I might have mentioned that the gardener and I have had a lot going on in 2019 with relatives visiting and other urgent projects (non-writing, of course). I have been looking forward to April to write some poems. Ahem.
Friday I went to the doctor for the plantar fasciitis in my left foot. This is not my reconstructed ex-tumor-ridden right foot. I’ve had pain now for about 8 months, so the doctor had me get xrays. He called me Saturday and told me I need an MRI to rule out a stress fracture or whatnot as there is a weird white line or somesuch on the xray. This line has gotten bigger since a random xray I had last May. That xray was to check on my reconstruction in the right foot and they only took an image of the left for comparison.
Then Saturday afternoon my two boys lay together in a bed on the counter.
Are Perry and Felix not the cutest guys?! Felix has that expression because when Perry lays with him he always says to me, “What fresh hell is this?” a la Dorothy Parker.
I have primary lymphedema in both legs, and I use a compression pump–or am supposed to–to flush out some of the excess fluid. I hadn’t used my pump in a long time because I’m so tired at night and it takes a couple of hours, but I decided to last night. I didn’t put Perry in his room. Big mistake. While I was trapped on the machine, he started “instigating,” and he ended up knocking over our good lamp, shattering the light bulb and breaking a big chunk out of the side of the lamp. In the photo look at the right side of the lamp and you can see the white line at the start of the hole.
The gardener searched for the broken pieces of the lamp and tried piecing it together while I swept up the light bulb and made sure the floor was safe for little cat beans.
Then I hooked back up to pump my legs, while the gardener started watching TV. Less than two minutes later, he was sick. Without going into all the details, I will say he is still ill and we don’t yet know what is wrong. Because when it rains it pours, I received two separate rejections for poems since Saturday night. Yup.
(Update: The gardener is suddenly starting to feel better!)
So I am going to close comments and leave you with a favorite poem (that I dug out to show Theresa Barker when she visited Phoenix. WordPress won’t allow correct formatting, but I think this is close enough to give you an idea of the poem.
SO I SAID I AM EZRA
by A.R. Ammons 1955
So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice
I listened to the wind
go over my head and up into the night
Turning to the sea I said
I am Ezra
but there were no echoes from the waves
The words were swallowed up
in the voice of the surf
or leaping over the swells
lost themselves oceanward
Over the bleached and broken fields
I moved my feet and turning from the wind
that ripped sheets of sand
from the beach and threw them
like seamists across the dunes
swayed as if the wind were taking me away
and said
I am Ezra
As a word too much repeated
falls out of being
so I Ezra went out into the night
like a drift of sand
and splashed among the windy oats
that clutch the dunes
of unremembered seas
