And I was asked to read this poem.
My mother was visiting one year when
I was under a great deal of stress
from teaching and raising a family.
And she said to me in a soft voice one day,
''Honey, I think it's time for you to stop recycling.'' And I
did for a while.
She does recycle and so do I. But it
was so dear she let me off the hook
and we let each other off the hook for a little while.
So this is an anti recycling poem,
which I dare not read in California,
but I always read it when I'm on the road.
It's a Gnostic view of recycling.
The labeled bins on the California hillside
catch the glint and quarter glint of passing cars.
Families pull up with their interesting trash and start
unloading.
Here sweetheart, this goes over in newspaper.
The bundle hits with a thud.
Diet soda can spin almost noiselessly down,
and the sun permitting bottles from a day's pleasure
are tossed into mixed glass by the children who
like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic, as matter
greets itself and starts to change.
What mystery is inside a thing?
If we peered into the bin, we could see it waiting there,
could believe everything is alive and specific and personal.
Could tell by the tilt of one bottle against the next
that it's difficult to be singular, to have identity,
to keep an outline safe in the terrors of space.
Even the child knows this.
Bye, bottle, she shouts, tossing it in,
and the bottle lies there in the 2 o'clock position temporarily
itself before being swept into the destiny of mixture.
But what if some don't want to?
What if some items in the piles of paper,
the orange and blue envelopes from the magazine sweepstakes,
numbers pressing through the cloudy windows with our names,
some among those pale sheets, curled with moisture,
would rather stay as they are?
It's spring.
We've thrown away mistakes, tax forms, recipes,
tennis ball sized drafts of poems.
That which was blank shall be made blank again.
But what if that failed letter wants to be a failure,
not go back to pulp and thought, or across the parking lot
where light insists on changing the dull cans,
s few cans don't want to be changed?
So they should want to.
Shouldn't they?
Should want to be changed by light,
which is called sweet reason, honeyed, spectra, magnitude,
light that goes from the parking lot looking helpless
though it is matter that has been betrayed.
All afternoon, the bins are carried off
by those who know about where things should go,
who are used to the clatter the cans make pouring out
and the families who believe change would heal them are
pulling away in their vans slightly embarrassed
by that which refused.
The bins fill again with hard substances.
The hills bear down with their fugitive gold.
The pampas grass bending low to protect what was briefly
certain and alive with hope.