CONSIDERING HAPPINESS, BY CATHERINE STAPLES

Considering Happiness

Catherine Staples

                                                                                   

There’s no scoop in the grain bin

with which to measure a modest contentment,

no Arden, no unmapped hundred-acre wood.

Here there are city parks and places under bridges,

shanties where you dare not sleep. But no

leveling green wood for the dispossessed.

Still if fortune keeps your feet from the fire,

unsteadily, but with luck, you might

like the divorced Hicks street mother of three

raise chickens in a backyard hutch, petition

the old Italian men for tips on growing

winter chard, kale, & beets in a cold frame.

Twenty-somethings debate coffee grounds in compost

and heirloom seeds while the construction worker

in the metal-tipped boots has gone quiet,

hands deep in his pockets; we cannot know

why he’s here, but we’re hearing everything

from the girl who wants her loans forgiven

because the government bailed out the banks.

And she won’t vote for Obama again,

she may not vote at all. She favors anarchy.

Shall I distract her with the mystery of the red bees

of Red Hook or tell her about the friend of a friend

who farms all year down by the naval yard—

an old asphalt play lot gone heady with cornstalks,

sunflowers, every blessed vegetable under the sun

and the neighborhood boys busy every afternoon.

Shall I choose amity over rancor or retreat

while advancing and speak riddles like Feste,

“The better for my foes and the worse

for my friends” or just be plain and say

that for me contentment is three children

under the same roof, the kettle whistling, a book

tipped on its side, splayed open to the left off page

and waiting for the next conversation to begin. 

_____________________________

About "Finding Happiness," Catherine Staples writes

The Wallace Stevens question of finding “what will suffice” led me to thinking about a line from As You Like It: “some settled low content” and about the pastoral notion that one might make do with exile in the wood of Arden. But when you live in the city, how can you access the pastoral, the healing green? In terms of setting, I drew upon my brother Paul’s New York—from under the arc of the Brooklyn Bridge to the varied neighborhoods where long wandering bike rides took us.