A Basket

All my life I have been gathering things
in a big woven basket
of many colors:

ears of corn
wild plums
leaf mulch;
the meaning of English words and their pronunciation,
as in marcescent and Abert’s Towhee;
fragments of personal history and half-remembered scandals;
a junk drawer of phrases never quite mastered in French,
Japanese, Spanish, Latin, ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Sanskrit,
and Linear B;

how to knot two strings together end-to-end in the garden;
make the dog think it’s her idea, getting off my bed;
calculate the probability of two people in a room
having the same birthday;
coax a forgotten prairie flower to rise up and bloom;
recite the 99 counties of Iowa, left to right, north to south;
bake a loaf of bread, and first grind the wheat;
step a hey-for-three in a fast Fandango;
get its and it’s right, almost every time;
find the dropped screw on the garage floor,
even when it's rolled into the shadow under a tire;
and a few more things.

And I wonder if it will feel like blessing
the world,
the day that I pour out the basket, everything
into a great tumbling and spreading pile
and leave the basket turned on its side
and dance away from it,
humming in a language I never learned
but have always known.

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