Walden: Basket Ball

Ever since I arrived here, a basket ball has been floating in the pond. Today the pond is rimmed with ice, and the ball is floating in the little currents, limning that rim on one side. The ball has stayed mostly at the western end of the pond, near the drain pipe, thus perhaps the little currents now the pond is full. Is this a letter to you, or just a poem roving out of me after reading? Does it matter? It does matter, a great deal, but I don’t know the answer. The ball must belong to one of the families around the pond, though not mine as there are no children here. A month ago, before the snow, I pulled the basket ball out of the pond and left it on the dam, hoping that whoever lost it would see, but they haven’t looked and probably just bought a new ball, even though their houses are on hills around the pond, and clearly the lost ball would have rolled down hill. It’s back in the pond, limning the ring of ice delicately separating the water from the lower sky, and it’s all making me remember The Red Balloon, my favorite movie, while I know the snow melts a little because of the consistent one drip at a time that is falling in the gutter, some persistently impatient thing happening and tapping, tap tap tap tat tat tap tap, all the while I’m looking at the basket ball and feeling it’s like a friend to me now, all green with the little plants that have beached on it and died. It can’t follow me like the magic balloon of tentative friendship and eventual loss that film led me to wish would happen when I had no friends once, the angels edging their way into our sight sometimes when we are all alone and everything is still except for the tap of the melting snow on the roof. Which reminds me of how I felt in the MOMA last year, when I walked up on a tank of water full of basket balls, and the water disjointed the balls in a slice at the water’s surface, the prismatics of water and the trick on the eyes being delightful, and making me sad that there’s so much crap floating in the water of the world and the soul, and still in love with walking around this tank, making the balls whole and sliced, and whole and sliced, and being all tickled at the control and lack of it I had in that moment and being delighted with the artist and the curator who have enough humor in them to give me this little game. And in these moments when my head is full and things are roving out of it, even if they are sad things like the abandoned basket ball and the melancholy careful balloon, I am very happy and feel I should be here. I get around to thinking things like the corpus callosum lets me love you, it may be where love really is, all that combination and cooperation just happening so that I can have a sense of the delicate and complex and treasurable you are, and I get to think little notes like I wrote in my book, snow is when the ground is lighter than the sky, and in that I am happy, even though you are not here with me. Which is OK, because you are somewhere noticing something, and you will call and tell me about it soon. So it matters, even when we don’t know the answers, and maybe don’t really want them, just want to sit with it, quietly, listening to the snow being lighter than the sky.