Native Soil

There She Is

Karen was a woman who wore stylish
linen suits to work and chunky turquoise

jewelry sometimes or a string of pearls

and navy T-shirt dress whose hem would

skim the floor, but for the three-inch

heels she wore; and she adorned her
office and herself with clever pieces from
boutiques — a long silk scarf in pink pastel

tossed on with casual elegance, one turn

around the neck above a crisp, white
cotton shirt and Levi’s... plain clay
saucers, different sizes, meant to set your
plant pots on, were coasters,
paperweights, and places to put odds and
ends... and sturdy woven baskets, long
before the world discovered them, wore

large, neat labels: “Out” and “In.”

She always took the summers off — her
husband was the Dean of Men — they had
“a little place” somewhere in Ireland, it
might have been a castle or a pub. She
loved it, that was all I knew, and though
she lived with such élan and dressed with
flair and ingenuity and didn’t care what
anybody thought, and was so kind and
always took me to the symphony and then
for drinks at Hickory’s to celebrate my
birthday, and adored ballet and was a
friend of Balanchine and once, at least, I
know she went to Moscow for a
weekend... not that she was ever sickly, I
don’t think she missed a day of work in
fifteen years, but toward the end of May
she’d summon up, from God knows where,
this superhuman energy and raucous joy,
and, “There she is,” I’d think, though I
could not have told you what was missing.
It’s as if you’ve never seen a flower, and a
coral-tinted rosebud shows up one day at
your door;
you’re overcome;
you vow to
treasure it forever,
and the morning after,
all its petals have unfolded and you stare
in wonder at it: “There was more?” you
say in bafflement. And that was Karen, all
at once unfolding like a rose.

There are those who never grow quite as
they should except in native soil, and I
suppose when Karen first met Ireland,
there was sudden recognition, something
like immediate addiction to a sense of
place she’d not have felt the lack of till
she had it. I confess I’ve felt the tug of it
myself, from elsewhere, who can say? I’ve
yet to learn. It happens when the sun is at
a certain slant, the trees throw shadows
out, just so, and something beckons in the
wind, a scent, a sound, except I don’t
know which direction it would have me go,
but, oh, I yearn for it and grieve as if I
know the thing I’m grieving for, and all this
in the time it takes to breathe one breath,

inhale, exhale, and while you’re at it have

a brief encounter with a universe outside

of time and space where words are

weighty and irrelevant. But it’s the poet’s

job to make the poem speak if not the

words, and so: There is a place I’m meant

to be and it will find me or I’ll stumble

over it, and then I’ll know that I’ve come

home.

(And no, it isn’t death or heaven, not as

strong as premonition, not as vague as

funny feeling, not an ache but more a sort
of itchiness, as if I were a migratory bird,
instinctively aware of season, storm, and
course; a kind of magnetism, I suppose,
and only wish I knew which way is north.)