The smallest thing is entropy (or maybe a tiny pocket)

I posted this poem as part of another post. I think it needs its own space.

Photo by Jens Frank Jakob on Unsplash

The smallest thing

Nothing lasts.
The manicure grows out,
the moon of my cuticle, more visible each day,
in the gap at the bottom of the polish.

A small thing, a strange thing, was
when my mother died,
everything else kept living.

I lay in bed and watched the second hand jerk—
Down on the tick. Up on the tock—
Across the face of the clock.

My name starts with A,
so everyone butt-calls me.
This very week: my son, my sister, and
the aide who worked with my mother the year before she died all rang me and then, oops, realizing: hung up bfore I answered.

It’s a small thing,
but sometimes, it makes me sad.
I would have liked to…
would have loved to…
speak with you,
I think, looking at the phone.

The smallest thing is
how alike we are to moons -
or clocks,
or dancers
jerking through the movements
under strobe lights -
visible, invisible.
We flash on. We flash off.

"If you could live anywhere, where would it be?" my daughter asks and my heart leaps to answer: With you with you with you. But she is asking a different question: Which town? What sort of house? “Somewhere near water,” I say. The west coast, maybe - though your father would never … “ I drift off, incompleting the sentence.

The truth, if I could tell it, daughter, would be this: I would live in your pocket, on the soft linty bottom of the seam. I would live in the soft spot behind your brother’s ear. I would ride through the world where you and he adventure. Everywhere you go, I would go too. Whispering, as you walk along: you are good.

It’s the smallest thing:
the grit beneath the carpets—
no matter how often I vacuum.

The manicurist runs an orange stick, wrapped in cotton, beneath the half moon of my fingernails, trying to get at the dirt. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I dig with my hands in the garden. I know I shouldn’t but . . .”

It’s no small thing, the tender green spiral that, overnight, has emerged from the zucchini vine, wrapped itself around the red plastic hula hoop that my husband arced over the garden. No small thing, the way this bee has figured out how to navigate the 1/2 inch holes in the fencing.

“Look at you,” I tell the sprout, which may or may not be a pepper plant. “Turning your own body into food! Look at you.”

Life is hard enough already.
Why place yourself into struggle?
Do we really need to place ourselves, like grains of hard corn, between the grinding stones of the mill?

Oh, Grain of Sand, you tiny thing:
If you slipped into an oyster shell,
you’d soon become a pearl.
Why slip into a printing press? You’ll just
muck up the gears.
There’s a world out there just waiting for pearls.
Leave the disaster world behind.

It’s the small things that do you in.
The deer tick. The mosquito bite.
The whole harvest depends
on the pollen carried
on the leg of a bee.

The smallest thing: the pause button,
the friend sitting at Ramona’s, alone,
because you (I mean, I) forgot to write the lunch date in the calendar.

The small things: The drip, drip, drip
in my mother’s tub, tub, tub,
all day, day, day,
for a million years, years, years.

Now that she’s gone, gone, gone
the dust that puffs up when I sit down, when I stand up.
The dryer lint, laced with the threads of my red sweater.

When my father started falling,
we didn’t know what to do.
He fell in the driveway,
behind his car,
where he lay,
in the warm summer day,
for hours.
The garbage men, coming in to get the trash cans, found him there.
He fell in the city, tripping on the sidewalk.
He fell in the kitchen, his knee, squishing into the cat food.

Then, one night, when he was sleeping in my old bedroom,
and, I, visiting was in my sister’s bed,
He fell in the middle of the night,
on his way to the bathroom.

I watched him spiral down -
One foot caught beneath the other
landing on his knees,
his forehead resting on a stack
of freshly laundered towels.

Of course, I rushed to help but
he pushed me away.
“I’m fine,” he snapped.
“Go back to sleep.”

I went back to sleep.
Just a little thing —
dozing off while calamities are happening just outside your door.

---

When the emergency siren sounded at the mall, I looked up. From my cafe table at Barnes and Noble, I saw the woman freeze, caught in the wide open space between three stores.

She looked around: What’s this? Terrorist? Child abduction? Earthquake? Aliens?

Everyone else kept moving.

The bearded man ordered a coffee.
The waiter delivered two burger platters.
The couple exited The Yard House, laughing.

Everyone knew it was a false alarm. Everyone but the frozen woman. As the siren blared on, she squared her shoulders. She took a few steps. Stopped again and shuddered, shaking off the shock like an animal in the wild. It’s okay. I’m okay. Nothing’s wrong.

The man received his coffee.
A sister and a brother shared a Frappuccino.
Six developmentally disabled adults entered the cafe, and asked to use the bathroom. They buddied up and headed to the back, holding hands.

I kept writing:

We say we want to go to the beach,
and then we don’t go to the beach.
We say we want to walk,
and then we don’t walk.
We say we won’t eat after 7 pm,
and then we do—
standing at the freezer,
spooning chocolate ice cream into our mouths,
one teaspoon at a time.

It’s just a little taste, we say,
over and over.

You can’t give up. You have to try. Have to stand up to the tidal force of entropy taking everything apart.

When the siren finally stops, my ears don’t know what to do.
Everything is sound.

The lights buzz. The refrigerator case hums. The espresso machine roars. The wheels of the trash can click-clack along the tiles.

Then, everything falls silent and, off in the distance: a string instrument, a child’s voice, a trill of flute.

The frozen woman enters the cinema.
A man and a boy,
bang into each other, laugh, and do it again,
as they walk in my direction.

---

This poem built itself from the prompt: What is the smallest image in the story that is refusing to be written?

These are some notes that were in the poem but are not in the poem any more. I include them here because . . . I loved them. They helped the poem get started. I have trouble letting go of things that i have loved. It’s a small thing but it gets in the way.

The smallest thing is sand, is dust. A glittery mote swirling in a slash of sunlight.
The smallest thing is a moment. One degree of temperature. One unit of pressure. A shift in the plates of the world and the cliffs crumble into the sea.

The smallest thing is Entropy: “the disorder and uncertainty in a system,
the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe. The general trend of the universe toward death and disorder.”

The smallest thing is a pocket: “a small bag sewn into or on clothing so as to form part of it, used for carrying small articles. A flexible compartment providing separate storage space, for example in a suitcase. A small patch or area, as in pocket paradise. A word describing a small item, a pocket dictionary, for example. A verb denoting the action of slipping an object into a hidden space in the clothing: to pocket a key, for example.