my purpose

i feel like steve martin in the jerk, i've found my purpose.

it's strange to be so completely lost in life, yet profoundly struck by the muse and able to jot it down. to make a poem. to speak to people's lives from a place barely understood.

i think that is the hardest part of it all, writing from this place of uncertainty and admitted ignorance. feeling my life, living my life, knowing my life will come forth in words arranged on a page that many will never see. most will never see.

but for those who see, those who understand, i am grateful.

it is such an odd thing, this, jotting down my life in so many fragments. making sense of it in small epiphanies along the way.

i think all poems are that, epiphanies. whether they lament the facts or celebrate them. we cannot construct a tower of words without keen awareness.

that i live in such a way i am able to be acutely aware of the scratching on the trellis above me, and the emergence of a fat squirrel my girl has been feeding. nibbling on a hunk of something i only later realize is a part of a loaf of bread i left out (my girl had taken said loaf to feed the geese yesterday and rather than lug the thing back upstairs only to lug it back downstairs today, i tucked it, safely, or so i thought, away in a blue bucket on a chair on the patio). the little bugger sought it out and made off with the goods. can't say that i blame him. it was rainy and cold this morning.

so i returned back downstairs with a fist full of peanuts. this, our pet squirrel ripening around the middle, paused, with a slice of bread in its mitts, and watched me put the nuts down. after scampering up the trellis to watch from above, i came back inside.

later, my husband was leaving, peanuts in pocket, and the squirrel was residing in a dogwood, peanut half devoured in his mouth. he scampered off through the pine and on to the church roof. we got too close, or moved too fast, or something. unnerved him. can't say i blame him. start trusting humans and it all goes south.

somehow this little rodent will find his way into my work. (perhaps he just has) and i will understand then, what i cannot call to words now.

you see, poetry is a doorway to understanding. these blogs used to function that way for me, but there is a lot i cannot say now, and find more hindrance than freedom here. but sometime, i will return and speak freely. or allude to truth freely, as once i did.

i do not understand, but i trust.
that is my motto these days.