Black Powder

“In the middle of war, he is asking for poems.”

~ Ilya Kaminsky, a Ukrainian American poet, author and professor, wrote for The New York Times

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Dear Alex,

You know I’d be last in the room to ask for poetry. In class, library or happy hour, I have sought neither rhyme nor song. My bookshelves house two collections of poetry: Robert Frost and Louise Gluck. Frost I bought a decade aged to feel more enlightened; Gluck was my birthday gift of choice for the same reason.

Names switched to trophies. I was hunting for shiny things.

Shine is candy. We love it from babyhood to gurney. Polish our cars and stories to mask fear. “Pour some sugar on me. I can’t get enough,” booms Def Leppard in my eardrums. His concert album beams in my music library on phone. He squeals at me to fire up, dazzle, flash, his verbs revving up to the pitch of poetry with Frost and Gluck. At this peak, why the hell would you come down?

I was down on knees at my front lawn last Sunday to yank out grass roots that had smothered the sprinkler heads. I shoveled with bare hands soil that hardened around three metal valves, raking and writhing as a rabid skunk, grappling with black powder to unleash blinding water from the abyss, seeing at the moment nothing other than earthworms sliding into a rumba before me for the next hour in a trillion more sun rays.

It was my grandest high of the week.

Yours,
Kate

PS.  I took this photo in Paris shortly before the pandemic, spellbound by the chandelier of glass spikes seen best at ground zero.