Sunlight is free, at least for now
1
Ice pack on the knee that used to be the good one. The price of poetry and walking. The price of age and mishap and gifts from the unknown. Weakness without cause, without apparent cause, too slow moving, karma of the body, laziness of care, aversion to exercise, indifference to building strength, all other superager ducks ready in a row. All but this. She should know better. Should have known. The worst is the sinking of spirit, the temptation to give in. “Life’s hard. One of the hardest,” says White Steve in Reservation Dogs. Resistance makes it worse. It—the knee, the knowing, the sinking, hardness itself, and the dread that this one setback is the beginning of all that ends. Such is her age of catastrophizing—at the age she is in the year she is in the world as she knows it, up close and afar and everywhere in between, the ice pack giving small relief, already warming.
2
Some people say these are poems. I say everything is fiction, poems too. All words are fictions, an understanding once so widely shared no words for it were needed. When was that? When did the sky turn dark with human tinkering? When did we first steal air from the birds? When it rains, do we remember? There should be more to say here, I think, and then I wonder why, when is there ever more to say? Breathe deep. Three times, they tell you. All your problems will disappear. Just three deep breaths, not one, not five.
3
A random droplet on a freshly watered collard leaf breaks into rainbows and who needs a crystal palace? Sunlight is free, at least for now. Water, on the other hand, comes at a cost, and with drought increasing every year, even the rain barrel will eventually go dry. More than once. But not today, not yet, heat still alternating with heavy rains. It would be a good spring for the garden if she hadn’t injured her knee, the otherwise healthy enough one, and a few days later tripped on uneven ground after hammering a picket-fence barrier over a hole in the plastic mesh chewed out by squirrels. The squirrels will come in anyway, what she’s after is blocking the rabbits. At least for a little longer. So far they’ve been content with the weeds and grasses in the neighboring yard, the cat on watch, teaching them their boundaries. But the injury—her hammer went flying, and with her weakened knee, when she tripped (wearing flip-flops and catching a toe, dislodging the rotting branch marking an herb and lettuce bed), instead of landing safely as she has all her life, she wobbled, lost her footing, her balance, bounced—yes, she’s sure, she bounced—right foot, left knee, right knee, right hip, right shoulder, caught finally, gently, by the abundant, swooping beautyberry, aware of wrenching her neck. For a moment she felt fine, almost better, as if the fall had made right what was wrong. Endorphins, she thought. Or dopamine. Whatever brain chemical it is that protects us from the first moments of pain. Now, the next day, every old injury cries out and every movement calls for caution that seems feeble, as if she’s aged ten years overnight. Neck, shoulder, elbow, knee, toes—each site a theater for hurt, or tingle, or ache, or tiny seizure into numbness, reminder of fragility of flesh and bone and magic of light in water, the eye to see, the heart to receive, the rainbow brilliance itself.
