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(Joy’s Poem)
29.08
Friday
When I was a lanky little girl, that is to say a teenager (three long years ago), I won a scholarship to France for a half year, any incidentals to be covered by my grandmother—she of the egg slicer, the eponymous egg slicer—with the notion to improve my French. I found myself on many wrong sides of many escalators, and heard again and again, Attention, meant to shock me out of my reverie, make me hop to the left or the right (I still refuse to remember the correct side). I found myself shrinking at the word, jolting at it, even. It meant I was in the wrong place. The ridges on the escalator brought to mind the wires of the kitchen utensil. I still try to do as the French do, and faire attention.
One translates faire as to make or to do, interchangeably, and so I make it and I do it (attention) in much the same way: interchangeably. Then it is an infinite and regenerative thing. I try not to pay it (attention). Or even worse, split it, as a bill. I try.
At first it’s just in two it splits, like a wire through clay. Imagine there are two wooden blocks knotted at the end of this wire, to be cupped in palms for leverage, as fingers grasp and pull tighter against the heft of wet clay. Imagine a spy movie, a wire around a neck from behind, yanked for the requisite amount of time. But it is just in two it is split. One time, down the middle. And you think, this might be okay. I can focus on two things at once. But people are wont to hone their tools, and so we progress. A grandmother, specifically mine, has a device to slice a hardboiled egg. It’s made of cheap plastic, with rows of wires you press over and through the round egg to split it into a half-dozen 2D versions of yourself. Itself, I mean. Itself. Sometimes I give up. I lay and imagine myself sliced this way, as an egg. And then we make more progress, and so, if we are to continue with items found in a grandparent’s house, then I think of a silver machine that a cut of red meat goes into and comes out pink, as a mince.
I used to think to feel like this was to be young, this pain of fragmenting. But year on year, the fragmentation steadily rises, like the price of eggs, as mentioned on the internet on too many consecutive days. (I pause, briefly consider titling this poem The Slice of Eggs These Days then don’t. Why?)
A call to attention
I’m calling you now
Not on the phone
Off your phone (imperative)
It’s cacophonous now
I know
Of all the tools you are offered in life, which ones will you pick up and use? My grandmother gave me the one that could take me apart (egg slicer), but also the one that could make me whole again (poetry). She often gifted my mother—and downstream from her, me—the work of her favourite poet Mary Oliver (‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one and precious life?’ / ‘Attention is the beginning of devotion’) and I believe I was named Joy so I would write like her, O, joy! O, joyous experience of being alive! Am I being sarcastic right now? Surprisingly no. I love her. I’m not sure if it’s cool to like a poet after someone makes merch out of their most famous line, or uses it as fodder for a LinkedIn post. But I don’t care! I do! And always will. Love her and the way she pays attention, to the streams and the bulrushes and other things I don’t care about. Maybe it’s because of a lifetime of reading her I want to faire attention, as the French do, make it whole, as a round hard egg, sitting on a thatch of grass in a beam of sunlight that has broken miraculously through dense treetops. Ready to be picked up and offered to the world, as one complete thing. The only way I know how to say I still love you (world), and I always will.
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