Because no one could ever
praise me enough, because I don't mean these poems only but the
unseen unbelievable effort it takes to live the life that goes on between
them, I think all the time about invisible work. About the young mother on
Welfare I interviewed years ago, who said, "It's hard. You bring him to
the park, run rings around yourself keeping him safe, cut hot dogs into
bite-sized pieces for dinner, and there's no one to say what a good job
you're doing, how you were patient and loving for the thousandth time even
though you had a headache." And I, who am used to feeling sorry for
myself because I am lonely, when all the while, as the Chippewa poem
says, I am being carried by great winds across the sky, thought of the
invisible work that stitches up the world day and night, the slow,
unglamorous work of healing, the way worms in the garden tunnel
ceaselessly so the earth can breathe and bees ransack this world into
being, while owls and poets stalk shadows, our loneliest labors under the
moon.
There are mothers for
everything, and the sea is a mother too, whispering and whispering to
us long after we have stopped listening. I stopped and let myself
lean a moment, against the blue shoulder of the air. The work of my
heart is the work of the world's heart. There is no other
art.
