Poem for a Grown Girl: Leaves of Grass for the Uninitiated

My older daughter is turning twenty-one today, and is setting up housekeeping with her mate, far from home. It is spring, and so, too, are the birds outside my window staking their claims. Mostly, this is a gentle swooping across my line of vision, but I am embattled against a woodpecker who favors my eaves. 

He hammers the house, and each time I stamp and clap him away with hoots and shouts, he retreats in his red and white regalia, trying impossibly to camouflage himself from the top of a distant cedar. He flicks his head with stilted and faked nonchalance, waiting and watching for my pastel tunic to move out of the window, farther away from his target directly above me.

His desired sweet spot is right beneath the peak of the living room which overlooks a large expanse of grass. He is sure of himself and his choice, and rightly so. This dry shelter affords him a view of both predators and prey moving upon the gentle slope of his aspired domain.

By this time in my life, there is much I could advise to birds and to my own chicks about where to roost, when to hunker in and stay put, and when to flee. But advice is as welcome as the woodpecker. So with a restraint that isn't in my nature, I only offer her a poem for a someday read. This was written shortly after moving from the desert to this newly lush and verdant landscape of ease or toil, depending upon who tends to the green.

My Sweet, my wish for you is that there will be only celebrations of both love and work ahead, but because I love you so very much, I give you my full knowledge, as I see it from here.

"The Haymakers" by Jules Bastien-Lapage 1877

Leaves of Grass for the Uninitiated

1.

I awake in the afternoon to a nervous buzz

-- not from a late night with a bottle--

but from an interrupted late morning snooze,

lids flying open to a leaf blower, an edger, a mower,

over and again, until the attempt at sleep is futile.

This cacophony barely muffles the response of the blackbirds

who call and razz from phone poles and tree limbs,

remembering the faces of those below who disrupt

the wide, cool, blanketed hills, bustling before tee time.

These birds will pass along this facial memory to their offspring,

for this is what crows and ravens do, I'm told with awe

by my mother who likes her PBS on Saturday mornings.

I am left to wonder at how they manage to fashion 

this bold point-and-whisper, a black-robed amen corner

each hatched from an egg, a single cell of the likewise-judged.

Shame-faced of sleeping at high noon, I dare not show my own.

2.

My upstairs room has windows that won't allow screens

-- the latches are on the frames, and not the cases --

invented by a man, my aunt would have said.

At night, crane flies find these wide open squares of my nightlight 

to pay an exalted call to a mate, promising a place for them,

only to fuss and dust the manicured ceiling alone

which someone, sometime, painted a muted sage.

So much to pass along to my girls (but how to do it?):

Memories of plaguing faces, insects and inventions

but none as stinging as the Man pushing against the lawn.

The woman colludes on behalf of the soft bare feet of her young

For they won't be young or bare for long,

soon enough mincing in pointed heels

to pose under a tree for a dance, crushing larvae,

as they trail and lift the hem to prevent a green stain

The woman also won't always find the ease in her joints to sit

and watch on the damp emerald verge of her self.

3.

Where a man finds the job of his dreams

-- by which his wife finds the house of hers--

there becomes a precarious perch.

The outside swath of pure devotion requires mastery

of hired hands or self and vigorous horticultural tomes

and wide is the path which leads to beetles, root rot or voles.

By the sweat of the brow shall these two maintain their splendor

With a tabernacle of assorted plowshares and swords

kept in apple-pie order by the man of the Grounds

while she teaches settings at table, blade inward,

and the mystery of mysteries

how to keep out encroachments of moss on the drive

or ants in the cupboard who creep from

these perspiring borders of impatiens, lavender, and marigold

to where the tasks of their marriage meet

and rub up against the neighbors.

The passersby in cars, holding fruit from the store,

will sit back and gaze half-lidded at the satin edge of our street.

                                                                                                        --2011 Lizbeth Leigh

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