The Way I See It

By Denise Michaels

PROMPT — The way I see it ...

It is not unusual as I make the rounds of the garden to startle a bird hiding under a sword fern frond or nestled between a stone and a huckleberry bush. Birds greet me summer evenings when I appear with my sprinkler to offer mist. They gather at the bird bath I splurged on because when I saw it at the nursery, I thought of my mother watering birds on the hot summer evenings of my childhood in Redwood City, California. I observed her rinse out the basin to replace it with gurgling fresh water, the birds gaily responding. I associate song birds, the passerines, with my mother, who, though deaf from a childhood illness, told me she could hear their chirping when they flocked close by. Like my mother, I express gratitude for wildlife each time I refill my birdbath, and whenever the robins reappear or towhees come to bathe. I’m enthralled when the gray squirrels that nest in the woodland hop to the rim for a quick drink. Sometimes, long-term memory is sepia-toned but I will always remember my mother’s birds were blue.

Today, I’m inspired to transplant the spider-wort, a misnamed flowering bush I enjoy for its profuse purple flowers, velvet-like, the shade of deepest royal blue. There is no mistaking the ephemeral magic of daily blooms, each blossom living only one day. For a decade the spider-wort struggled in a terra cotta pot that reminds me of an antique urn that might have been fired by an Etruscan, or a Roman for a terrace of olive trees. For the sanctuary of living things evokes histories and odes. Pablo Neruda’s odes to ordinary things such as the onion. But also, tools, Neruda explaining the hand-held object bears the imprint of the owner. I chose my father’s camping shovel to transplant the spiderwort. This little shovel comes with instructions shared with me and my brother, and rules for excavation or sleuthing memory. Again, I’ve been interrupted by enchantment. In this case, to view again yesterday’s work and wonder what, if anything, I accomplished by taking down a snared plum tree. And the minute I leave the laptop to walk out on one of the many garden paths, I’m doomed, knowing I will be hooked again or should I say lured again by another task, a task I hadn’t realized I could do by myself. And here I mean things like using a simple nylon rope and a hand saw to guide the broken tree down from where it was wedged, the entire carcass, bones and all, home for several decades to birds, squirrels and raccoons as they were all sustained by the ripening fruit that began as what looked like chartreuse-colored earrings hanging near the yellowy leaves, sometimes eaten green before they’ve ripened to the violet ink hue I tried to paint with when my daughters were girls. For now, robins maraud branches of the healthy oemleria I’ve pruned carefully to encourage its symmetry and umbrella-like canopy. It was this tree which put me on notice that we had an erosion problem when my grandsons emptied their inflatable swimming pool and the water surged off the ledge of the ravine like a water fall.

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Denise Calvetti Michaels grew up in Redwood City, CA, before moving to the Pacific Northwest over forty years ago. Denise was awarded the Crosscurrents Prize for Poetry by the Washington Community College Humanities Association for her prose poem Notes from New Orleans. Her poems and lyric essays appear in anthologies such as In Praise of Farmland (Whit Press), Mute Note Earthward (WPA), Between Sleeps (En Theos Press), Beyond Forgetting (Kent State University Press), The Milk of Almonds, Italian American Women on Food and Culture (Feminist Press), and Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora (University Press of Mississippi), and others. Polenta, a memoir, is included in The Milk of Almonds, Italian American Woman on Food and Culture (Feminist Press, 2002). North Creek, published by Cave Moon Press, is a three-woman anthology and includes her previously published poetry. Denise teaches Psychology for Cascadia College with emphasis on curriculum related to Sustainable Practices. Denise earned a BA in English from the University of South Florida, an MA in Human Development from Pacific Oaks College, and recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from the University of Washington, Bothell.