Pea Necklace

Spare me hobbies, please! – symbolically
equivalent to crawling little creatures who,

deformed and greasy, hobble forth on stumpy

blistered knees to offer their banalities –

obsequious and wheezing! – oh, what horror

to imagine dicing life into time-killing slices –

ways to find a way to block the miracle – devise
through sorting stamps or knitting socks

or putting clamps on an un-needed glued-
and-nailed-ennui-construed contraption faintly
meant to harbor books – a way to flatten
senses: lose all feel of spherical from fear
of emptiness: peremptorily squeezing into
tininess your human curiosities: losing your
capacity for wonder, thunder – plundering
your heart for crumbs: accommodating

your despair until it numbs: I do not want
to make a thing unless it can at least remotely
bring some sense of God. And then I dream
I see an ancient lady in a wheel-chair,
popping peas out of a pod she takes from
others in a wad of paper-toweling – piling
them into a bowl atop her lap of similarly
unshod vegetable cousins: dozens she now

strings into a necklace – emerald beads –
her needle wielded with sweet expertise.
She seems transformed – delighted as a child –
as she looks up at me, a passerby, now
strolling past her nursing home, where she
is lolling, in the lobby. I watch her mouth two
happy words: “My hobby!” Ancient lady knows
what’s what. Another clue that I may not.

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