At a Certain Time of Year Cucumbers . . .
“Somewhere in the garden/you stand balanced,/facing east towards/the cucumbers rioting/in the old sandbox.” Anita Sullivan
The Highest Cauldron
By Anita Sullivan
EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—8/26/2013—
At a certain time of year cucumbers
When you wave hands like clouds
your weight shifts
in your mind, without your body
moving,
and sifts to your feet.
Somewhere in the garden
you stand balanced,
facing east towards
the cucumbers rioting
in the old sandbox.
Suddenly one leg
breaks loose and glides left
as the arms quietly pinwheel.
How could language ever begin
if it’s never only partly –
like Tai Chi?
Or cucumbers, which
appear overnight, leap
to blimp from nubbin
with no between?
Or how your elbows
on this stifling August evening,
have both turned cool
in the complete absence of
a breeze?
Consider the cucumber:
neither subtle, weight bearing,
blue, tasty, essential, reprehensible,
symbol
for anything something
else couldn’t have done (a banana, for example)
better.
Its general relevance quotient
in the Larger Scale of Things
would likely be a
two.
One decimal point prior, Persephone
slips into a deep blue lake
on an August afternoon in Southern Italy
and disappears.
Note: The image used to illustrate this poem derives from http://villaris-ri.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Tai-CHi-TREE.jpg.
Anita Sullivan
Born under the sign of Libra, Anita Sullivan cheerfully admits to a life governed by issues of balance and harmony. This likely led to her 25-year career as a piano tuner, as well as her love of birds (Libra is an air sign), and love of gardening, music, and fine literature (beauty). She spent years trying to decide if she was a piano tuner who wrote poetry, or a poet who tuned pianos. She traveled a lot without giving way to a strong urge to become a nomad; taught without becoming a teacher; danced without becoming a dancer; and fell totally in love with the high desert country of the Southwest, and then never managed to stay there. However, Sullivan did firmly settle the writing question—yes, it turns out she is a writer, but not fixed upon any one category. She has published four essay collections, a novel, two chapbooks and one full-length book of poetry, and many short pieces in journals. Most recently, her essay collection The Rhythm Of It: Poetry’s Hidden Dance, indulges her instinct to regard contemporary free-verse poetry as being built upon natural proportional rhythm patterns exhibited in music and geography, and therefore quite ancient and disciplined—not particularly “free” at all. This book was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal from the Eric Hoffer Book Award. More about her books can be found on her website: www.anitasullivan.org. The poet-piano-tuner-etc. also maintains an occasional blog, “The Poet’s Petard,” which may be accessed here here. (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)