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Out of Nothing

The ruts in our gravel road
weren’t there from the start.
When first laid, the road
was long, flat, and straight,
a mixture of awkward
and often sharp river rock
at the base, with finer pebbles
on top, to even out the surface.

But little stones yield easily
to the tires of trucks and cars.
They spray onto the weedy edges
and thread their way between
stray spears of roadside grass —
leaving a furrowed wake
to mark the frequent passage
of our wheels.

As I drove down it again today,
my tires slipping into these tracks,
it struck me that my mind
operates in the same way —
my thoughts incline along
a certain route, and with time
and repetition, grind out grooves
that direct my mental course.

And what if, little by little,
I have wired my neural paths
to join the well-worn causeway
of a belief that is really a lie?
I see the self-delusions of others
all around me — common as the grit
of our road, seeping in the cracks
between the bulkier stones —

yet it’s much harder
to name them in my own psyche.
Sometimes it takes a collision
of my habitual patterns of thought
with the solid wall of what really is —
to curb my harebrained trailblazing
through the wasteland
of what isn’t.

I hit this wall recently,
and faced a lie my mind had made —
only it wasn’t like a grain of sand
to be dusted off my feet at the door.
It was a deep channel through which
all my mental circuitry flowed,
diverted from a former panoply
of paths.

What a variety of ways exist
to unravel yarn caught in a knot!
But I’d come to trust in the quick fix:
just buy a new skein.
An efficient form of problem-solving,
to purchase a solution —
ready to apply to my predicament,
ready to make me happy again.

I’d look at any hindrance
and imagine how money could step in
and collar it, bludgeon it into silence.
I’d survey all my wants and wounds,
and conclude that money, like a salve,
could remedy them all —
filling every hole —
down to the smallest pock.

It may be correct
that money greases hinges —
and who doesn’t want all doors
to open without protest?
But there are times when it seems
as if the doors ahead are stuck fast,
and there’s not a dime in sight
to help pry them wide.

That’s when, at last,
I see it for the lie that it is.
I still have to get from here to there —
but not through that door,
nor by those ruts in the road.
I feel my brain stretch and flex:
I will park the car
and walk into the woods,

let the path of my thoughts
splinter down unused trails
marked by sweat and ingenuity;
I’ll take up the sacrament of elbow grease,
and I’ll pray —
not to the god of mammon,
but to the one who likes to make
something out of nothing.

Sarah Dunning Park, 2013

Sarah Dunning Park is an artist and poet living in rural Virginia.

And her slim volume of poetry for mothers of small children was one of my favourite books of 2012. I like to read it when the tinies are in the bathtub, splashing, because she’s singing my life with her words. Each poem is makes me smile and cry, because sometimes it’s just so nice to have someone else say out loud the underwhelming and utterly normal and yet beautiful moments of this season of life. This book isn’t a wallow and it isn’t an ecstasy, it’s poetry about the beautiful realities and hard dreams of mothering.

Sarah wrote:

I love when a poem reaches in and grabs my life by the throat, and says, “Pay attention! There’s this thing in your world, and it’s called beauty. You’re not even noticing!”

But I also dislike the complicated world of Poetry-with-a-capital-P: the kind you need a degree to appreciate or that seems like it’s just out to appall you.

Maybe you’re with me on this—and maybe, like me, you still want to find what’s poetic about your life and your kitchen sink filled with dirty dishes and old bread crusts.

To be entered to win your own copy of What It Is Is Beautiful: Honest Poems for Mothers of Small Children by Sarah Dunning Park, just leave a comment on this post sharing your own favourite poet or poem (along with an email address in case you win).

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