When Sealey Challenge Meets Saturday

Is it challenge failed? Or something else?

Apologies to AR Ammons.

I did not read your book. I was at the library for 30 minutes. My children were in the other room looking for me.

I envy how you’re able to ponder the mountains, wax philosophical. You go on lots of walks.

I like your poem “Hymn.” And your poem “Sunday at McDonald’s,” which made me feel you might understand me:

In the bleak land of foreverness no
one lives but only, crushed and buffeted,
now: now, now, now every star glints

perishing while now slides under and
away, slippery as light, time-vapor:
what can butterflies do or clear-eyed

babies gumming french fries—nature
is holding them, somehow, veering them
off into growth holdings [. . .]

Then I drove my teen and her friend to a beach party and back. I wanted to stay with you.

Do you know what it’s like to be with children? Like, not near them, distant and pensive, but with them, all day long? If there was a child with you on your walks would you write down every word they said, and it would be a school of philosophy? Not nettles crowding your mind with noise, not mindless sounds you felt yourself slowly abdicating your duty to?

Instead I drove to the grocery store and wrote this in the parking lot.

I thought, if I bring them food they love, they’ll be happy, and then I’ll be happy.

I thought about you as I chopped carrots and celery to make soup for my husband, who has a cold. Iykyk. (LOL. How could you know?)

It’s the future tense that I can’t get past. To be present—is this a luxury, or just a choice I can’t make for fear of some opportunity cost? The coin bank of things undone, like laundry, or mopping the floor.