Today I pulled invasive ivy from the backyard, while my husband sat with his father in the emergency room after we received a call that he (my father-in-law) had been delivered there after fainting in church.  And I had several sweet new communications via facebook, and my son and my husband powered through math in spite of setbacks.  Later (with me still smelling of ivy) my husband and I talked of past and future – disappointments and resolutions relating to his father.  All of which amounted to the following:

The ivy is my worthy yard opponent

It teaches me of life as I uproot it

It spreads its complicated woven networks

I comb the loam for horizontal runners

Today I planted several tender tendrils

Beginning branchings that I hope will grow

Nets that can, entwined, uphold each other

A web of trust that all of us can know

While in another branching of the family

The knotted roots of past – betrayal, anger

Pulled consequences out from distant reaches

Touched off by small deception’s ancient hold

I rip out armloads, stuff it all away

As ivy’s images creep, wily, through my day.

A pep talk for myself and maybe for others as well:

layer on layer, patient placing down

daily labor, each day’s small deposit

little gain as evening comes around

not much to see, but still continue placid

consider the perspective of a life

of sediment that settles under sea

of change that comes so slowly you don’t see it

as things evolve, emerging gradually.

At some time, you’ll look back, and then you’ll know

the progress that you made at your endeavor

as imperceptibly stalactites grow

stalagmites reach them, and they join together.

No need to judge or let your head hang heavy

Your work will bear its fruits when they are ready.

On Monday I saw my mom off at the airport and took the train back into town.  I had two hours before my usual commitment, so I sat in a coffee shop at Westlake Center, and later up in the empty food court.  I had brought my usual early morning activities – prayer and devotional reading.  The overlapping of unaccustomed views with my work brought new colors and insights.  

Today I felt weary of iambic pentameter, so I allowed the images and thoughts to take their own form:

Rain speckled windows

Rain heckled walkers

Valentined workers

Magic smile’s warmth

Hot foamy latte

Baristas laughing

Businessmen talking

Measuring worth

Flash glimpse of something

Glancing up pensive

Fusions of insight

Inklings of truth

Something to hold on

Take when I go on

Pondering, breathing

Walking through rain

Later reflection

Precious connection

Light glimmers lifting me

Homeward again.

It had long been a wish of mine to be able to run.  Wishes are different from aspirations, sometimes even antithetical to them.  I wished I could run fast as one of the wishes I might ask if a fairy granted me some (not among the first three, but if I took my sister’s suggestion that my first wish would be all the wishes I wanted for the rest of my life, then I’d wish for fast running among one of those wishes.)  As it was I was agonizingly slow as a child, last picked for sports teams.  I would always get a stitch when I tried to run, a pain that proved too hard for me to power through to any kind of competence.

Later analysis might point out (as my husband did) that my attempt to run was inefficient – that there was far too much verticality going on (what he said was my center of gravity was too high).  What I realized was that I was really trying to fly, trying to leap up with every step.  Which, as it turned out, worked against forward motion.

As an adult I’ve tried a few times to learn to run – a few days of searing, painful treks up to the school on the corner, once around the track and back; later inspiration from a book called Born to Run, which had us running barefoot around the track at Kellogg Middle School, until they closed it down to replace the track with a rougher surface, unfriendly to bare feet.  My most recent endeavor involves running on the treadmill at the Y.  Normally I have eschewed working out at a gym when actual outdoor exercise could do the same thing; my bicycle riding has always been as much for the air and the scenery as for the workout.  But in the winter, when cold air can be a challenge if I’m struggling anyway, I’m finding the tutelage of the treadmill salutary.  And it became the subject for my sonnet today:

Back from running treadmill at the Y

I’m salty, mellow, tired but elated

Five miles today, or almost, and I find

Enthusiasm high, not dissipated.

At night, in resolutions in my bed

I think of marathons, triathlons 

Imagine running miles along the road

A settled gait that takes me on and on

Come spring, when air outside is balmy, sweet

I hope to take off confidently striding

Just me, the road, the sneakers on my feet

Past sprouting blooms, suburban landscapes gliding

For now I’m flush with incremental gains

As treadmill numbers, climbing slow, make plain.

Having finished that, I had a little more to say on the subject, so I decided to try another verse, one whose rhythm might lend itself more to running:

The wave of my gait rolls up and across

Right to left, left to right, as I stride

One movement, connected, steady and strong

Makes me feel I could do this awhile

The treadmill, my training wheels, teaching me rhythm

Makes my steps even and steady

While the green blinking numbers encourage my continuing

Show what I’ve managed already

The music that privately plays in my ears

Makes me smile and augments my endurance

Gives enough difference that each step’s not tedious

Gives me the hint of a dance

I could get used to this – 

That is my hope

That I’ll learn to want more and more

So I’ll run in great freedom and reap from it joy

And it won’t even feel like a chore.

What makes something poetry instead of mere verse?  I feel it has to transcend mundane views, invoke a deeper world.  These don’t.  But it was knowing there would be some like these that made me include “verse” in the subtitle of my blog.  

A lot of my daily sonnets are pretty bad.  But they hone my craft at verse; they hone my ear.  This evening I said to my husband: “I turned your oatmeal off, I think it’s done,” and noticed the iambic pentameter.  Or, to take it further (as I was compelled):

“I turned your oatmeal off, I think it’s done,”

I said, and noticed five feet of iambic

I went to give a prodding to my son

Who lay, near comatose, under a blanket

The evening ticks towards its predicted end

The deep and wondrous thoughts I hoped to capture

Keep flitting off beyond my reach again

Leaving me rhymeless, stuck, devoid of rapture

At last the sticky veil of sleep is drawn

I’ll seek more brightness when the night is gone.

(Not a full sonnet, that, but I had already written a full one – even worse – so I was OK with leaving it partial.)

There are other benefits to the practice.  The search for what to write, pen poised on blank journal page, dated on top and thus requiring that something be written, sends me scanning for feelings, thoughts, whatever stands out.  So the sonnets become a chronicle of my days and thoughts, sometimes mundane, sometimes something more.  I find I need to write about what’s up now, though there is some temporal flexibility. Now can be this moment as I type, or it can be anything in my memory where the thought or feeling was strong enough to leave a spike, such that I can go back and relive it.  

I prefer reliving the high points, recapturing the lofty thoughts.  But yesterday there was a low point, actually left over from Sunday, and I found that I had to address it, to clear the landscape, in order for other things to be able to emerge.  It wasn’t a deep low; I had pretty much pushed it aside, but the fact that I needed to put it in a sonnet proved that I needed to address it in my thought, put it to bed, to re-establish my accustomed tranquility.

I left the potluck quickly and alone

I didn’t want to stay and try to chat

I felt let down by church and on my own

No one to cherish me or what I said

I was a bit embarrassed by my speech

I didn’t do as well as I have done

Didn’t practice, read it, stumbled, lurched

Didn’t tap the knowing of the One.

Not awful, but I didn’t make connection

Failed to convey the spirit I had felt

Spent too much time on other’s loose suggestions

Too little on the light the Spirit dealt

Or maybe it just wasn’t the right thing

Square peg, round hole, a message without zing.

©Wendy Mulhern