

After dropping off the children this morning I went to the Shrine's gift shop. One of the women who runs the shine was at the desk and I told her I wanted to buy a small icon of Mother Cabrini for my icon corner. I said we needed her prayers for our school. She smiled, and proceeded to tell me that her daughter has been a Waldorf teacher for ten years and that she is so delighted that our school is located in the shrine. She said if she could raise her children all over again she would have put them in a Waldorf school. Then she mentioned she'd put up our flyers in her building to spread the news about The Wooden Button.

I've always felt that our school has moved forward for reasons beyond our control. It was meant in some way to be: at times when doors could easily have closed instead they opened. There was energy behind our plans that gently pushed us forward, wind in sails so to speak. This miraculously continues. And so I add Mother Cabrini to my prayer corner, asking her prayers, but also suspecting that she may have been helping us all along.

{   p o e t r y   w e d n e s d a y   }

photo friday: fragments

All photos are fragments. Life spreads past the edge of every shot—the sky, the ground, the road turning out of the frame. What image could contain the whole? Even Google Maps has blank spots, streets and addresses unplumbed. We photograph things to capture these fragments—places, events, stages, endless trips to the park—and keep them in a semi-permanence?

It has been yet another incredibly busy week here. Our little Waldorf school, The Wooden Button, held its first day of class Wednesday. It went off without a hitch, you wouldn't imagine the incredible amount of work that preceded the opening. Yesterday the students, including my son, brought vegetables from home and made soup together. And then, my daughter has also started attending preschool, only for two hours twice a week, but she is enthusiastic about it. For myself, I am looking forward to the weekend—it'll be the first since we got back from the Jersey shore where I can take a deep breath and relax a little. 

Next week's photo Friday theme: symmetry.