Poem 69 (Pandemic Day 72)

Burning

"Control nature," my father said.

Or "We must get this yard under control."

I think that's right

I thought of myself as doing the best I could.

Collage by Deborah Keenan

filling buckets, carrying them, aching fingers

coiled around metal, down the slope,

one bucket for each new tomato plant.

I first made a moat for each green life.

I tilted the lip of the bucket

and the moats filled.  I watched the stalks lift,

the green veins fill.

Now there's other conversation.

My son says, "Could you do that in the olden days?"

And I say, "Yes, we could burn and burn and no one cared."

What city friends never understand--not just the leaves

of autumn burned, but in March and April we burned

a line across the back acres, getting rid

of last year's stubble, burning the volunteers

my father hadn't planted himself.

Now I know I was too young to be left

in charge of a line of fire.  Where did he go

that spring day, leaving me with a rake,

a hose that didn't stretch far enough?

I think he went for a drink, a bottle hidden

in the rose bushes, or maybe for another nap of oblivion;

then I only felt he'd given me a precious job.

I don't remember feeling small until the fire jumped

in the wind, and my rake, my anxious movements couldn't hold

the heat in place.

It doesn't matter. the yard survived, though fire took
the raspberry patch, three pines, the best oak for climbing.

I see my son and daughter think I'm old, a pioneer
who believed in burning for free, a sky that could abide
smoke and forever be clean.

The yard's rearranged now.  One tornado, two straight line
wind storms, two brothers, one girl, handy neighbors
carrying spring promises.  The willows my father planted
still grow in the next yard, land sold off
when his job was taken from him.

He controlled nothing, finally, but the patient
and decisive movement of his body into the path
of a train.

What jobs are right for children?
I give my daughter no line of fire
to guard. I ask too little, I think,
and worry they will never be serious enough
for the world.

I stand now under the willows, knowing they root faster,
grow farther, lift higher than any other tree I might choose
for my plot of city land. My father said,

"You plant a willow, and you'll still be around
to see it tower over you."

Deborah Keenan, Happiness, Coffee House Press, 1995. (Minnesota Book Award Finalist)

This is not the kind of poem that would seem to fit into a book entitled Happiness.  I wasn't sure I could keep going for the last 3 stanzas, after I learned of her father's end. Happiness, however, is not really a simple thing; it is not easily purchased online or in a store; not provided to us by our parents, or our friends, or our lovers; not something that we can call up on command.

In her 2007 book The How of Happiness, positive psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky elaborates, describing happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”

Perhaps that can be the outcome of our living, but to read Keenan is to first deal with passionate trials of familial lives--love and its betrayals, perhaps then you can recognize the worth and meaning of your life and the happiness that that can bring.  

Keenan (1950-) is a retired professor, but still an active Minnesota poet and collage artist.  She's had a big impact on arts in our state through COMPAS and Artists in the Schools programs and teaching at St. Thomas, U of M and Hamline as well as at the Loft.  I had some of my poetry critiqued by her in a Loft class--20 years later, I'm still thinking about how to improve the final lines of a poem that she told me was "very wonderful".  Maybe now is the time to tackle that final line at last.