Escaping writing

I had been writing a paper on Interviewing & Counseling practices, a ten hour-a-day process for the last two days and felt the urgent need to write...something different than that. I wonder what other writers do to take a break from writing.

Last week, while helping a friend who owns a landscaping company in the San Fernando Valley, I found myself spending an afternoon trimming rose bushes. The sun was an intense presence, under which the rose bushes and I shared our common frailty as living things. Pruning shears in hand, I recalled the myth of the Three Fates, one measuring, one holding, and one cutting the thread of life. As dead rose petals littered the ground, I silently wondered about this experience of measuring and cutting life. Who is measuring mine right now?

Gardening

Pruning the rosebush
the ache of the summer heat
on my shoulders,
the feel of the living stalk
between fingers,
petals - one, another,
then another
seek ground, life
not strong enough to hold on.

Whether it's blood
or petals, the gift
of time is a thread
I stand on,
feet covered
in the soft
broken soil,
shears meet
the slight resistance
of a living thing.


© Jonathan Bohrn (2005)

Some time before, while visiting the beach, I found a seagull lying in the sand. Coming upon it, it seemed to be sleeping peacefully, but it never moved. Looking at it closely, I concluded that it must have died recently, and since this was the closest I was ever going to get to a seagull, I touched it. It was still warm, and its feathers felt very soft. I ended up carrying it to a sand dune in order to bury it, feeling the weight of its body in my hands. It was surprisingly heavy, and, I thought, beautifully made. As its eyes were still clear, I just couldn't get myself to throw sand on them, instead, finding a palm leaf to cover its head with first. It seemed somehow inappropriate to just walk off afterwards, so I stood by the makeshift grave and said a prayer...not a religious incantation, but an acknowledgment of life and our shared impermanence - offered by one creature to another.


Limitations #3
AD
Alexandra Ekkelenkamp

before whose time
am I alive

will I be a haunting spirit
looking
over brilliant shoulders

will I copy poetry
in chimney dust
dating it _______73 yrs after me


© Alexandra Ekkelenkamp

Alexandra's web site, identity, can be found at http://www.geocities.com/alexandraekkelenkamp/