what the soul is supposed to be (Friday's Sunday's Poem)

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks
Mary Oliver

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled-
I'm wading along

in the sunlight-
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from-
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind-

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage-
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.
__________________________________________________________


About the poem: Last night, I rushed home late from work, hurrying to be able to fulfill the promise I'd made Mr Bunches and Mr F when I'd left for work that morning. "If you're good today," I'd told them, "We'll go to the park tonight."

There are about a zillion -- well, three -- parks within walking distance of our house, but you can't go to a park when it's cold or wet or snowy, which it is 373 days per year in Wisconsin.

This week, though, it's been in the 70s and 80s and yesterday was shorts wearin' weather, and when I got home, the weather had held up, the boys had been good all day, and so we were off!

The park we went to is only a few blocks away, but even that wasn't quick enough for Mr Bunches, who raced ahead and raced back and hopped up and down and at one point did a Happy Park Dance while we waited for the light to change.

We were only able to stay for about a half-hour, but that wasn't really the point. The point was to get out and walk, to see the cars and the clouds and show Mr F and Mr Bunches on the walk home a star that I'm pretty sure was Mars (I always think at least one star in the sky is Mars, but this one looked to actually be Mars, because it was kind of red) and to swing.

And to begin, officially, the spring-and-summer part that is the best part of the year -- the time when we will walk to parks and go to ponds and rivers and swim in lakes and go to the zoo and not spend all our time cooped up in the house or wandering through malls.

There is nothing like the freedom of being outside on a nice day.

About the Hot Actor: I asked Sweetie to name one, but she's out of sorts today, probably because when we first woke up, I promised her a McDonald's Bacon, Egg & Cheese biscuit, my treat, which I did because Mr Bunches had announced that he wanted "soda", so I was going to take him and Mr F and me to McDonald's to get hash browns for breakfast, only then Mr Bunches wanted to watch Quasimodo (as he calls The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Mr F just wanted to swing.

So we didn't go, and finally, after about an hour, Sweetie said:

"Who did you ask me last night if I liked and I said I did and you got mad and said you were going to be a cross between him and Ryan Gosling?"

And the answer was Channing Tatum, and I don't believe for a second that Sweetie forgot about him.

But I am going to look like a cross between Channing Tatum and Ryan Gosling. That's my plan. My version of the cross between them will be, of course, a 43-year-old version of them who is made primarily of McDonald's breakfasts and appears to be slowly melting, but I will achieve that.