Legends of Ordinary Wisdom - Sashana Kane Proctor

[Larry Robinson]

Legends of Ordinary Wisdom


When he is eighty-eight
The poet
	bent like the trunk of 
	a weathered oak
shuffles to the lip of the pond
	and drinks the vision 
	there at his feet.
"Hello, Old Mirror Friend,"
	he tells the water.
"How well you hold 
	my withered countenance today
	with its wrinkles and crows' feet
	surrounded by turquoise sky.
Hello."
And the water ripples back.

And when he's done 
Off he trudges
	the turtle he has become
to sit on an ancient rock.
He pats it
	with a hand
	dry as a long fallen leaf
	and rests a while.
"Thanks for warming my backside,"
	he sighs to the stone
	as he stands to leave
And when he is gone up the path
	the loam where he padded so slowly
	remembers the gentle steps of his feet.

When she is ninety-three
	confined to her chair
She sits
	bones melting
	to painful memory
	her life miniaturized 
	like she'd never have believed
While the essence of her 
	scribbles the poem that says, 

"I ache to ground myself here
planting as symbol
a cutting from a jade plant
rootless
into the dry soil of a neglected flowerpot
I want to plant my feet
ankle deep into my garden
I want them to grow roots…”*

A busy young mother 
	reads the words 
	that dance the page
And snatches up her youngest
	her peanut buttered daughter
Whisking to the yard
	to root their feet deep
	in fragrant bread warm earth.
"Now stand up!" she cries
And they are trees
	waving arm branches	
	at a turquoise sky.
"This is what it feels like,"
	she says to her little one
	the one with eyes that eat the world.
"See?  We have our feet in the earth
	just like trees
	and we are growing and becoming
	and greening and breathing."
And her little girl thinks 
	she is crazy 
	and so so beautiful
	delicious as a peanut butter sandwich.

When that wee one
	is twenty-two
	and completely unmoored 
	by heartbreak
She remembers the earth
	up to her knees
	tethering her 
	steadying her
Holding her
	like a mother
And the peanut butter fragrance
	the treeness of it all.

When he is forty-five
	and missing his grandfather
	and worrying about his sons and his students 
	living in the hell of their world
The physics teacher holds the sight 
	he saw from his boyhood bird blind
	of the old poet
	bent like an ancient oak
	as he shuffled down the path
And now he greets the pond
	and sits on his grandfather's friend
Whispering
		"Thanks for warming my backside."   

	- Sashana Kane Proctor      


   *from the poem, “Returning Home After the Fire Evacuation” by Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg