How dare you be so round
oh little metal ball that I unearthed!
Such perfect roundness is beyond me
and mocks my need for imperfection,
especially when it comes to things
that have been so long buried,
cloaked so long from human purpose
as to fall from the kingdom of the familiar . . .
And no rust!
as if also cloaked from time
that is wearing me unevenly away.
It is as if you had worked something out
with mother nature.
And then there is the question
of what you might be,
now that I am asking,
where as before I found you
there was no you and me asking.
As if I owned rights to your story!
Before, there was just me
and everything but you.
And, don't take this wrong, but
as far as this poem is concerned
my world minus you
was faring fine . . .
But now, just look what you have done!
You have made me wonder about you.
What are you?
A ball bearing
whose happy place was once
between a wheel and a fixed axle,
in which the rotating parts and the stationary part
are separated by a ring
of small identical solid metal balls
that reduce friction?
And where then is the machine that your
existence conjures out of dust?
As if I care.
I don't.
I am not curious.
Is that disappointing to you?
That you were not found
by someone more curious?
I am no detectorist but an aging poet
who is only interested
in your potential as a metaphor
which usually winds up being
just another veiled
self-referential revelation.
And I cannot do that to you.
Your perfect roundness resists
the machinations of my imagination.
There is just you on my shelf
of random keepsakes
and, of course, me and everything else.
And someday there will just be you
And everything else.
You remind me of my mortality.
But I do not fault you for that.
In fact you are faultless.
It is I and I alone
who must bear
the friction of this poem.
......................
I used to find lots of things in the ground when I was little, from stones to glass to pottery and odd bits of metal. I was looking, and I was curious. My mother was that way, always collecting things; I got it from her. She enjoyed wandering through junk shops and I caught the bug early on. I could lose myself in those places but back in the 50s the inventory in junk shops was at least 30% antiques and sometimes the price tag was pocket change, for an old pair of brass spectacles or a medicine bottle with whittle marks or an old book from the 19th century. For a kid with my discerning eye, that was heaven on earth and my room soon became a museum for old bottles and one-of-a-kind artifacts. As I grew a little older I started discovering bottle dumps in out of the way places -- in old filled-in wells or the corners of old stonewalls in overgrown cow pastures or in marshes which towns and villages designated as unusable (unproductive) land and therefore suitable for family or community dumps. The best bottle dump I ever encountered was in Maine on a small island in a lake where 4 or 5 generations of an extended household or two had deposited their trash well over 100 years ago (that was around1965, so nothing in the dump was newer than, say,1870). For me bottle dumps were nothing but compacted moldering antique shops. I used to find inkwells, brass lamps, brass trivets and flasks with pontil marks. The deeper I dug, the older the stuff. And everything I collected conjured a story in my head. In elementary school one time we made a class trip to Sturbridge Village where I discovered that I loved stone ground cornmeal and gum made of pine resin which was sold in jars in the form of lightly floured marble-sized balls. But, to my great childish pleasure I saw how old utensils and tools and bottles were used in kitchens and barns and workshops, which was grist for my penchant for time-traveling in my mind. Getting to this poem now, the metal ball I found was a conundrum. It had to be old because it came from 3 or 4 inches down in undisturbed ground. But it was perfectly round and smooth and it wasn't a musket ball which apparently were mostly made of lead. It was professionally machined and perfectly round. It seemed so self-sufficient and inscrutable, resisting all of my attempts to account for it's being there. The best explanation I could come up with was that there was a farmer who acquired a large ball-bearing (in the 1920s or 30s) and he gave it to his kid as a marble. Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, it has been sitting on my shelf in my library in a small bowl along with 5 colonial vintage ceramic marbles. This poem is my attempt to find a home for this enigmatic ball in my poetry. If it is from the 20s or 30s, as I imagine, that makes it an antique. By one definition something has to be 100 years old to qualify as an antique. The last line, which refers to the "friction" of this poem, alludes to how writing this poem was not a cakewalk. It's not a deep poem, which, when I am writing such a poem, feels like the poem is taking me by the hand and showing me what it wants or needs from me. This poem, because it wasn't deep, depended on word-play, language that makes a lot out of a little. It is really just a poem about feeling like an old worn out ball-bearing, but being OK with that because I can write about how that feels. Should there come a day when I can't write about how I feel, I will just have to cross that bridge when I come to it.
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