June Bug

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/06/june-bug/

Hello, June. I look away a moment, and you’ve arrived in alexandrite, pearl, sunshine, and a weightless world. Everything’s on me, Heracles, but I’m along the ridge and gone. A season of life is come and aloft, and suddenly I’m a child no longer. May I still be one?
I’m wobbling in place, and flirting with the precipice, and everything is upon me at once: summer, home buying, weddings, graduations, mortgages, goodbyes, travel, moving, faith, love, hope, patience, hurry, flowers, exhaustion, tension, uncertainty, opportunities, roads, activity, danger, water, the warrior, the king, anima, existentialism, philosophy, friendship. It’s the realization that the daffodils, rhododendrons, tulips, roses, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, geraniums, nasturtiums, crimson dragons, maples, poplars, plums, apples and all the beautiful trees are efflorescing in time with the weeds: the horsetail, scotch broom, thistles, dewberries, poison oak, nettles. 
Spring does not choose only joyful blooms, but the weeds spread seeds in sync. And are they not beautiful, also? The blackberries, “big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes / ebon in the hedges, fat / with blue-red juices” as Sylvia Plath wrote; or the belled foxtail and the huckleberries with their lovely little berries hung out; the blue-button flowers, pervasive and poisonous; queen anne’s lace, so blithe despite its near resemblance to hemlock, and the death of Socrates.
My life is such, as wide with weeds as the world, yet full of trees, valleys, rivers, and peaks as well, wildflowers gracing the faces and banks of each. I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, currently, and I see in the fanciful fiction some of me: the journey, the home, the community that comes and goes, the unexpected additions, blessings and curses, and the oddity of it all. But it’s still lovely, and it’s mine, absorbed into a little Macondo in me, like the precious pearl in Steinbeck’s story, both drawing me together and rending me apart. I’m a cross-stitch mess, a knitting nightmare, and I’m likely to be unraveled and re-begun for the summer’s out.
And I’m excited, frightened, ready – anyone can come along.
My heart’s a magic carpet
aloft beneath the heavens
my arabesque thoughts
and minarets, whirl,
a world to resurrect 
with regress and love
I’m signing a curvature of signature into a thousand filed bureaucracies, an ugly necessity of an angry system. So many complaints, so much nightmarish idiocy and everyone covers their tracks with a thousand words of legal mystery. 
I’m too late, too late by half. With some stories, the protagonist never has a chance, but history is writ by the winners, even if there is none. Is this all Pyrrhic? 

Weeds

A man full of words
is a garden of weeds,
and when the weeds grow,
a garden of snow,
a necklace of tracks: it was here, my snow owl, perhaps.
Who scared it away?
~ Jorie Graham - The Dream of the Unified Field (book not poem)

I remember one person saying recently that he stopped dating a woman because she didn't have any dreams, no hopes or motive - she didn't want to do anything.  I can't comment on whether this was true or not, but I do realize that I experience similar feelings of interest in people and their journeys. I was realizing earlier how attracted my personality is to knowledge and dreams and journeys: motivation, hopes, yearnings, cravings, gut-burning, heart-wrenching aching adventures of appetites. Patrick Rothfuss posted this link, earlier today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmEbF2uhsZk
And I smiled as I admit that knowledge, understanding, wit magnetizes me, galvanizes me into a headlong pursuit of friends and ambitions.

Full of words and weeds
It's two owlish eyes staring over me
do these fingers sing across these keys
as the crickets, the nightingale, the mouse scurrying
through the brush, between the trees
who? who? precedes the swooping death
in a breath it ends, soon as it begins
pierced in the talons and watching the worldfall
beneath, a blackplate pool and bristlebrush leaves
crows cawcall - is it a prayer?
someone must the sacrifice be - no
my fingers do not sing
but for a second before the mouse's life ends
does she fly with the wind rushing by,
before one creation ends to another one feed?



I found a whole bunch of poetry books at the library, and I think my collection is a little too varied. I found some Robert Bly, some Mary Oliver, some Jorie Graham (I just discovered her), some Bukowski (mixed feelings) and some Maya Angelou. I've been really enjoying my Jorie Graham experience, actually, and Mary Oliver is simply the best.