April 24, 2012

This is a rerun day, rerun of the beautiful day we had yesterday, bright sunlight, cool dry air, a real rarity, and to have it twice in a row a real blessing.  The big black dog from our neighbor behind has been exploring the yard, chased off the stiped cat, and greeted my heron statue with his wet black nose.  I think he was intrigued by it as he circled it several times before touching its stone beak with his nose.  When there was no response, he went on to other things, just relieving himself on a tree, and wandering around.  Eventually he wandered out to the road and disappeared.  He always looks so . . . full of himself, slick and black and bursting with life.

There has been a bunch of birds out; they must enjoy this weather as much as we do.  The blue jays and the cardinals seem to be most abundant, but there have been sparrows, tiny fluffs of brown with cheepy voices, and mourning doves as well, so smooth and gray, they waddle down the driveway looking left and right as if checking for cross-traffic, making their sleepy "who-ing".  Bees have settled in the ligustrum this morning, weighing down the bursts of flowers when they land to drink of their sweetness.

I found a poem by Merwin that surprised me, I thought it would be about one thing, and it turned into something else.

Apples

Waking beside a pile of unsorted keys
in an empty room
the sun is high

what a long jagged string of broken birdsong
they must have made as they gathered there
by the ears deaf with sleep
and the hand empty as waves
I remember the birds now
but where are the locks

when I touch the pile
my hand sounds like a wave on a shingle beach
I hear someone stirring
in the ruins of a glass mountain
after decades

those keys are so cold that they melt at my touch
all but the one
to the door of a cold morning
the colors of apples

W. S. Merwin

I have a small glass jar of keys, bought at an estate sale, some old keys, long and heavy with scalloped tops and the flat part with notches cut for the turning.  Some are small, stamped with numbers that mean nothing to me, some are triangular, some rounded, some look like keys from old houses, whose doors now will never open, some like keys to cars that have long ceased to exist except in dreams.  I would like to find a key into the room of memory, the one that remembers what I did daily when I was six or nine or twelve, to the memory that escapes me, fleeing down dark corridors when I try to capture it, escaping at last.  I want a morning the colors of apples, red sun, green trees, yellow warming the wood of the crepe myrtle.  Oh, perhaps it's this morning, perhaps there will be a key for this morning, slotting it into memory, keeping it locked until a future time when I will need this sunlight, this hum of bees, this yard full of birds and a dog.