"Frequently Asked Question #5."
Now that you have a child, has your writing practice changed?
Digging rock from hardscaped beds, I think,
is a bit like not writing poetry,
like thinking about writing poetry
but digging rock from my backyard instead.
If you've never pulled rock with your own gloved hands,
or a trowel, with a flat-headed shovel on your knees,
or squatting, or half-bending so your back will hurt
by nightfall, never learned how best
to corral the rugged little stones so you might
scoop them and haul them to a container that will bear them
away, turn them into some other fool's problem.
Or if you have, and your fingers remember,
like mine remember, a day's work that
wore holes into sweet, pink, flowered, garden gloves.
So when I called it quits, after laboring more hours than I'd
labored with my daughter, it seemed I'd hardly
cleared any rock at all.
You might wonder why.
When my shovel came down on a pyramid of knob-sized
gray, and white, and speckled stones
near the struggling young juniper
and opened a nest of lice, small cream
eggs and red and black writhing bodies,
I checked first that these were not termites.
My mercy limited by my love for the wood and mortar
I call home.
Then replaced the river stones on the teeming anthill
and turned to clear rock from some other section
of my hardscaped bed.
60% of the world's population lives
within 35 miles of a shoreline.
And a hundred million people live within three vertical feet
of sea level.
In some ways, all this I am saying about devastation likely
to be wrecked quite soon by rising sea levels has nothing
to do with what it will mean for you living here in Tucson
and me living in the front range of Colorado,
so little to do with my own life,
my own little hardscaped bed.
And yet, I have to have attention, right?
I had to learn somehow to have a compassion that
focuses me and teaches me some things
that I can do, my culpability, and my potential.