grey

Why flee
the middle of grey?
Stay long, remain.
Every whichway
wide vector
fog spectrum
calls blue,
your name.

The One Year

My nonexistent resume states I spent last year as a private, full-time, in-home tutor for an at-risk child. Great kid. True story, no joke. Wierd though (not him) - because we both laughed some and cried a lot, and not all at once but over the course of last calendar year. It was some year. The One Year. A gap year. A citizen service year. A home-based, child-centered, service learning year without emolument that I was supposed to feel good and fuzzy about. Not about the pace but the general path, the 'ole college try. I was doing the right thing partway wrong. The kid and I we built machines and carried numerals and burned sugar until the only elements remaining were carbon and confusion. The chemical sort. He tried to teach me and I corrected. I spoke louder and he revolted. One year of growing where he was planted and me yelling at the weeds I grew or something like that. A spiritual sowing and graduate level case study in unpaid service learning all jimmied and balled up and twisted into L-I-F-E. The pay is the learning! The privilege is the sacrifice! I totally, totally did not get it especially when what I got was - not money.

Luckily, I slept in a queen size bed tuition-free at different hours of the day and night with my host family, each member, literally. Not all at once, but sometimes. Yikes. Also I got to cook meals, toss clothes into dryers and scrub surfaces - as regularly as I wanted. Freedom baby. Cleaning products were included when I bought them. It was wonderful practice handling this hot potato yarny mess, this jimmied, rolled up life which unraveled when I tossed it, or dropped it. A ball meant for motion falls apart when thrown. Velocity and irony. And oh was I a bad sport. 

The dad was really, really nice. Handsomely nice. Wore a lot of Detroit t-shirts. The mom, like whoa, crazy amazing. Switch that, amazing crazy. Delete. Just crazy. Hair, brain. Both. I taught a lesson about prefixes as in words like antithetical. Well the mom, she was the thetical of hair and brain compounded into one word. The kids - beautiful, nutty. Smelled like peanut butter. All three of them, which includes the middle, the 7-year-old lad upon whom I bestowed my tutorial aptitude between (his) actual breakdancing and (my) actual mental breakdowns. The eldest child, a pre-tween, well she was off to a school just down the block along the traditional road, a walkable distance for the one who can follow a straight line and look both ways twice; and the third, a loud tyke of 2 with a large cranium in pajamas - he created persistent in-home opportunities for me to ninja fight and assemble hours into days and days into endless days like an Ikea universe without the allen wrench. Without The Allen Wrench! Horrid. Did I mention this? That I missed the bold print in the initial job description: Groundhog's Day but worse. Horrider-ist. 

In between, when the worst was broken up by not-the-worst or even, pretty-ok, I'd read my Bible and the Detroit Free Press, two chronicles filled with less misery than hope. Lots of words about broken rubble and raising souls. Then I remembered. Gratitude. Place. Life. Family. Love. Hope. Good. Lord. I had the best job on earth. Spinning yet on the unraveling ball but on the ball at least.       

As of late, my tutoring role has been minimized to part-time afterschool care as the middle lad has taken well to khakis and a parochial classroom. Sweet mercy me. The eldest, drop the pre- and now a tween, still walks her straight line between here and her future self. But I still remain in tact, breathing in the same house, exhaling the same laundry. Though the lad (now 8) he taught me - change is both lungs and air and more art than science. Art, as in, spontaneous breakdancing. So I got paid in free oxygen and even more so, love. That's pretty awesome. And I'm still on payroll.

Now I play with the large cranium boy and do other very important and ungraded things, and after I wipe my resume off the countertops and onto the floor -
I write. 

oh to have a memory

In love with Yeats
In darkened sleep
One grand long lyric to mind commit
A trickling song
Hums and seeps
Yet
Rhythm and the words
Flow like rainwater through 

wide broken dams,

melancholy openings, a 

sweet retreat.

If only art could 

clutch but 

letting go is sweeter. 

listen, life.

The tiny life-breath next to my soul puffs sweet
Scents of this night and childhood
I think
all that life inside those lungs
Those lungs that once lived in the belly of my life
My life
My God
What a miracle
His puffy cadence marches on
in quiet night
How many and long
My own not his
His and not my own
Mystery tells on itself in a moment when
Mystery unbecomes
To be no longer
To breathe no longer
The thought makes me cry
So I shall
Place my ear closer to his back
to retrieve the joy of listening to night and
Life