A Painting and a Poem, both by Eric K. Carr

Sometimes I wonder

What if Mary Oliver

Was a city girl

What if she never saw

The bear

Or the dark pond

Or the black snakes

Or the peonies and wild roses

Trembling with black ants?

What if her animals

Were on TV

Or behind bars

If the only geese she saw

Were printed on greeting cards

And the summer day

Smelled like hot asphalt 

What then

Would she think

Of her one tamed

And still precious life?

Would she notice the collective soul

Of so many people

With so many stories

And more wisdom

Held within one block

Than perhaps all of Alexandria?

Would she revel

In the smell of rain

On concrete

And the way things like candles

And cut flowers

And windows open to the street

Still link us to something primal

Or at least primitive?

Would the soft sinews

Of wrought iron

Or stubby greatness

Of government buildings

Speak to her soul

And would she delight

In the flights

Of pigeons

The dark mysteries of sewer rats

And erratic shocks of green life

Pushing through sidewalk cracks?

Perhaps she would sit in a taxi

Mouth agape in wonder

At the heartbeat

Of a city

Throbbing

Pulsing

With so much life

Are we really made

By place

And time

Or of seeing?

Perhaps the poet's genius

Is not in the luxury of time in nature

Or the necessity of solitude

But in the prophecy

Of different sight

Of sensing deeply

Of treasuring here

Now

Wherever here

And now

May be

A shock of green grows

Pushing through the cracked sidewalk

Monsoon graffiti