Down to Our Ears For Priscilla Meyer You taught me how to read a text closely, as if I my head were in the page and not above it. Be less like a passenger on a plane, powering past, than an ant on the ground— or a snail at the beach centimetering through sand, a library on its back. (You’ve heard of tiny homes, well….) Close reading, I now think to myself, is like a headstand and picture you, in your seventh decade, upwrong in the kitchen, telling the most hilarious of Russian stories to people’s feet! You all but taught that way— with so much vigor and balance. An article I read this morning said that a headstand “can lead to a symbolic upheaval of perspective.” That certainly happened in your class. But then the article went all Buddhist on me: “Instead of being rooted in the Earth, we can see ourselves as a mystical peepul tree, whose roots grow in Heaven…. We can let worries and attachments fall to the ground.” It doesn’t take a headstand to lose the things we love. They climb out of our pockets all on their own and plunge like suicidal coins or tiny divers hitting their heads on the board. (The event we older folks specialize in is loss.) Ficus Religiosa—I have no use for the fig under which the Buddha sat and whose pollinator is the Aganoid Wasp (though I wouldn’t mind living a thousand years). Close reading, like close living, is just a wish to be in it, down to our ears, you might say, buried in detail. Where love lives, not God. You’re down, Priscilla; I’m down, as students like to say—the two meanings of the word joined by that rickety bridge we call a pun. Eager yet disconsolate…. We’re losing people left and left. Look at the snail with its book, right there next to— no, inside of— beauty.
The Professor Takes Up Gardening Everyone stops to admire my trumpet vine, which sends red notes up into the sky. It must be nine feet tall now and looking, I suppose, for concertgoers who listen with their eyes. It’s a free soloist on the brick face of my imposing house, a Victorian El Capitan. When the blossoms fall, they become radio parachutes. I’m mixing metaphors, as I do flowers. The portulaca at the base weep like a hippie grandmother in a tie-dyed shirt or like Willy Wonka in a Skittles factory. (Gene Wilder once lived in the house next to mine— he was no catcher in the rye.) My darlings will do just about anything for an audience, and sometimes I get jealous. Of course, they’re neither old nor crabby, and they can really play! They have lips like Angelina Jolie and lungs like Carl Lewis. Who knew Julliard was in Iowa? “I planted you,” I tell them. “I watered you.” I’m the worst sort of parent or teacher, taking credit for everything. I never did this with those other annuals: students!
Big Top The men in yellow T-shirts blink caution, each barrel chest a kind of traffic light or bumble bee protecting the hive. They bring heavy robes and drape them on the queen. They’re anesthesiologists of ruin, scuba divers in the kitchen. To save the house they must gas it. A crowd of one cheers from the stands. It’s big top fumigation. All they need now is a lion and a clown. Why can’t someone do this to me? Enclose my fears and suffocate them, extinguish every last termite of worry? I wouldn’t mind being empty for a while. All of the people inside of me, even my loved ones, staying with friends across town.
How's That for Love? After the derecho came through like a football team or a wall of line-dancing drunks, I drove around town inspecting the damage. The limbs of a giant tree had gone through the windows of an apartment building four stories up. It was as if the tree— or the storm—had known where the glass was, poking out the building’s eyes. In one apartment, a limb had entered the living room and, still unsatisfied, found a woman’s bed, crashing there. To a reporter this resident later said, “They were chain-sawing in my bedroom!” (How’s that for love?) When something awful happens, we tend to think of it as an intruder and not the tenant it really is. Your child becoming a teenager: acne and anger! Your head becoming an ice rink after your hair falls out. (Where’s the Zamboni?) The building, tired of just about everything, turning its shirt inside out, wanting a little green.
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Ralph James Savarese is the author of three books of poems: Republican Fathers, When This Is Over, and Someone Falls Overboard. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Seneca Review, Sewanee Review, and Threepenny Review, among other places. He lives in Iowa.
