The Poetry of Ordinary Time & Purple Flowers

This morning while on the elliptical, I listened to an On Being podcast with Marie Howe called The Poetry of Ordinary Time. It's funny how far you can go while on a piece of stationary exercise equipment. One thing Marie talked about was how she has her students write down ten observations about the world without using metaphor. We don't always need metaphor; life is the poem. They always find it difficult because it involves confronting exactly what is there in front of them.

Then tonight, I was struck by Katherine's reading of the Alice Walker's words - "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back."

So as I wrote tonight, I let these two inspirations mingle together, and I focused on writing down observations of the "field" around me. Lucky for us all, that field included purple flowers amidst yellow ones in the vase just behind our circle of sharing. Here's what I observed...

Purple flowers.
A perfectly cylindrical water glass sits atop my wrinkled page with tonight's agenda on it.
Light bends through the water in four places and shines onto Mev's Ode to Joy.
The 2/3 of empty space above the water leave the teal text unbent by the light.
"Life's Tragedy Is That We Get Old Too Soon & Wise Too Late - benjamin franklin" it reads.
Mev's eyes are warm and earnest as she looks from the cover of The Book of Her toward the empty wooden chair beside me.
Who is she looking for? What is she wanting to say?
The swaddled child in the cover's far right corner looks sideways at me.
Is she (or he) skeptical of me? Should she (or he) be?
I wish I was wrapped up with my cheek smooched against my mother's warmth like her (or him).
And the hatted boy in the far left smiles at us both - at me and whomever Mev is looking at.
The wind moves through the treetops outside, and the leaves dance.
The sky faces from bright blue to pale blue to a warm yellowed white.
Two birds fly in opposite directions.
Light still bends through the water left in the glass, but only in three places now.
Mark sings to the sounds in his headphones and makes another kind of music on his computer keyboard.
The ice maker lets out a rumble, and I hear water running in some sink down the hall.
Pages turn.
The hostess returns to the greeting of an open door and writers scattered about.
The prickly cactus stands still in the corner, tall and artificially lit.
I notice the artificial light next to the soft natural light.
The natural light grows dimmer while the artificial light remains the same, only more noticeable than before.
Carpets add patches of softness to the smooth hardwood flooring.
Three candles sit on a plate with curled up edges. Two white, one a golden yellow-orange.
Fingers tap on the table.
Five pens move, mine included.
Keys jingle-jangle.
Light only shines from the water in two places.
Converse shoe soles patter down the hall and back.
My own green flats carry me to Fatima's cookie-brownie goodness.
I can only see the sky's warm yellowed-whiteness from one window.
Out another I see the bright blue fading into the pale blue.
And out another still, I see only a panel of bright blue - lost of its natural glow.
The light fixtures from the kitchen reflect twice onto this monotone panel of sky, but they don't light the green trees that stand stoically on the other side of the window pane.
The light only shines through the water in one place.
It's the light from the ceiling that bends the rays through the water and onto my still crinkled page.
But the rays aren't as big as they were before.
Instead of falling onto Mev's Ode to Joy, one ray lands smacks-dab in the space between two sentences - between a question mark and a capital "B" to be exact - and the other into the blank space.
The bell chimes.