Some Days

by Bea Garth, copyright 2008

There are some days the body knows
that it doesn’t matter what day it is.
Whatever it is you are doing is just too much:
you can be in the middle of the natural foods store
or shopping for a gift of Rumi’s poems
for your first nephew’s wedding
or buying lumber when suddenly you remember you forgot
to buy the concrete for the walk-way
but your body knows its too late
and anyway you are in no condition
to be lifting bags of concrete
out of the truck even if somehow you could
make yourself go back in to the check-out counter
and order them to be put into the truck.
You’ve already roped in the wooden two-by-fours
and you know you cannot get yourself to untie them
and move them over. It is too late and really not even
early enough since it was your body
that made you forget in the first place.
You know its mid June and a cool sea wind is blowing here
inland into San Jose and Campbell,
the weather is shining and beautiful
but your body is quaking,
undergoing the beginnings of the lunar cycle.
Today is the first day of the Solstice
and tonight there will be ceremonies
and your own blood is beginning to flow
in tune with the change
and it doesn’t care to be in any way efficient.

Your body is wondering what Rumi would have to say
if he were a woman and you think of your nephew
and what it was like as a girl
being his aunt all of nine years
baby-sitting him and later
how he used to worry about his diabetes
and how he felt he should never marry
and you told him none of us are immortal,
you might as well be happy,
there is no knowing when we’ll die
--and there it is, your old mortality
hitting you in the abdomen once again,
your lower back aching
from its old injury
swollen from this time of the month
and you praying for menopause
(that’s got to begin arriving soon!)
and you will take your gift
of poems and essays home
to read and then wrap for your nephew
and his outrageous second marriage.

You notice how he always
seems to like exotic Jupiterian* women
and you wonder what is the reason why,
then you remember your recent walk with his mother
when you reminisced and praised her
for leaving home so young,
since your home life was so bad
and this way she was less affected
and you remember that during the walk
a lone white horse came cantering down the path
and your sister grabbed the horse
by a belt dangling from its rope harness
and you recall that it was while your sister
was taking care of horses
the summer before your nephew was born,
he simply being an embryo gestating,
that that big white horse
you had tried to ride as a child
wouldn’t move the way you wanted it to
since you were so little and it was so big
and you think this is what your body is trying to say
refusing to move since today is no day for concrete
but it is a day to think of horses and love
and imagining your sister and her son and Rumi’s poems
in the fading afternoon light.

*Astrologically the planet Jupiter rules the sign Sagittarius which is often depicted as an archer riding a horse. Jupiter is known as a planet of optimism, expansiveness, faith and religion. Jupiter is always like an archer, willing to take risks aiming at something he or she believes in and galloping off towards that elusive quarry.