Ideas of Order

Trying to clear the bed to plant the potted blueberries, all root-bound budding craving space, the unfamiliar sunshine made me slothy and sleepy. I pulled weeds and walked across the yard to the bin and back again, wandering away to study shoots of hollyhock. There was no hurry. Soft in the air, the first time since September, squinting into the sun.

The plum blossoms shine, when a week before they mingled with snow. The plum tree grows out on the common verge, tame once, now gone feral. In August, I picked the hard red plums, the ones I could reach from the ground, and mulched them with vinegar to brew a shrub syrup from the fruit.

“–Say it, no ideas but in things—”

Is every woman a flower? Each man a city?

No, I think, though I do love the plums* and the blushing tree, I do not concur. Unlike the poet Williams, I suppose each woman rather the river falls above the city, uncompromising, “a recoil of spray and rainbow mists” her Ideas in the sensing of things.

*This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

—William Carlos Williams,

k.

Author: Kim K. McCrea

Kim K. McCrea earned her BA in English before embarking on a career in technology and public service. Kim won Oregon Writers Colony 2018 essay award, Treefort’s 2017 Wild West Writing Prize, and was named runner-up in Cutbank 2018 Big Sky/Small Prose contest. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Cutbank, Tishman Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere; she is the author of the novel Pandora's Last Gift. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Kim lives in Oregon, where she studies the moon and stars and wanders with her Labrador in the rain. View all posts by Kim K. McCrea