Al Zolynas: "Waiting for the Present"

I would sit in the dimness
of my father's wooden toolshed
waiting for the mice
to come out and feed
on the wheat we kept
in a hundred-pound sack for the chickens.

I kept silence, refusing
even to swallow, hoping the thud
of my heart wouldn't betray me.
The only way to the sack
was over my still body.

Outside, it was Australia,
Christmas, summer holidays—
the heat unbearable to all but reptiles
and schoolboys, and the mice
who lived their small, secret lives.

When the first mouse
nosed up the unfamiliar landscape
of my body, motes of dust
floating in the beams of light
that streamed in from the cracks in the wall
exploded minutely.

After hours of sitting
through the long summer, motionless,
alert, though my limbs were asleep,
the mice accepted me.
I simply became the way to their food.
Once, as many as a dozen were on me,
each carrying a single, precious grain.

Now, years later, I find myself still
sitting in the dim light,
legs locked in meditation, monkey-mind
swinging between imagined past and imagined future,
waiting for that most obvious of hiddens,
the ungraspable present.

"Waiting for the Present" by Al Zolynas. Text as published in Under Ideal Conditions: Poems (Laterthanever Press, 1994; no bookseller link available). Reprinted with permission.

Art credit: "Mouse Hole," photograph by Olivier Le Queinec.

Al Zolynas: "Postcard from Home"

Sitting on the deck, bare feet
on the railing, I watch and listen to
this day spilling out its myriad flow of details, one
after another, one on top of another, seamlessly,
with no apologies, not the slightest backing off:
two ruby-throated humming birds
drinking their sugar water, distant dogs
barking, the sudden shriek
of wood surrendering to a neighbor's power saw,
those boulders poking out of the hillside, another subdivision
materializing on the stripped land across the valley.
Each detail says "This!"
and has always and ever only said "This!"
Wish I were here.

"Postcard from Home" by Al Zolynas. © Al Zolynas.

Photography credit: "Woman's Bare Feet Propped Up," Comstock Photos (originally color).



 

Al Zolynas: "The Zen of Housework"

I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.

My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.

Full of the grey wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches,
is setting in Western America.

I can see thousands of droplets
of steam—each a tiny spectrum—rising
from my goblet of grey wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly—like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.

Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!

"The Zen of Housework" by Al Zolynas, from The New Physics. © Wesleyan University Press, 1979.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).