Read Wild Gratitude for Free Online Page B

crying,
just
        
this, just this, nothing more, nothing else!
—
    as if the morning were somehow conscious of itself.
        When you leaned over and touched me on the arm
                   it was as if my arm needed to be touched
                             in that way, at exactly that time.
Three Journeys
    Whoever has followed the bag lady
    on her terrible journey past Food Lane’s Super-Market,
    and Maze’s Records, and The Little Flowering Barbershop
    on the southeast corner of Woodward and Euclid
    will know what it meant for John Clare
    to walk eighty miles across pocked and jutted
    roads to Northborough, hungry, shy of strangers,
    “foot foundered and broken down” after escaping
    from the High Beech Asylum near Epping Forest.
    And whoever has followed the bag lady
    on her studious round of littered stairwells
    and dead-end alleys, and watched her combing
    the blue and white city garbage cans for empties,
    and admired the way that she can always pick out
    the single plate earring and one Canadian dime
    from a million splinters of glass in a phone booth
    will know how John Clare must have looked
    as he tried to follow the route that a gypsy
    had pointed out for him, scaling the high
    palings that stood in his way, bruising
    his feet on the small stones, stooping to
    admire the pileworts and cowslips, scorning
    the self-centered cuckoos but knowing the sweet
    kinship of a landrail hiding in the hedgerows.
    I began this morning by standing
    in front of the New World Church’s ruined storefront;
    I was listening to the bag lady and a pimply-
    faced old drunk trading secrets with the vent man,
    and remembering how a gentleman on horseback
    had mistaken John Clare for a broken-down haymaker
    and tossed him a penny for a half-pint of beer.
    I remembered how grateful he was to stand
    elbow to elbow in the Old Plough Public House
    happily sheltered from a sudden rainfall.
    But later when I saw the bag lady
    sprawled out on a steaming vent for warmth
    I remembered how Clare had moved on, crippled
    by tiny bits of gravel lodged in his shoes,
    and how he tried to escape from the harsh wind
    by lying down in an open dike bottom
    but was soaked through clear to his bones;
    how he came to the heavy wooden doors
    of the Wild Ram Public House hours later,
    and gazed longingly at the brightly lit windows,
    and had no money, and passed on. Whoever
    has stood alone in the night’s deep shadows
    listening to laughter coming from a well-lit house
    will know that John Clare’s loneliness was unbending.
    And whoever has felt that same unbending loneliness
    will also know what an old woman felt today
    as she followed an obedient path between the huge
    green garbage cans behind Kroger’s Super-Market
    and the small silver ones behind Clarence’s grocery.
    I began this day by following a bag lady
    in honor of John Clare but suddenly, tonight,
    I was reading “The Journey Out of Essex, 1841,”
    in honor of the unknown bag lady.
    I had witnessed a single day in her life
    and was trying hard not to judge myself
    and judging myself anyway.
    I remember how she stooped to rub her foot;
    how she smiled a small toothful grin
    when she discovered a half-eaten apple;
    how she talked on endlessly to herself
    and fell asleep leaning against a broken wall
    in an abandoned wooden shed on Second Avenue.
    Tonight when I lie down in the dark
    in my own bed, I want to remember
    that John Clare was so desperately hungry
    after three days and nights without food
    that he finally knelt down, as if in prayer,
    and ate the soft grass of the earth,
    and thought it tasted like fresh bread,
    and judged no one, not even himself,
    and slept peacefully again, like a child.
Excuses
    If only I could begin to sift through the smoke
    rising from the wet streets leading to your small room
    above the warehouse. If only I didn’t have to walk
    to one side of myself, sideways, like a shadow
    growing out of the side of a