What I Know -- What I Do

Here's what I know about war: the laundry still needs to be done.

I suppose my poetry, and my other writing here at Vivid, is small scale, interior, domestic -- there's little reference in it to daily events outside the first robin siting of the year or my Thursday trip to the inpatient wing, where there are no sharp edges. That's all right -- my life is also pretty small scale, interior, domestic. It was bigger, more outward, more adventurous once, but we make choices. I'm happy with mine.

Still, it feels strange to think so much about the war in Iraq, and to have it change nothing. I stepped into St. John's a couple of times this week -- it's on my walk home -- and lit a candle. There were more than usual burning; a bank of warm flickering red glass in wroght iron. Beeswax smelling of clover. That's the only change I've seen.

I've been remembering the night I spent in the livingroom of a condo in Florida -- the livingroom because it had the fewest windows. A hurricane was blowing over. The power was out and we had no news. The windows were boarded. The room was dark and hot and damp. Lightning seemed to shot in through cracks in boards and web across the walls. The iron roll-downs on the patio banged and rattled and one wrenched lose.

When I was thirteen or so -- in Omaha were hurricanes are scarce but tornados are common enough -- I was babysitting two kids, Nick and Erica, 4 and 2. The air turned green and the sirens sounded. We went down to the playroom in the basement and hid under the stairs. We built a blanket fort, which I thought might protect us from flying debris. I told them the plot of the Star Trek episode "Miri," which had been on the night before. This upset them, though the storm hadn't. When the parents came rushing down the stairs it sounded like the end of the world.

That's all I know about waiting for bombs.

I think about storm warnings, and I light candles. I type and I mash potatos and I do six loads of laundry.