Goodness

March 5 2019

The driveway remained unshovelled.

There was something beautiful

about its unbroken surface,

carved by the stiff north wind

that tunnelled between the houses.

Like the smoothly flowing curves

of a finely finished sculpture

you feel compelled to touch.

The soft gradations

of moon-shadow and light.

The stillness

of undisturbed snow,

as if time could be held motionless

in this permanent cold.

But also something

that would offend the neighbourhood,

its pride of ownership

affection for order

impulse to conform.

The bourgeois sensibility

that keeps the grass trimmed

and retrieves the empty garbage bins

before the sun has set.

Where we believe in industriousness

and the virtue of work,

that neatness

is close to Godliness

and timely completion a test.

Straight lines, vertical banks

evenly angled turns,

fully cleared

so the dark asphalt shows.

This is how man carves out his space

from the chaos of winter

and tries to keep nature at bay.

And also how goodness

resurrects itself

from the daily news of cruelty and death

the incessant crush of event.

When circumstance called me away

for reasons I'd rather not say

and I returned to find it shovelled.

And found another sort of beauty

in that nicely manicured space;

in a cold relentless winter

an act of neighbourliness

for which no credit was ever claimed.

We nod politely

while often not knowing their names.

Recognize the dogs

who belong to each of us,

pay our taxes

give to trick-or-treaters.

But persist in turning up our noses

at cookie-cutter houses

and suburban cul-de-sacs,

fondly recalling

a vaguely bohemian past

and aspirations of greatness

we long ago let lapse.

Never imagining

it might be those same bourgeois values

that in the end 
turn out to save us.

Here's a link to the article that inspired this poem: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/telling-reactions-tales-amy-klobuchars-rage/584104/.

Except for the most wonkish political junkie, this will probably be meaningless to anyone who reads it later than the first few month of 2019 (who is Amy Klobuchar, and what were the Kananaugh hearings?!!).

Aside from absolutely loving Caitlin Flanagan's writing (“Irish Alzheimer’s (in which you forget everything but the grudges)” especially!), this is the paragraph that immediately propelled me up out of my easy chair and to the laptop.

When people speak derisively about “Minnesota nice,” it’s because they don’t understand the people and the place. It’s not niceness; it’s a form of radical politeness combined with an unshakeable and largely unexamined sense of obligation to one another. Klobuchar knew her family would survive the divorce when she trudged home from a friend’s house the morning after getting the bad news and saw her mother up and dressed and shoveling the driveway. In Minnesota, a shoveled driveway is both a winter necessity and an unmistakable sign to the community: We are okay in this house. If she had been too broken to do it, someone on that block would have surely done it for her. That, too, would have been an unmistakable sign: We won’t let you go under.

This was one of those poems that pretty much flowed from my keyboard as if taking dictation. Which not only tends to happen with the best poems, but which is an incredibly pleasurable feeling, one that keeps pulling one back to writing like that first heroin high pulls addicts back to try to regain that never reproducible first-ever narcotic rush.