Iris Lennox

Tag: Curiosity

  • Triptych: Coming and Going


    Curiosity
    by Iris Lennox

    My little white cat stands at every doorway
    before she enters.
    Perhaps it is fear
    but I think it’s manners,
    and questions that steady her
    upon the threshold.

    Is there anything here
    worth the risk
    it takes to
    leave the safety of the hallway,
    and what will I miss if I do?

    No noise behind her,
    but I sit typing at my desk
    while she
    considers,
    a tiny pink nose weighing her
    options—

    I say hello,
    which changes nothing,
    and now I weigh
    my kindness against her indifference
    as a thread moves across the floor,
    the air purifier
    beckoning it closer.

    My little white cat enters
    not to see me
    but to inspect the thread
    and to
    maybe
    prove the room deserves her
    presence.

    Patience
    by Iris Lennox

    Moose Tracks are easier to eat in a bowl,
    but not nearly as engaging
    as racing to the drips
    spilling over the sides
    of my cone
    and knowing there are
    peanut butter cups gathering
    in the middle.

    Why do the sweetest parts
    hide in the center?

    No one eats M&Ms for the color,
    and you’d embarrass yourself
    if you dared say,
    “the peel is better than the orange.”

    We all know
    some things ask to be opened—
    the banana from the stem,
    the shells at the baseball game,
    the foil around warm chocolate
    you forgot was in your pocket.

    At least,
    for me,
    for today,
    for this moment,

    all I need to do
    is taste sweetness
    with the patience of a toddler,
    unaware of the nature
    of stickiness,

    and save the middle
    for later.

    Father
    by Iris Lennox

    He left before his first Father’s Day
    and mine.

    But at least he left in style,
    with my mother’s car,
    all her cash,
    and glasses
    wrapped in a towel
    because they were
    worth keeping.

    He worked in a bar
    and, from what I hear,
    he lived like he did.

    At least that’s what strangers told me,
    each one carrying
    another adventure.

    Someone up north.
    Another on the west coast.
    Then the east
    before he landed
    in Las Vegas.

    The land of dreams
    won
    and lost
    all in the same night.

    Sounds about right.

    I met my father
    for the first time
    and the last
    one month before he died,

    and every Father’s Day
    I try
    not to care.

    Written in response to three words: curiosity, patience, father.

  • Curiosity


    It begins with a question
    as most things do—
    standing still and not understanding 
    and then,
    why?
    Sometimes,
    how?

    Before me—
    bands of color arranged with conviction,
    clearly the earth has already decided
    what each layer means
    and is in no hurry to explain itself.

    The greatest beauty rarely does.

    Someone wearing a mud-stained hat
    and pants that swoosh
    when he walks
    has named them.
    Kaibab Limestone at the rim.
    Toroweap beneath it.
    Coconino Sandstone—once dunes,
    moved grain by grain
    under a wind that no longer blows.

    This was a desert, then a sea,
    then something in between
    that does not translate cleanly
    into a single word.

    Mystery mingling with majesty.

    I look at the red—
    Hermit Shale, perhaps—
    soft once,
    willing to be shaped,
    now holding its position
    like a memory that has settled
    into fact.

    Further down, older still,
    Vishnu Schist—
    stone that endured heat,
    pressure,
    nothing erased,
    everything contained and displayed—
    a record I cannot read,
    written in a language
    I have not learned. 
    But I recognize this:

    Resilience.

    Two billion years, give or take.
    The number means nothing
    to me
    other than
    "Wow."

    The mind attempts a comparison—
    a human life, a century,
    a civilization rising
    and falling somewhere
    between two lines of rock.

    It does not help.

    Below it all, the river—
    still working.
    Still carrying
    what it has loosened.
    Still, 
    rippling with stories that continue.

    The Colorado meanders. 
    It does not rush
    for anyone's benefit,
    the way an old man has learned
    to slow down.
    It cuts
    because that is what water does
    when given time
    and a way through.

    I find myself asking questions
    that have no immediate use.

    Who first noticed
    that this was once sand?
    Who looked closely enough
    to see ripple marks
    held in stone?

    Who intuited
    that knowing this
    made the view larger
    and more intimate
    at the same time?

    The tree beside me
    leans into its own inquiry,
    roots set in an answer
    that does not require words.

    Its needles move
    in present tense.

    No concern
    for uplift, erosion,
    continental drift—
    that long, slow negotiation
    between plates.

    As for me—

    I want to know
    how something becomes—
    how pressure instructs
    what to keep
    and what to release.

    How absence—
    of water, of time, of witness—
    enters the record.

    Curiosity does not simplify.
    It accumulates.

    Another name.
    Another era.
    Another process
    quietly at work beneath the visible.

    And suddenly
    the canyon is no longer wide.

    It is specific.

    I stand at the edge
    with a growing suspicion—

    that beauty increases
    with knowledge,

    and that time,
    unmeasured and indifferent,
    is not empty distance
    but the most patient artist
    I have ever encountered.

    —Iris Lennox

    This poem appears in The Giving of Weight.