SIGHT UNSEEN

The wild chickens of the 9th Ward

To wake without alarm is a great gift. To know the call of the rooster. To see the pink swamp mallow in her early morning beckoning to bees. This kind of waking promotes curiosity. 

Something hit me yesterday. A memory. How when Ron told me that he started that little lemon tree from seed, I thought of Amelia Street ten years ago. I drove a limousine then. I wore a black suit and black shoes and black tie, and some nights I would come home to what I had planted in a spot next to the driveway, once littered with bottles and bags and syringes. A spot that once smelled of neglect and regret. And I would put on my headlamp and look at what I had grown. I would water under the moon.

Sometimes Miss Queenie would pass. It was one or two in the morning, mind you, and Miss Queenie was on her way to something that would connect her. Each of us questioned the after midnight motives of the other and as she passed I would remain. I would stay with what I started from seed. Mostly cucurbits and brassicas back then. Mostly annuals.

I must have said this so often that my friend Metallica Mike would, whenever I spoke to anybody about my garden, say, “He started it from seed, brah.” 

The thing about a spiritual experience is that it cannot be explained. Not by William James. Not by anybody. The happening is, as suggested, experiential, and cannot be understood by the intellect. Vonnegut said everybody should write one poem daily, rhyming, a silly thing if you like, no need to show it to anybody. 

What I might suggest is that sometime in the next month, you find a seed, any seed, and you water this seed, and you set this seed in the sun. And when this seed breaks the surface, you will no longer need to visit the Sistine Chapel, for you will know the old school dap captured by Michelangelo.