Giving
Picasso, Bouquet with Hands
For You Today
by Jessica Greenbaum
Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper,
but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the daily
herald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come: thwash,
the next day another, an example of everything that gets done
in the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow
that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case,
the strange October weather warming them. There were the
conclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There was
pain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was my
ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged
to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being alive
at the turn of the twenty-first century, here’s how they ring out
against each other, here’s how one brings out the sense of
another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.
Giving
Greenbaum’s poem opens by cataloging the current details of a day – the sound of a jackhammer, a view out the window perhaps (happier than a Hopper painting) the newspaper. Then there’s the felt “volta” or turn in the poem to crocuses, growing (getting something done in the dark) whether under snow or October weather. Here the poem shifts from present to past tense, which suggests a passage of day to day time. And out of that sweep of time comes a surge of intention to give:
. . . Of course there was my / ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged / to make sense.
To give someone you love, the world, is impossible, but what is immediately possible is to share the details of the day, with its annoyances and beauties, the sensations of being alive here and now. The ordinary details that compose our lives can also include something as profound as the yellow eruption from darkness of a crocus against a fathomless blue sky. More gift worthy, the poet seems to conclude, than the gift of the world.
Have you gifted someone something humble that was in fact extraordinary?
