Sherry Chandler

I mentioned here, sometime back, that I intended to begin my days with poetry instead of the New York Times. I’ve been pretty good at keeping that resolution.

Here is how my reading went this morning:

I opened Jane Gentry’s new collection, Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig (LSU, 2006) to a poem called “Waking Up, in May,” a lovely way to begin spring.

Then rain begins,
taps out rhythms,
rolls its slurred notes
down the roof…

Then to Molly Peacock’s Cornucopia (Norton, 2002), where I find “She Lays”

She lays each beautifully mooned index finger
in the furrow on the right and on the left
sides of her clitoris…

Hmmm, maybe I won’t go rushing off to work today. Maybe I’ll linger in bed, watch the dawn light up the still “bare ruined choirs” of the trees.

I try my third book, In the Criminal’s Cabinet (nth position press, 2004), an “nthology” that I recently unearthed from the pile on my table. There I find a poem by Carole Baldock, “Many Mansions:”

Security is tight in the Hall,
all doors manned,
guests ushered,
well looked after,
watched over.

You mind your manners
in the Hall,
where windows soar
floor to ceiling…

…We are gathered together
in the Hall
to shake our heads
over those who despise Culture
to consider how best
to help those wary of Culture…

Power to the people! Count me among the criminals.

I mean that just tears it. I’m human, I have a delightful body able to listen to the rain, to smell the fertile earth of the world I live on, to feel a loving touch, even, and perhaps most-needed of all, my own. How can I possibly put on my picture ID, magnetically coded to key me into the well-guarded hive, and pretend to be just another drone buzzing honey into somebody else’s comb??

Well, actually, I enjoy my work, most of the time. Besides, somebody has to pay for the organic brussels sprouts I ate for dinner last night.

But I will try to go to work more aware, to practice some random act of individuality.

Living fully is the best revenge.

Make a gesture kiddos. Find some small rebellion. It’s spring. It came back again.

I’ve never understood how an “equinox” or “equal night,” a term that to me indicates 12 hours and therefore duration of time, can arrive at 12:07 a.m. Universal Coordinated Time (what used to be Greenwich Mean). Because that’s 12:07 a.m. tonight, there’s some confusion as to whether today or tomorrow is actually the beginning of spring. Here’s an article in the NYTimes — I did read poetry first — that explains a little bit about how it’s all calculated but I still didn’t find an explanation about how an “equal night” arrives at a particular instant.

Here’s a way to celebrate spring — with the Spring 2007 issue of The New Southerner.

It includes, among other things, an interview with Albert Bales, Director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology and the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Tennessee and author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook (New Society, 2006).

Petroleum is the basis of so much in our society that you could almost say it’s the whole basis for Western civilization at this stage. Over the last 100 years, we’ve gotten rid of our railroads. We have gone into big-box stores that are essentially warehouses on wheels. The supply chain stretches clear around the planet to China and India. All of that has to change. All of that’s become obsolete. Our interstate highways are becoming obsolete. What comes next is relocalization …. getting smaller. It’s having local production of food and water and basic resources, things you need for living.

I also recommend Giving It a Rest by Sara Jenkins:

When a Jewish friend told me how she’d begun to observe the Sabbath, something clicked. I realized that I had been yearning for a time set aside, different from other days, open and free. My friend’s approach sounded workable. Mostly she spent the day at home being quiet and reflective, but if she truly needed to go out in her car, she did so, without considering it a breach of rules. Rules had nothing to do with it. I saw that the form for a Sabbath could be open to experiment.

So I began observing my own Sabbath the very next Sunday. It centered around two ideas: silence and no work.

Simplify, simplify is the theme for this first day of spring.

But I have to admit, I enjoy the privilege of getting into my car and speeding the 60 miles to my aged mother’s house twice a month. Or driving the 75 miles over to Louisville to do an InKY Reading.