good decades

oh decades decades decades decades



i lived in three gardens:
the secret garden, the ritual garden, and the danger garden.


the secret garden was a place of sun and peace and growing things, rich in laughter and song, hidden amid a vast estate of desolation.

the ritual garden, a ceremonious place of seemly care and and well crafted rhythme, where good old ways were honored and magic wishes took root.

the danger garden, where lifesaving poisons were decocted, savagery damned with drums and dances, blood shed, bad dreams netted, hearts made wild and true.


at first, i balanced along a railroad track in the summer sun with a cat and a toddler and we made up our own words.


later, we sang charms to the moon at the close of the year, the festival of the magic boy that everyone loved; we called down the snow and lit christmas candles and the cat had kittens.

later kindness revealed its cruelty and vice-versa, every grand narrative confessed ambiguity, and when the last child came, it turned out that a tiny child pulling herself up by her bootstraps, strong as a giant, was the way it was going to be from now on, not only the way it had been.


having three children became not,as i'd expected, a set of three cosmologies or three mythologies, so much as three varied modes of action and perception, each blended into the others but each unthinned, undiluted after all, three harmonious ways of moving through the world, which i've learned by heart. i don't know how it feels to them, not at all. i only know these three more ways of moving through the world, which are really one way. it is my way.


i laid drowsing on a blanket in the sun with dragonflies humming while three children played with little toy horses and robots in the sandy stream, telling each other what to do next and then doing it; this really happened. i laid eyes closed book in hand enchanted by the simultanaeity of insects and children's voices and trickling water and wind in the trees and that is my idea of Heaven and i believe in it because it really happened.

now these things are moving into history and soon i can't keep in the front of my consciousness any more where you are or what time you'll be home, because you're somewhere far away, i don't even know where, and there isn't any home, i don't know where you'll go home to - you'll have to find your own home, i suppose.


but that's a gloomy scenario. naturally we will gather together once in a grand while, somewhere or other, marking occasions, and act as we remember, the four of us, when we all lived in the forest and nobody lived anywhere else.

children's birthdays are supposed to make mothers happy! but here i sit grieving, just wishing it would all happen again, just all start over again.