Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away.

—Proverbs 27:10

I live in my childhood home. There is something charming—and almost anachronistic—about raising my own children in the same house my parents bought when I was nine years old. I know every corner of this century-old farmhouse by heart, and every room holds memories in its walls. I am comfortable here. But as familiar as this house is, we are, in many ways, living in the middle of unfamiliar territory. A foreign world lies outside our doors.

Of course, it’s not as though a whirlwind has pulled us from our foundations and given us a yellow brick road where the sidewalk once was. Our street, in fact, looks almost as it did twenty-some years ago. The buildings themselves have hardly been altered; their structures, their yards, and even their paint colors are largely the same as they have been for two decades. The difference, rather, is their occupants. Most of them have been replaced. A couple of familiar faces remain, but after 17 years, they no longer recognize me.

The residences on our block—including ours—are mostly rentals or "starter" homes, which means that the people who are here now won't be for long. We’ve spent three years trying to learn the names of most of our neighbors, and within that short time, several of them have already moved on.

We rarely see many of our neighbors, and with so few of us likely to remain for more than a year or two, putting forth the effort—and it is an effort—to meet them feels almost futile. Some will never even make eye contact before ducking hurriedly into their house-shaped bunkers. They live in hiding, and then they leave.

* * * * * * * *

Twenty years ago, meeting our neighbors seemed easy. With so many kids sharing the same block, spontaneous encounters were practically inevitable. There was a time that children formed a part of the landscape, a time when I could recite the names of the occupants of nearly every house within view of our front yard.

I could tell you that the neighbor in the white house across the street would step onto his front porch at five o'clock each night—you could almost set your watch by his appearance—and call for his son John, stretching his short name into two long, operatic syllables. And John, with the blond rattail flying out behind him, would race his bike home for dinner.

In the fading red house facing ours lived two little girls, younger than I, whose father owned Southside Mini-mart down the alley. I envied them. They could skip over to their father's business after school and have their pick of free candy.

Two houses down, with their mother and the hard rocker step-dad they called Tony, lived Chris and Jennifer, unkempt in their oversized Def Leppard t-shirts. They smelled like dirt.


And at the end of the block was a family with three children who attended our Christian school. They had a friendly brown and white dog named Ginger, and their mother taught me how to sew Barbie skirts by hand.

But for all our quotidian interaction, we never grew close to the people around us. We knew their faces, and we knew their names. We said "hello" when we met on the street, but we never so much as shared a meal. We never really knew them.

Most of these people are gone now. I don't know where. Or why. Or how long ago. Maybe some of them are dead. And, to be honest, I have a hard time caring.

* * * * * * * *

Ours is a small college town, so the student population is in constant flux. As unsettling as that can seem, it's at least to be expected. What distresses me more is how rapidly the rest of the population turns over.

I often wonder what subtle effects our modern nomadic lifestyle has had on our society. What would our neighborhood look like if the people in it had stayed? How much different would our attitudes and expectations be if we knew we couldn't just pack up and leave every few years? And what investments would we be willing to make in our relationships with the folks next door if we expected to find them still living there in twenty years?

* * * * * * * *

Twenty years ago, those casual encounters with our neighbors cost us nothing; it likewise cost us nothing to say our casual goodbyes. Because forging friendships with our immediate neighbors requires more from us than it once did, it’s just possible that those friendships will seem more valuable in the end. But what, exactly, will it take to reach these people in the first place?

Most of us are just not home enough to regularly bump into one another. We spend too little time in our own yards. We're busy. We may have collected enough virtual "friends" to keep us from feeling the need for the kind with flesh and blood. We invert our sense of community by allowing Blogger and facebook to turn our private spaces into public spaces and iPods and cell phones to convert our public spaces into private spaces. Even when we do find ourselves forced into some kind of neighborly small talk, our fragmented culture has made common experiences next to impossible to find.

Bleak as it sounds, the only sure-fire way of making contact and forming relationships with these disparate individuals seems to be disaster of some sort. A massive windstorm this fall knocked out power and downed several trees around us, damaging a number of nearby homes and vehicles. Destructive, yes, but also an easy and natural topic for conversation. It provided an opportunity to finally meet some of the people on our block. I even had a chat with a man on the corner who had the top half of a giant pine tree resting comfortably on the roof of his camper. Before that day, I had never so much as seen his face.

My husband does a much better job of making friends with the neighbors than I do, but even so, it hasn't been easy. Sharing food has been somewhat successful—excess garden produce in summer, hot cross buns at Easter, homemade cookies at Christmas. A couple of neighbors have even accepted our invitations to dinner, but we have a long way to go before we could say we know them. When we tried to share a plate of treats with one man across the street, all he said was, "No thanks," and shut the door in our faces. Maybe he thought we were trying to poison him.

These people could be suffering some horrific trials in their lives, and we would be blissfully unaware. And tragically unable to help them—tragically unable to love them.

We've all heard the story of the Good Samaritan. We've all gotten the message that "Love your neighbor as yourself " doesn't literally mean to love your neighbor; it just means, as the old rock song suggests, to love the one you're with. But what if loving my neighbor actually meant loving my neighbor? As in, the person next door? The one with the Buddhist prayer flags and the political bumper stickers covering his door? The middle-aged single lady who plays the cello? The young couple that leaves for work in the pre-dawn hours and comes home at lunch to walk their tiny dog? The former police officer with the gorgeous flower garden? The registered sex offender whose front door was inexplicably smashed to slivers one night? What about those neighbors? What would it mean to love them?

Unless some of them stick around, we may never find out.

* * * * * * * *

I, too, have been a nomad. I may live in my childhood home, but I've taken a long time to arrive back here. As my facebook "friend" list reflects, I have put down shallow roots in other states, in other countries, only to pull them up again and be transplanted elsewhere. But there are fibers in that soil, traces of me, that I've left behind with every move. Those transitions, however necessary, are never entirely painless.

I'd like to say that we'll stay comfortably rooted forever in this house, but that may not be up to me. And honestly, I have the same wanderlust as those around me, the same hope for something bigger, something better, something we can call our own. Our family is growing, I tell myself, and we'll need more space. I truly do want to hold some kind of principle of rootedness, to maintain a deep sense of belonging to a place, but on this point my principles and my desires work at cross purposes. I don't think we'll ever leave town. At least I hope not. But even if we stay here in this neighborhood until our dying days, I can say with almost prophetic certainty that most of my neighbors won’t.

It’s our modest hope, however, that in the meantime we will build a few friendships here that will cost more—and be worth more—than a shallow hello.

This Little Light of Mine

Here we are in mid-January, and I haven't posted in over a month. And that last post was practically cheating, since I didn't write anything.

I'd like to think that I'll be writing more soon, but writing takes time, and free time is a commodity that seems to be running low around here of late. Writing—at least the kind that anyone would want to read—also requires a clear mind, but my sleep-deprived thoughts have been about as clear as the oily mud puddles in the alley behind my house.

Several times a day, I walk into a room and immediately forget what I came for. My children are learning to answer to any of five boy names. (At least I'm still sticking to names that belong to actual members of our family. That's pretty good, right?) The Christmas tree, until just a few days ago, was still standing fully decorated in our living room. And the dust. Let's just not talk about that.

My excuse is that I have a newborn who is taking up all my time. And I have four other children who take up all my time. We had Christmas preparations and Christmas celebrations and Christmas cleanup which took up all my time. And now that Christmas is over, I have graphic design projects that are taking up my time. I have groceries to buy and floors to sweep and thank you notes to write and books to read and Candyland to play and guests to feed and laundry to wash (oh boy, do I have laundry to wash), and all of it is taking up all my time. I could be wrong, but I suspect that this is why the old woman who lived in a shoe did not win a Pulitzer prize. She was too busy—changing diapers while talking on the phone to the insurance company and pausing to tell the six-year-old to quit using the piano keys as a Hot Wheels race track—to consider the metaphorical complexities inherent in domestic life and then string them together into graceful narrative arcs.

But then again, some women not only maintain blogs but sign book deals while knee deep in this kind of beautiful chaos. So I suppose my failure to write reveals more about my priorities than about my busy schedule. If you can call it a schedule.

Blogging has been pretty well near the bottom of my list of ways to use up all my time right now. But this may be a good thing. The fuller my life is, the less time I seem to have to talk about it. The best writing I have managed in the last couple of months has been the occasional uncreative Facebook status. Brilliant literature it is not. That kind of writing sheds about as much light as a dollar store glowstick the morning after a party.

Last week, as I was mentally reviewing shopping lists and to-do lists and hurrying home with a van load of groceries to my crying baby, I was inhabiting—both literally and metaphorically—the gray cloud of mist and mud being spat upon me by the tractor trailer I was following. I was thinking how colorless and drab life can be on days like this (poor me), how dull and monotonous, when I started listening to a CD of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I bathed my weary brain in her lucid prose, and began imagining how satisfying it would be to write as she does, capturing in precise phrases the glory and excess and teeming life hiding within an unassuming clod of earth.

There I was, a living clod of earth myself, and failing to be amazed by the mere fact of my own of my own existence. But gradually, as I listened, I found the dark cloud growing lighter. I found myself seeing through it. Or not seeing through it, but seeing it, seeing the thing itself:
Look at this grimy cloud!
Look at these living, mud-clumpy hills emerging from their snow shroud and rolling along beside the traffic.
Look at that tired barn leaning on the verge of collapse next to the highway, and see the story hiding within its weather-and-rain-silvered boards.

I am suddenly aware of the strange beauty on every side of me; I wonder how I could have missed seeing what I was seeing. How could I have forgotten that every particle of dust mingling with the rain and melting snow has a history of its own? Each, if it could speak, could tell me how it came from a distant volcano or an ancient glacier, from a maple leaf or from the palm of my hand. My hands—my own hands—are formed from dust, and are returning to dust even as I write this. I, too, am dust with a story. But I did not have to exist here any more than that muddy raindrop. How could I not be overwhelmed with gratitude and awe?

That is what this book does to me—and I haven't even finished it yet. It helps me to see. It shines a blazing light into places I'd never thought to look. I can't take it in all it once; I have to pause it and revel in words for a while. It's probably not safe to listen to while driving. Customers should be sent home from the bookstore with this volume packed inside a brown paper sack stamped with the warning, "Be safe. Don't Dillard and Drive." I need to give my full attention to what she's saying.

That is how I want to write.

Sitting there in my van, I wished I had the power to shape thoughts into the kind of words that could rip away the grey veil from those dreary clouds. I longed to shine my own verbal spotlight, to make everyone see the swirling magic, the millions of untold stories, contained in the spray of muddy water spattering our windshields. I wanted to uncap my highlighter and pull everyone's attention in glowing yellow lines connecting the dust in those hills with the dust gripping the steering wheels in the cars that flashed past—living dust, dust filled with borrowed breath. Dust with birthdays. Dust with dental records. Dust with college degrees and laugh lines and regrets. I wanted to wield my pen and make the pages shout, "Dust you are! Isn't it miraculous?"

But then I sighed and just kept driving, watching the wiper blades flick away the dingy film that clouded my view. I flipped the turn signal and absorbed the gritty rhythm of studded tires on wet blacktop.

Who am I kidding? Annie Dillard must have been born with a gift for writing. And she also has more than just a fleeting desire to commit her ideas to paper. She reads about writing. She writes about writing. She, no doubt, gets up early and stays up late just to write. I am sure that she edits and revises and edits again. Is that really what I want to do with my life right now?

Her life is not mine. I will never write like she does. I will never write about the same things that she does. I will never be a writer. Much as I admire her book, I occasionally get the feeling that something huge is missing from her prose. I realize that all her vivid descriptions, all of her startling metaphors, all her hours spent holding perfectly still until her cigarette burned down to her fingertips simply in order to observe the secretive behavior of muskrats could arise only from study, practice, and an essentially solitary life. Not a lonely life. Not a boring life. But a life full of lengthy meditation apart from the society of peanut-butter-smeared toddlers.

I would not trade my life for hers—Pulitzer and all. I would not trade Candyland with noisy preschoolers for rendezvous with quiet muskrats. At least not on most days. There is no less wonder in my sticky, spit-uppy existence. There is no less magic. There is merely less opportunity to write about it. For now, I will content myself with the few words I can post here on this neglected blog. I will shed what limited light I can.

Annie Dillard can carry her spotlight and I my dollar store glowstick.

Holly Jolly

I Plead the Fifth

Introducing our fifth little boy, Liam Quentin:

He arrived on Friday night, November 26, his great-grandfather's birthday, and was a very healthy eight pounds, fifteen ounces and twenty-two inches long.

Meeting his brothers for the first time:

The Glorious Status Quo

I do not have cancer.

Normally, that wouldn't even be worth mentioning, but in this month of Thanksgiving, it's one bit of news that I'm very grateful for. Every so often something comes up that makes me realize how blessed I am to be enjoying just another uneventful day of "the same old thing."

Lately, "the same old thing" involves feeling about 13 months pregnant and consequently more than a bit sorry for my achy, tired, fat, slow self. And I'm not even having twins. In fact, as far as pregnancies go, mine are uncommonly easy—no morning sickness, no preexisting conditions, no miscarriages, no C-sections, no Strep B, no gestational diabetes. Nothing. "You are," a doctor once told me, "an obstetricians dream."

Nevertheless, when people ask me how I'm doing these days, I sometimes forget all that good news and want to respond with bitter sarcasm. You really want to know how I feel? Then try these ten easy steps to allow you to share in the third-trimester experience:

1. Place a 25-pound watermelon in a backpack or duffel bag, and strap it to your belly as tightly as you can so that it digs uncomfortably into your waist.
2. Adjust the straps so that the weight rests primarily on your lower back and hips. Just make sure that the melon sticks out at least a full 10 inches in front.
3. Put on ankle weights and four pairs of socks before cramming your feet into your now too-tight shoes.
4. Attempt to do routine household tasks such as getting out of bed, picking small items off the carpet, and hauling an overflowing laundry basket up and down the stairs several times a day.
5. Shortly before bedtime, consume a family-size jar of salsa, and wash it down with two or three quarts of soda. This will allow you to fully appreciate the heartburn and squashed bladder that pregnant women come to expect as they strive for a little shuteye.
6. Chew enough antacid tablets to let you sleep for an hour or so.
7. After no more than an hour of fitful slumber, attempt to roll over onto your other side.
8. Give up the attempt.
9. After another hour, have somebody elbow you repeatedly in the ribs to simulate the midnight acrobatics of your baby. You will then be wide awake enough to realize that you have to go to the bathroom. Again.
10. Repeat daily for three months.

Of course, if all goes well, when this new baby boy is finally placed in my arms, I'll again discover that it really was all worth it. I'll understand afresh what a privilege it was to carry another healthy child—something that countless heartbroken women in history have hopelessly longed to do. But right now, if I'm being honest, I'm usually looking forward less to meeting my son than to simply not being pregnant anymore.

But if I struggle with selfish resentment and impatience on account of a blessing like pregnancy, how would I cope with a true evil like cancer?

"Good timing" is, I suppose, a phrase that does not apply to a deadly disease. Serious illness is never welcome. But with four young kids and a husband dependent on my good health—not to mention a fifth baby who's roughly two weeks away from making his grand entrance—I can't help but think that this would be a truly terrible time of life to be diagnosed with cancer—far worse than, say, 30 or 40 years from now when our kids are grown and our nest is empty. So, as you can imagine, finding a mysterious lump in a place where it did not belong was not a pleasant discovery.

My first thought was, "Oh great." No fear. No anger. Just annoyance. I figured that it was, in all likelihood, simply another obnoxious pregnancy-induced growth. After all, everything else about me has been growing like mad. I feel like I am that scene in The Magician's Nephew during the creation of Narnia, when the whole of that new world is so full of life and growth that a broken bar of iron takes root and matures into a fully formed lamppost. Everything growing. Everything expanding. If I accidentally swallowed a watermelon seed right now, my grandfather's terrifying tale would become a reality; a vine would spring up and start producing juicy watermelons right inside my already crowded belly. So of course one more growth was entirely understandable, even if it was in an unusual place, right?

I figured my doctor would agree. However, at my next appointment, she didn't seem nearly as certain as I was that this was no cause for concern. When she told me to schedule an ultrasound exam, I felt my blood pressure rise just a little. And yet, I remained fairly confident that the ultrasound would confirm beyond doubt that this was totally normal. I prayed about it, but I didn't worry much.

Then, after the ultrasound, the radiologist came in and explained that, given my good health, my relatively young age, and the fact that I'm pregnant, this was most likely nothing serious, but he could not be entirely sure. This particular lump wasn't something he could diagnose merely by looking. The only way to know if it was cancerous was to perform a biopsy.

I don't know how it strikes others, but to me, "biopsy" is a rather scary word. It now brought the idea of cancer into the realm of real possibility. And, because I had been expecting an "all clear" from the ultrasound exam, it struck me as both scary and disappointing. I wanted this to be over. However, with my due date looming ever closer, I scheduled the dreaded biopsy appointment for the earliest available day.

I was nervous about the procedure, but as it turned out, an ultrasound-guided needle biopsy wasn't such a horrible experience—not something I'd like to do on a regular basis, but not a whole lot worse than having a few of cavities filled. 

I still didn't really think I had cancer, but waiting to find out was more of a test of my own trust in God's plans than I would have expected. I happen to be reading through the book of Job this month, and as I read chapter 13, I had to pause at verse 15: "Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face."  Would I, if I were faced with this deadly disease, still be able with Job to hope in God? Could I argue my ways to his face?

Mercifully, the pathology report came back in just a couple of days. Those two days, however, gave me cause to meditate more than ever before on how everything I have, including my health, has been a gift, and that my life is not and never has been merely my own. You can imagine with what gratitude I heard the lovely word "benign" read to me at my next appointment. After facing the prospect—however remote—of a serious trial like cancer, the expectation of maintaining the status quo comes as the best kind of news. It comes like gospel.

So now I face two more weeks (give or take) of third trimester pregnancy. I am still achy. I am still tired. I am still fat and slow and prone to heartburn. I still get kicked in the ribs in the middle of the night. I am even coming down with a cold. But I also still get to enjoy another glorious day of the "same old thing."

October Fruit

They shall still bear fruit in old age; They shall be fresh and flourishing...

— Psalm 92:14

Another year of my life has drawn to a close, and with it, another growing season. The tomato plants, once pregnant with summer's bounty, now sag dejectedly in the muddy ground, heavy with green fruit that will never mature. The icy night air has faded their once-bright flowers into a pale yellow translucency—an annual picture of the fruitful might-have-been. October has again caught them unawares.

* * * * * * * *

Three weeks ago, when my 91-year-old grandmother fell and ended up in the hospital, none of us anticipated a prolonged recovery. She had hit her head, and she was weakened by the injury, but the bruise would heal, and she would be well again soon. She has always gotten well again. Hers has been a long life.

But a life, to be called "long," must have an end; eternity is not a span that can be measured. And so it seems that this long life of hers will, after all, have an end as well. She is home again and has regained some of her strength, but I can see that her October has come. In spite of this brief Indian summer, the first frost has already taken its toll. She complains of the chill in the air, and her limbs are more frail, her hands less steady.

* * * * * * * *

Last Friday, I spent the lunch hour with my sons at school. We passed the potato chips among the five of us and talked amid the din of a hundred children laughing and joking and shifting fidgety legs; of a hundred children crunching apples and unwrapping sandwiches and rummaging in brown paper bags. My own little boys bounced and squirmed in their seats, talking over one another, giggling at trifles, filled with a surplus of energy that could not be contained within their small, robust frames.

That entire lunch room was a fresh battery, charged with electricity waiting to be released. If I were to spend a full day in the company of so much youth, I imagine I would gather an electrical charge of my own. I felt as though the room might burst—that those walls, like my own bulging body, were pregnant with life about to break from its confines. And at noon, the room did, in fact, give birth to a hundred electrified children rushing outdoors to play. The clock's hands converged at the number twelve with a clap like thunder.

I have seen these children zipping down plastic playground slide, their hair standing on end. At the bottom, I stretch out my cold hands to catch my sons and pull them up, and as we touch, their lightning fingers burn my own; at that startling moment, that point of contact where we two distemporaries collide, something ignites.

On a dark October night, we could have seen the spark.

* * * * * * * *

As my two youngest sons and I entered the nursing home after lunch, my gait was slow and plodding, heavy with my long-awaited child. I felt that I, too, could make good use of the abandoned walker sitting just outside the front door. Passing through the hallways, my children ran their dimpled fingers along the handrail, hanging and swinging and skipping from it, using that would-be crutch as the bar of a jungle gym. They leapt past each open doorway, never noticing the frost-bitten forms lying on inclined beds just inside those rooms; never seeing the hundred color-drained faces bowed over half-eaten meals in the quiet cafeteria.

We turned a corner, and boldly centered at the end of the long hall sat an old man, directly facing us from his wheelchair.  His unflinching gaze was fixed upon us as we worked our way toward him. His crooked, unclipped fingers grasped the arms of his wheelchair, while the oxygen tubes in his nostrils made a rhythmic pop and hiss. He breathed with a sound like Darth Vader. I made eye contact and then looked away, pretending to instruct my kids on how they should behave when they saw my grandmother, although I had given them the same reminder only moments earlier. And when I looked up again uneasily, those aged eyes had not wavered from their point of focus.

As we drew nearer to him, my sons, too, became aware of his unnerving presence, and they fell back, hiding behind my legs. He stared us down. Would he let us pass? I tried to slip casually by him with nothing more than a quick hello. But as I turning my eyes again to my sons, his gnarled hand rose from its resting place and, with a suddenness inconsistent with his shriveled state, he jabbed a pointed finger at the center of my protruding belly, his ridged fingernail pressing into my flesh as if testing the ripeness of a large fruit.

Did that moment of contact leave him with a sensation of warmth? Of an electrical charge shocking his chilled limbs into life? Perhaps some sort of strength did flow out of me, but even the vigor of nascent life does not have the power to raise the dead.

Life and death were colliding, and my burning skin was caught in between.

"What's this?" he demanded like a gatekeeper demanding a password. I laughed nervously and stammered something about having another baby in there, but the man had already shifted his attention downward. "Hellooo," he crooned. "You are our favorite kind of visitors." I smiled feebly and told the boys to say hi—something I had hardly wanted to do myself. And I did not rebuke my son when one of them ignored my instructions and merely gaped.

I felt tempted to gape myself.

We moved on down the hall to meet with my grandmother. I could still feel the sting on my belly where that withered hand had touched me.

* * * * * * * *

Another birthday has arrived, and I have much to be thankful for in remembering the year that is gone. Every October brings reasons to celebrate, but it also brings reasons to consider my own mortality. This northern growing season is painfully short, and those sun-loving tomato plants never do reach their full potential before fall arrives. They could have done so much more—born so much more fruit—if the cold had not set in just yet. Not just yet.

But while I survey the frost-stricken garden and look back on the harvest that was, I must remember how much this growing season has given to me. And I can see that even now, among all those withered plants, not a branch is barren. Their fiery red fruit is gathered up, their feeble limbs now limp and unable to rise. They are weighed down. But with what?

At the end of my own growing season, at the end of my own painfully short life, is this the sight I want my time-worn self to see reflected from the mirror? Will I recall with joy the fruitfulness that was mine? In that final October, when I reach out my hands to touch the young, and I again feel the startling heat of that spark, may I  see In the light of that momentary fire that, although my weakening limbs are weighed down—they are weighed down with still-forming fruit.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

I have had little time to write these days, due, at least in part, to the daily mountains of laundry rising in impressive peaks and ranges across my bathroom floor. And as I near the end of this pregnancy, mountaineering has become an increasingly daunting task. My four—soon to be five—boys have a unique genius for staining multiple sets of clothing each day.

Although laundry occupies a significant part of every mother's week, it is nevertheless a subject given little dignity by the literary world. There is no shortage of (mostly sappy) poetry praising motherhood in the abstract, but not much is said about what mothers must actually do to keep the household running. Potty training must certainly have the potential to inspire earthy metaphors, and doing the dishes is a topic ripe for poetic analysis. Clearly, more mothers of toddlers should become poets. 

G.K. Chesterton once said that "the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." True enough. But they have also been mysteriously silent on the subject of laundry. In light of this sad omission, I thought I would share one of my favorite poems, by one of America's best-known poets. It is the only poem I know of on the topic of washing clothes, and it elevates that mundane task to something almost holy. Read it twice.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

by Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             The soul shrinks

    From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org: Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted with the permission of Harcourt, Inc. This material may not be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Collected Poems, 1943-2004 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)