Cane No. 1

Familiarity breeds contentment.

But it is not a rule I want.

I wish only to recognize in my experience

that which makes me feel at home within myself.

It is our nature to go back,

and I mean, all the way back,

to when our consciousness had yet to emerge.

We sought the things that would fit into a place

in the plasm that would become our minds.

And now that our minds know something of our selves,

we use nouns to speak of these things

that can give us that familiar sensation

and to note our awareness of a rightness,

resonance –

a fit.

All of which leads to this:

Our second desk faces out a west-looking window.

When I look up I see a familiar sight.

The red, brick patio I laid in the foreground,

and the red, brick sidewalk in back

between the vegetable garden plots,

which leads only to the compost pile behind the garage.

The zoysia lawn in the middle ground,

an unnatural aberration, if there ever was one –

needing fertilizer, watering, and constant cutting.

And along half of the back border,

an invasive cane.

The tops sway up in the utility wires in a barely negligible breeze.

That cane which got its start in that corner

from several clumps of roots my father hacked off

from the stand of cane in the back yard I grew up in.

But I think that there is more to all this than the familial connection,

even though the sidewalk brick also came from my home town

in the trunk of my parents maroon Buick,

and I can remember my father plugging in a zoysia lawn

when I was merely a boy nearly fifty years ago.

But familiarity goes back much farther than that.

There is this green, and that green,

and more greens than I care to mention,

fundamental signs of growth –

and life.

And the sky,

the air,

the breathable atmosphere,

sometimes blue,

sometimes salmon,

overcast,

black,

with points of light sparkling through.

And in this middle ground,

this cane I watch each year, springing up from underground,

growing skyward with blades that will draw blood from ungloved hands,

and then the fuzzy heads,

and at the end of the cycle, the cane turns a dusky yellow,

almost cream,

when the wet snow sticks to the now rustling and scraping dried blades,

the hollow stalks rubbing up against one another for warmth –

a little companionship.

And then, in the early spring, I lop the spent canes, bundling it for the city,

and then, once again, the familiar refrain.

But again, not to discount the cycle of life,

this is not the ground on which I search for words.

It is this very sense I have while sitting, lost

and found,

at my window.

And I think I have seen what I am looking for

through so many seasons and in so many times,

angles, light,

and that stand of cane.

And I must clarify, yet one more time,

I don’t quite mean this particular, physical place,

locatable by GPS,

but that place in my mind,

unconscious and conscious,

where this

thing

fits

that neurological

place.

Because I have been here before:

On the Kaw River bridge, overlooking that wreck of a river;

On a chair at Aimee’s with an egg cream, staring out through backward letters,

On that stretch of empty highway where the Flint Hills open out on the valley below.

I have been content in familiar places.