Laurie MacDiarmid serves as Professor of English at St. Norbert College, a small Catholic liberal arts college on the banks of the Fox River in De Pere, Wisconsin.
a Christmas cactus with green and wine leaves blossoming out of season, reaching yellow fleshy buds into this old building's moldy air,
and a languishing African violet twice repotted and currently sagging like a senior student on the verge of graduating into universal uncertainty.
A half full bag of soil sits on the bookshelf next to a stack of paperback mysteries, and empty pots act as haphazard bookstops, vaguely clotted with the dessicated blood of long lost supermarket siblings, those trailing vines with spade shaped leaves spotted yellow, evoking nothing so much as deep south kudzu, and begging the question: how is it that I can kill the unkillable?
Two potted plants struggle to maintain their roots, to find a way to thrive despite me. Their silent fight contains the threat of resurrection, signs of nature's resilience in the face of our empty business and strife.
I knit socks and misshapen sweaters, hats of all colors and sizes, leg warmers, ponchos, scarves (thick and skinny), vests invented from scraps, head bands, fingerless gloves, mittens, weird bags, afghans for babies and adults, booties, squares intended for larger works that languish for years in plastic baskets, cowls, and (soon?) stuffed cats.
I imagine myself crafting a big sofa pillow that reads, in raised letters, LET THAT SHIT GO, then sending it through the mail to my PhD chasing daughter, who (truth be told) I imagine as a younger and wiser and cooler version of myself.
I knit and unravel and reknit. I wear and discard, wear and forget, gift, abandon, and donate mountains of hours of fingerwork and yarn, budget yarn and middle class yarn and cottage industry handpainted ridiculously expensive boutique yarn and yarn I inherited from my favorite grandmother long lost to the next life.
I can crochet as well, but the denser fabric leaves me (finally) unsatisfied, and even though it takes half the time to finish a project with a hook, I prefer the needles' tedium. There's a story here, in this pile of knots, a message, a metaphor for the way I am in the world that's so painful I'll leave it in the skein.
I just knit an intricate intarsia pattern (look that up if you don’t know what it is) of cats and then undid it all. That’s my MO lately — knit, unravel, reknit, unravel. Ugh. This must be a sign of something to come? Some preparation for blooming?
Spring Fever
begins with an itchy nose, the tissues swelling, air scratching, pollen rising, tides of cat hair drifting into puff balls around the dirty house.
Now come snow squalls to punctuate our waiting, and stiff wet winds drilling into bared skulls,
mud, basement water, and pale legs sprouting like white asparagas from the hopeful shorts of the very young.
The neighborhood dogs maintain high alert in their front yards, eager to smell our stuffy houses on us.
So it makes no sense to me, every year, when this cloud of cranky unforgivingness settles over me like dust,
invisible seeds of despair that hold me down in ghostly paralysis, a mute woman refusing to leave her parked car.
What is wrong with me? Isn't this a time to open my windows? To step out of my hermetic stillness and join the moving universe,
joyful and unafraid? To send out new shoots? But even this poem feels, right now, like another locked room.
It was sunny when I went to yoga this morning. Now it’s gloomy and gray. I seem to have spent all of the sunshine either looking at my mat or now grading student work.
Leonard Cohen Gives Me Advice -- after "Anthem"
Oh, honey, where is your mind?
You're on the yoga mat but swirling like a madwoman in plans to rearrange the furniture, buy more shit you don't need, dye your hair another ridiculous color. You're evoking people you can't help, those sucked into a private vortex, inventing problems that don't belong to you --
the hairpin curve in a colleague's career, a young poet's cracked screens, a woman's brown eyes drowning in the front row, spots where bodies stubbornly refuse to appear, blank spots in grade books --
as if you're so important to these stories, these alternate universes, as if you can fix the holes in their narratives with a few concrete details, an active verb or two, maybe the addition of a character.
You're forgetting, lovely, there's a crack in everything, and we're all broken, ashamed, caught in plot twists we never anticipated, alternately bored and out of love with ourselves and wrapped up in destructive rage against all the machines.
But those breaks, that's how the light leaks in. So give up up looking for the perfect offering, the spell you think will set the worlds all right -- and, while you have time, ring the bells that still can ring.
