Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough, because I don't mean these poems only but the unseen unbelievable effort it takes to live the life that goes on between them, I think all the time about invisible work. About the young mother on Welfare I interviewed years ago, who said, "It's hard. You bring him to the park, run rings around yourself keeping him safe, cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces fro dinner, and there's no one to say what a good job you're doing, how you were patient and loving for the thousandth time even though you had a headache." And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself because I am lonely, when all the while, as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried by great winds across the sky, thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night, the slow, unglamorous work of healing, the way worms in the garden tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe and bees ransack this world into being, while owls and poets stalk shadows, our loneliest labors under the moon. There are mothers for everything, and the sea is a mother too, whispering and whispering to us long after we have stopped listening. I stopped and let myself lean a moment, against the blue shoulder of the air. The work of my heart is the work of the world's heart. There is no other art.