Ren Powell's Blog, page 34

Dog Daydreams

Wet hair and hot tea, a blue sky and a quiet house – but for the noises Leonard is making with his mouth. I’m not sure what that’s about. I’m heading into work in an hour. And I can feel the muscles in my back tense at the thought. I had no idea that I had such a need for predictability. Stability. The past 13 months of Covid restrictions changing almost daily – an outlining of new regulations followed by two pages of exceptions – I have thrown my arms in the air like one of those gas station inflatable tube figures. I wish I were more vocal, I would growl impressively, or roar. Instead I curse. That’s hardly charming.

After work I will go up to the studio and paint a little, and sew the new books. And everything will be all right again. I just need to rise above it until then – float over turmoil and the drama and the sudden jettisoning of work done for new assignments. Go with the flow – the rush – the flood – because fighting it is useless and self-destructive. How are we all not cowering in corners by now?

Maybe I need a good day in the mountains. This time last year, we were hiking with clementines and tea in our packs. Well, in E.’s pack. I was doing yoga on the flat boulders. Maybe there is some truth to the idea that our minds and bodies are so connected that a stiffening of one results in the stiffening of the other?

I didn’t choose a word for this year. But am very surprised that it is probably “brittle”. I feel brittle.

In some ways.

My internal life right now is actually very rich. I am writing and making things with my hands. I am reading and listening to interesting podcasts. Learning. So maybe it is all perfectly fine. Maybe this year isn’t brittle at all. Maybe it’s enclosed, like a tortoise, an oyster, a cocoon. I’m not a silver lining kind of gal, so that’s not what I am doing here. What is, is. To take a step back and see a larger picture doesn’t mean to search for compensation for having to accept what we don’t like. I think that’s a kind of religious thinking: God takes away and God gives. I guess some people find that comforting? I know we throw out those kinds of platitudes hoping to comfort people who are grieving, but I have yet to hear anyone say that it helps them to hear it. “Look at the bright side: I’m going to beat you bloody, but give you a cookie.”

No. I don’t see this little period of creativity that I am experiencing as compensation for anything in my life past or present. It just is.

And I know I shouldn’t cling to it. And as soon as I think this, I start to feel fear rise: what if it stops? What if I don’t have any ideas tomorrow? What if?

And I take a sip of my tea and take a deep breath and laugh at myself.

Clinging desperately is a habit. I think my spirit animal is a gecko.

All things change. Everything is impermanent. I can tell and retell my story any way I want. And it is probably best for me not to think of it as punishment and compensation. It just is.

Leonard is growling at my feet. Dreaming. I wonder if he remembers his dreams? Is disappointed when he wakes to find himself here in the bibliotekette instead of hiking in the mountains on this pretty day?

I wonder if he has a story?

I still don’t know what
people mean by it’s a dog’s life
– isn’t it our lives:
arbitrary, according
to who yanks our chain?

The Weekly Digest as Audio: #15

Tweaking every week, and learning as I go…

The Horse on the Hilltop

Driving back from the doctor’s this morning, a horse was standing at the top of a hill all alone. I can’t explain why it felt important. Single horses standing on hilltops just feel profound. I felt a flush of awe.

And associations of freedom, I suppose. All those big words that are hooked into big emotions, but I have trouble anchoring to specifics in my life.

What is freedom to me? It sounds like a high school essay assignment. What exactly are “endless possibilities”? I know the emotions I feel from these words, but have trouble pinning them down as phenomenon. Endless possibilities sounds overwhelming. A whole field of half-hearted creatures barely nudging up through the soil, and the responsibility to make something viable out of them. Which do you choose? And what if you fail?

I am learning to leave awe alone. To accept the flood of emotion, like slipping into a warm bath, and let go of associations and interpretations about what it means to me or for me. I am learning to let the horse on the hill be a horse on the hill, and relish the flush of emotion for its own sake. Children do that, don’t they? Thrill in things without believing them to be omens or signs from the oracles. Without believing they either deserve them, or have to work to deserve them. They just observe. I’m sure there are adults who do that as well. I actually think I know one or two.

They think I’m weird.

Also this morning, along a roundabout on the motorway, a car was stopped – dangerously, blocking traffic from two directions. I had to stop too, and figured it was car trouble, until I saw the mallard on the road. But then he wandered up onto the grass and still the car didn’t budge. Then the door opened and I thought the driver was going to try to catch the duck to take it somewhere safer. But when she got out of the car she was holding her phone and filming the duck. She chased after it – filming – until it flew away. Then she got back into her car and let us all continue on our way.

No one honked. That made my day. I am pretty sure everyone was as puzzled as I was. What I figure is this woman risked all of our lives so she could get a film clip of a duck. Not to save a duck. But that the weirdness of this act perplexed us all so much that we were trying to process it. We were all thinking, so: not honking. I’m happy that this behavior is still an aberration and not the norm, despite what people want to say about what technology is doing to us.

I probably take a hundred photos a month. But I love what it has done to me. Now, when I am driving, or in the passenger seat, I see how beautiful the scenery is. I “frame” it in my mind and appreciate the reflections, the colors, the incidental composition of elements, the repetitions, and patterns.

I notice more – camera in hand, or not.

I also think it’s helped teach me to be passive. In a good way – to leave my ego out of the situation when my ego isn’t necessary. To fully embrace the value of being an observer and not a participant at times. To understand that it is possible to take center stage when it’s appropriate and then step back without the fear of losing “my place”. To be more generous. Less judgmental. Less fearful.

It always comes back to fear, doesn’t it? For me, at any rate.

I suppose there are days
when the sky, mottled as gull’s
eggs, still warms the earth
so the smallest bit of green
will poke through and claim the day

In the Deep End

I had to wear gloves again yesterday while walking with E. and Leonard. But the maples were showing off good-sized buds. E. said it is time to start putting seeds into the earth. But first I need to clear out the dead branches from last year. I need to buy a new top for the one little greenhouse that caved in under the snow sometime in February.

Then I have to read up on what’s to be done with the perennials I’ve planted in the yoga room. Sweep the mats and light the candles and remember that everything is going to be okay. Things could not be better situated “lagt til rette” to be… okay. But despite the well-intentioned platitudes people pass around social media, gratitude is not a fix for mental illness. You can’t “grateful” your way out of bipolar genetics.

I think I tried that. Every morning I meditated, I focused on loving kindness, on gratitude until this big ball of love swelled like a balloon, until it burst. That rubber, silicone – whatever – hurts like hell when it snaps back on your fingers and the world gets ugly.

It’s ironic that I had been focusing all year on the middle path. But I am finding it again, because nothing is permanent, and everything changes and I am not who I was a year ago, not who I was three months ago. It is only natural I should find it again – if only by accident in wandering.

If I could I would stay in this little bibliotekette, in the studio upstairs, in my yoga room and never leave the house but for runs along the trail and in Njåskogen‘s spongy underbrush. I find myself watching the clock and counting down until I have to get to the train station, and to the school, to the classroom. I fight the pinch instead of just relaxing into the discomfort.

I feel like a kid at the edge of the swimming pool. I have dived in before, I know it’s fine. You know – not like on an overcast and humid day when the water is almost the same temperature as the air – but on a hot day, when the water is cold. But you’ve had to shower first because of public pool rules, so you are shivering and your teeth are chattering and you know that once you’re in the water – in a half a minute or less – you’ll be warm again. Still… You can’t force yourself to jump in. Something in your brain says it’s a very bad idea.

At the beginning of this school year the teachers tried virtual reality. It was a problem that had the user walk a plank out the window of skyscraper, hundreds of meters over a busy city street. I was intellectually aware that it was not real. However, another part of my brain was telling me this was wrong – my whole body was telling me this was wrong. I couldn’t see any point in overriding a self-preservation instinct that is there for a reason, that is working well.

Going to work shouldn’t be like walking a plank high above a city street. I shouldn’t feel like my job requires me to be one of the flying Wallendas. But I am having a difficult time finding perspective. I can’t write more about this: confidentiality clauses and such.

So instead I will say that at home life it good. Painting, writing, reading, learning new skills. There is a balance to be had. I know this.

I need to wriggle out of the time-out corner and be okay again. Okay. Right. And. Yep. Okay. (Can you hear my teeth chattering?)

earth worms abandoned
half-eaten on the asphalt –
Spring’s little singers are full
as old, full throat-ed mezzos
and their conflicted, dark arias

Doing Life

Still coming to the computer later than I should be this morning. But I slept well and did do some yoga. I don’t recognize this body at all. Doing a forward fold, suddenly I stop a good 10 inches from the floor, my hamstrings tightening with a kind of metallic bite. This will take some time. I move through the Warrior positions feeling impatient. Let’s get this over. I have to work consciously at not allowing this to make me unhappy. When I am done, I feel like I didn’t really do it and should start again. I suppose that is a good sign that I have ambitions to get back to my practice as it was.

It’s funny that this morning doing my 2 minute poem warm-up I wrote about mercury. A liquid metal. Maybe I should use the imagery in my practice. Warming the elements until they flow. Adaptive.

I miss so many aspects of what my life was before things fell apart. And yet, I am grateful for the falling apart. It took me back to my basic drives. Put me in touch with what I know to be true of myself, but have been too cowardly to properly experience.

It’s been 4 rough years. And not a coincidence that I have gone through “the change” during this time. I don’t say that to be dainty. I am not afraid of the word menopause. But it has felt like a change. A metamorphosis. The electric shocks through my arms, the hot flashes and inexplicable waves of shame. The discovery of the mirrored arteries in my pelvis that nearly killed me by choking off my blood supply 51 years into my life. The cancers that seem to be invading every female relative I have. The rejection from the arts council from a book that was much better than my previous books. This is what it is to be midlife. As in: in the midst of real life – the things that have been on the periphery in youth, and easy to set aside, are center stage. This is real. The world gets bigger. My life gets smaller. And then somehow also -overwhelming.

It’s funny. Nothing I’ve been through is as hard as my childhood was. And my optimism is simultaneously waning and blossoming. The faith that I clung to as a child, that in the future things will be different – the trust that my story was heading so a wonderful, satisfying climax – that is gone. In some ways the arc that I imagined did happen. That’s not right. Not in any of the ways I imagined, but I did get a “happy” story arc.

I just didn’t imagine far enough. Who does? All of our culture’s stories end when the protagonist hits age 30 or 40. After that we’re comic relief. Or plot devices for someone else’s story.

So what now?

Now I have a very realistic idea of what is under my control. What I can focus on in terms of making my life better. And by better, I mean enjoying it more.

It’s a matter of choosing. And following through, of course. There are no guarantees of any sort – so it has to be the doing that matters.

I am not considering this a”reinvention”. In fact, the opposite. I am not using my energy to construct or invent a new personae, or a new “life”. All I’m doing is shaking off the fears and concerns for “how it looks”. I’m no longer trying to force a dramaturgy.

I am just doing.

Nothing is as it
should be has been is supposed –
every narrative
truncated.
Epilogue:

Stream of Unfocused Consciousness

There’s sage sausage hash in the crock-pot. And the wind is blowing so hard that the tree branches hitting the gutters on the roof sounds like rain. I’m drinking a cup of tea and thinking this feels nothing at all like spring.

I have a tidy list of things to do, but feel myself splaying across the day like an amoeba – reaching where instinct calls me – five directions at once. Not great when I’ve been feeling worn thin, but on the other hand, it is nice to notice how interesting the world is – so many things to dip into.

I think it is bad advice to say people should do one thing, and do that one thing well. It certainly is a limited – practical – view of what we are “supposed to” do with our lives. Be useful. Provide something of a defined and comparable value to others. From one perspective, it seems that when we move beyond the need to use all of our waking hours to provide for our own – and our immediate family’s – sustenance, we are brainwashed to think we have to use our “free time” to achieve the same kind of commodity-oriented goals. When I saw “we”, I mean “me”. But I am very sure I am not alone in this. There is a huge backlash to the whole productivity movement. But I have yet to see the relinquishing of the “do one thing well” idea. The branding. The minimalism. The easily identified, quantified, and typeset in stone on a grave marker. You get eight words to sum up your life.

Does anyone aspire to the epitaph: She did a great many things moderately well?

Norwegian call people like this potatoes. Here lies Ren Powell, Potato.

I don’t know. Maybe that would be just fine. But I am hoping by the time I fall apart that it will be legal to put me in a sack at the base of a sapling. No “Here lies”, at all. I remember – morbidly – writing a suicide note when I was in my mid-twenties. A poem about finally being nourishing. I think I have felt an enormous pressure to make myself useful since I was a child. A pressure to be worthy. And the consequential need for approval. Justify my existence.

Today I am sitting at my desk and I can see the bookshelves in front of me. I am in the middle of sorting through them – my collection having outgrown the space in this little bibliotekette. After yesterday’s temporary shuffling, right in my line of sight are books on travel writing, on playwrighting, on memoirs. But today I am not seeing them as accusations. I’m not judging myself. I followed those roads as far as they interested me. We aren’t supposed to treat the relationships in our lives this way, but maybe that’s all the more reason we should give ourselves the freedom to move on when a delight becomes a chore. My life is so damn circular, I may well pick the genres up again someday. Why have I been convinced that I have to choose everything in my life and stick with it – or deal with the shame of “failure”. I know myself and I know I don’t give up when things get hard. I follow through. But I don’t continue pushing when there is no desire either.

“If you are doing something moderately well, then stay in your lane. Continue. Try to prove you are worthy of the time you have on this planet, in this form.”

Why?

I don’t believe that the bacteria that will break down our bodies and make it useful for the planet again care what we have done, what is on our CV, what awards we have. Even the history books we long to be included in are fictions and distortions of stories that will suit or not suit the future, but have nothing to do with us at all. What’s in a name? A form of ancestor worship. A system of faith – religion even.

Of course, I want to excel. I want to be renown and respected. But I keep asking myself if that’s the measure of a good life at all.

Right now I’m going to pour myself some more tea and tend to my day job tasks – a job I used to love but now loath. And I am praying that my life will circle around and I will want to do the work again someday … soon.

Me: embryonic
an immortal jellyfish
reverted – not new
but new – translucent under
over the world is endless

Little Tow-Headed Girl

I am not as crabby as I am today. These are exceptional circumstances. I am taking deep breaths, and large sips of wine and trying to remember that everything is fine: perfection is not a goal.

I worked only two and a half hours yesterday, and it took everything I had. No lectures, not pressure, but just being there was difficult. I came home to find a message of one of the students wrote to me. It made me cry. It reminded me that the majority of the people in the world are kinder than we want to believe. And by that I mean it is easier sometimes to blame our problems on other people’s callousness, or cruelties, or inconsideration. But no. Sometimes life is just very hard. And the why’s don’t matter as much as the dusting ourselves off to standing tall and try again.

If I were to paint a self-portrait right now, it’d be a small girl with gravel in the bleeding heels of her palms, in her raw knees. Sunburned and dusted with the desert grit. Tear-tracks caked like mud on her cheeks. You don’t give up, you take that red rubber ball of anger in your gut and slam it against the cinder block wall. The same ball the kids use to play cannonball. Sanctioned bullying during P.E. class. The same cinder block that blurs every apartment building from Vegas to L.A. into one porous memory.

I think what I’m getting at is that the world is still unfair. And sometimes I wonder if I have ever learned to cope with that reality.

It has been too long since I’ve run. But I’ve promised myself to begin this week. To give myself that. Sometimes what looks like laziness is deliberate self-destruction. When I do begin running, I wouldn’t be surprised if I wound up with bleeding hands and knees. It takes a lot to remember to lift my knees high enough on those dark mornings. Just in case there are fallen branches. And this body as it is now, is unfamiliar. In the way of itself. I keep telling myself this is a liminal season. Accept and move on. All the bodies I have inhabited. Just now I think of the photos I’ve seen: me at the age of 6 or so, sunburned and bleached. Now I get the occasional flush of red on my face, and my hair, now gray, is pretty much the same kind of pale as then. And I am that kind of rubber-ball angry. You can throw it as hard as your body can manage, and it still is not satisfying.

There are times I wish there were someone else to remember this girl. To tell me about her. Today I am missing my grandmother. As sticking as she could be, she did always teach acceptance. Perfection is not a goal. On the other hand – it wasn’t a goal because one should stay in one’s own lane. There are consequences for over-reaching.

Yesterday I found out that the paper I’d chosen for the paperback books wasn’t good enough. The quality of the actual printed book wasn’t acceptable when taking into account the photography and acrylic prints. I spent the day and evening taking new photographs and then reformatting the book with new paper choices.

It’s all a learning process. A humiliating, frustrating, never-ending learning process.

If you are reading this and have already purchased a paperback copy, please contact me asap so that I can get a high-quality book in your hands (at no extra charge, of course!)

a paper cut
a tiny wound, where pressure
gaping, electric
a whole body singing
in dissonance with itself

Losing It and Finding It – in Turns

Getting going in the mornings is like trying to herd cats, as they say. I remember pulling the crockpot out of the corner and onto the countertop to start dinner. Lunchtime I went back into the kitchen to see it there. Empty. Useless. Forlorn.

I’m projecting again.

I keep reminding myself (at the risk of sounding like an inspirational meme) that life is a specific dance. One step back, two steps forward, one step back. And then your partner accidentally kicks you in the shin. (For the record, my partner is an excellent dancer, and only kicks me in the shins metaphorically.)

Anti-climax is definitely a thing. And – although I am excited about new projects – I am trying very hard to move forward. This morning I showered and dried my hair with a blow dryer for the first time in over two months. I put make-up on. Braving the cold winds and intermittent hail, I picked up the binder’s board I ordered two weeks ago. I picked up wine. And some lavender shampoo because I have been feeling very…. pragmatic lately. At least in terms of personal hygiene. I’m ready for some scented candles and soft music. I want to smell something besides sandpaper and pulp. And cuddle-puppy.

Speaking of which, I’m worried about how Leonard will take me going back to work this week. The pup is 35 kilo of adoration and has even taken to crawling up in E.’s lap when I’ve been sewing the signatures for books. Although I suppose E. will be working from home for a while yet. The vaccine roll-out here is shamefully inept. We’re expecting another spike over the next two weeks from the Easter holidays. I fully expect to go back to work, only to wind up teaching part-time online again.

But hey… roll with it? Right now nothing seems quite recognizable and I am beginning to relax a little. To come to terms with that. I suppose it really is a lesson in not clinging – even if it means not clinging to sanity either. I mean in the way that we can only approach these things obliquely. Catch a tiger sliding up alongside with a peach in hand, rather than charging head-on with a net.

Easy-does-it.

I’ve another doctor’s appointment tomorrow. Then heading slowly back to real life on Friday. The most frightening thing is that I am comfortable here in the house. Too comfortable. I’m almost afraid to go out and interact with people. Fragile. No. That’s not right. I am not fragile. Reactive.

Maybe Friday I should bring a crate of peaches to work. Yeah. Good luck finding decent peaches anywhere in this country.

did I say this was
my second glass with dinner
rambling uncensored
stepping right through the surface
of decorum like thin ice

Imagining the Real World

Here we are in America’s national poetry month, and I find myself not getting to the books on my nightstand. I was ambitious and said I would read a collection a day. But I didn’t anticipate the steep learning curve associated with Facebook Shops and “pixels” and currency converters, and plug-ins that work then don’t work then work again. This side of things is hard. No wonder my Norwegian publisher never really did much of this kind of thing: marketing. I suck at it. And I find social media intimidating and awkward. I am not a cheerleader type. Never the leader of the pink ladies. Never a Heather. And really, I am fine with that. But actually not sure how my introverted “authenticity” translates to functional marketing. The words followers and fans make me sick to my stomach, tied up with all kinds of ambivalence.

I am so grateful for E.’s amazing moral support when I hit the stupid-wall and start thinking: This is what you get for leaving your lane. Who do you think you are? You’re going to crash and burn. I’m trying to get things to a not-too-embarrassing state now, and then let it rest for a few days. Get back to poetry.

This evening I’m going to dive back into Rachel Barenblat’s book Crossing the Sea. (See what I did there?) I’m halfway through and incredibly moved. I’ve been thinking of Dave (at The Skeptic’s Kaddish) who set up a blog as a way to grief his father. Barenblat is a rabbi and this collection is about her mother’s death.

People say that everyone goes through this, but I never will. I say that to point out how powerful these poems are. The speaker draws me into her relationship with her mother and her grief. Her poem “Mother’s Day” begins with: It’s a year of firsts/and most of them hurt.

In “Pedicure”, she talks about the simple thing of removing the nail polish that she had on for the funeral: […] replaced with periwinkle, luminous and bright/like your big string of pearls you do not know/are mine now that you’re gone.

There’s a reason why I couldn’t read this book in one day. It’s like trying to eat a whole mayonnaise cake in one sitting. But I’m looking forward to picking it up again.

But first, there’s housework. And some yoga. Trying to get back into – oh, I don’t know, integrated with the rest of the world here: friends I haven’t seen or spoken with in nearly two months. And then there is work later this week. Students. There’s clothing that isn’t loungewear. Make-up. Shoes.

In some ways I’ve been
in a womb, cocoon, nestled
with the dull sounds of
blunted percussives, every
thing in the world – swaddled

Lowering the Bar

The house is (mostly) clean now. I’ve moved acrylic paints and sewing frames upstairs to the new studio/”cabin” — as E. calls it. He’s nestled in now on my old purple couch watching war movies. It is odd to have the house to ourselves again. It’s not that we needed the space, but it does make it easier for us to be more conscious about how we use our time. No more television in the bedroom. Sleep hygiene is a thing. A thing I am not very good at observing.

It’s evening again — upside-down day again — but Leonard is lying here beside me as though it makes no difference at all. The birds, though, they know. There’s no singing. Instead, I hear the neighbor puttering around in his garage. It’s kind of cozy, I suppose. But it’s not birdsong.

Easter seems to sneak up on me as much as any other holiday. After living here more than a quarter of a century, how is it I still forget to plan for all of the bank holidays now? I set out to go to the store yesterday for dog food when E. reminded me it was Good Friday. In Norwegian it’s Long Friday, which makes a lot more sense to me, considering how I doubt Jesus would have described the day as “good”. Everyone goes back to work on Tuesday. Sunburned from skiing, if they’re lucky.

Me? No skiing for me. But I feel my body longing for a good sweat. Lying on the beach with a book, dripping into my eyes and my cleavage, until I feel compelled to throw myself into the surf. What I wouldn’t give for a good summer day right now. Or this year at all, since travel still won’t be a possibility for us. Rogaland summers aren’t always warm. I’m trying to be optimistic, and planning on giving surfing another go this year now that I’m off blood thinners.

But I will take what comes and most of all be grateful for my health. Mental and physical. Things are rolling evenly these days in terms of my mood. I can’t describe how relaxing that is. Not having to second guess my sanity. And today — though I have “gone soft” in more ways than one over the past couple of months — getting dressed this morning I didn’t hate my body. I know that voice in my head is due back any minute to tell me I’m disgusting and weak and irresponsible — but it helps to notice the peace in its absence.

It astounds me really that there are people in the world who live their whole lives without those hateful voices in their heads. I envy those people. Not just for my own sake, but considering that I would have been a better partner, a better mother had I not assumed there was a state of perfection that we could all achieve somehow. If we worked hard enough at it. Had discipline. Were pure of heart. It’s frightening what we pass on to other people in our lives in our pursuit to be “good”.

I went to Christian camps for several years as a pre-teen. The bar was high for “good”. I remember once we were sitting in the morning assembly and the pastor asked us to imagine that soldiers entered the room and said they were going to shoot all the Christians. To imagine the soldiers then asked all the Christians to stand: Would you stand? the pastor asked. Who asks ten-year-olds what they would do under those circumstances? Some ten-year-olds are deep thinkers. Some think more deeply than 30-year-old pastors. Some of them have experienced violence in a way that does not make this question as fantastical as one might assume. People set the bar extremely high. In so many ways. Suck it up, move on, forgive and forget, be a paragon to succeed in the world.

Sometimes I wonder about the chicken and egg situation when it comes to my “intense” personality. My deep thinking.

I have a handful of nightmares from my childhood that I remember vividly even today. Some I find difficult to talk about. But one was about the hoof-footed Devil from an illustration in the Children’s Bible my mother would read to me before bed. He tempted Jesus to throw himself off the mountaintop. I don’t remember exactly what the Devil wanted from me. I just remember the electric-cold-sweat-fear that I can still sense on the edge of my consciousness.

About ten years ago, I actually went on eBay to buy a copy of that old brown-covered Children’s Bible. It’s in awful condition, but it is on the shelf in the living room with all the other Bibles and theology books. Sometimes I worry if I lose my mind at the end, like my Grandmother did, that those illustrations will torment me. The writing finger of God. The three boys who would not burn. The soldiers killing all the babies in their mothers’ arms.

I’m not sure why I slid over onto this topic. It wasn’t my intention. Easter is supposed to be about renewal.

Sometimes it is difficult to renew and move forward without kicking off what’s stuck to your shoes.

the kale is still green 
after a winter’s neglect
its leaves press against
the glass that kept it alive
its stem reaching from the rot