Rebecca Hoogs doesn’t know how to begin, she posts on her Facebook page.
She tries again. Status update: [imagine text box] it’s almost as hard to begin this as it is to begin a poem. She could start by asking Where to begin? in a tone as if talking to herself about a cluttered room or story (please don’t give away the ending). She could ask: you really want to know what I think? And she could ask you take the tone as friendly.
Or she–ok, I–could tell you a story about how I just got back from Rome–but that would sound pompous, self-aggrandizing, my sense of myself as fat and perishable as a ball of mozzarella, leaking its creamy center on the plate and already smelling a little sour at the edges–and how on my next-to-last day in Rome after a month-plus, finding myself unencumbered after a month of cumberment, I finally put on the running shoes which I’d lugged from Seattle and went out during the heat of the day, when all of the smart Italians are taking what we romantatize into a siesta and what they just call a pausa pranzo (lunch pause), and I ran through the Campo dei Fiori, past Giordano Bruno still burning, over the Ponte Sisto, through Trastevere, dodging construction work and piles of cobblestones uprooted like pulled teeth, past the bar at San Callisto where the junkies and garbage men get their espresso–to San Cosimato, and I would like to say I flew up the Rampa di Monte Aureo, the Flight of the Golden Mountain, but I hadn’t run in a month and so didn’t get much off the ground. I probably lumbered a little like a log being lugged up a ramp. And I could tell you about how I ran to visit the Tempietto, designed by Bramante and revered as a tour de force of Renaissance architecture which reminds me–the tour de force, not the temple–that coup de gr??ce comes from the blow delivered to the gladatorially apparently dead. And the tempietto, little temple, reminded me of tempo and I wanted the two words to be related as I do encumber and cucumber. They are not. They do not relate. And I could tell you how, on the top of the Janiculum Hill, at the farthest point in my run, I twisted each ankle once. Symmetry, my friends, is apparently everything.
But we won’t. I’ll tell you that tonight I read Matthea Harvey’s poem, “In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden,” and tried to love my own yard as much as she–or her speaker–did hers, my garden–or my speaker’s–gone to big blowsy, tumbleweedy seed. Everything saying, in its dead way, give me a little blow on the head. Just to be sure.
It’s hot here in Seattle, but the speaker keeps her insides as a cool as a church open only by permission.