by Sigrid E. Mortensen
© 2023
The fixer.
The tinkerer.
The repairman.
The fiddler.
The meddler.
The taker-apart.
The reassembler.
The one with the calm connection
The perspective
The insights
The inspired words
That ease what’s broken.
The one who hears the noises
The aches
The screeching cries, and who
By disassembling
Cleaning
Clearing
And piecing back together
Eases the fears
The angers
The frustrations
The disappointments
That had been clogging up the gears.
So skilled was I
That I would oil every squeak
Even before it began
Spending more
And more of my time
Anticipating every soreness
Circumventing every pain.
And yet
My eyes grow cloudy
And my fingers clumsy
And I can no longer fix
Every complaint.
Despite my best efforts
The noises return
And scream fix me!
Fix me!
Fix me!
I yearn to help
And yet
I begin to understand
As my ability wanes
And my maturity waxes
That not every break
Is meant to be mended,
That not every intervention
Is a gift,
That sometimes the grit in the cog
Must work its way through
On its own,
That part of the grand design
Of this glorious machine
Is to allow the dirt in
And by sticking the gears
And jamming the pulleys
New pathways are grazed and gouged and formed
And beautiful new mechanisms
Are born.
The oyster’s sand is that from which the
Precious grows.
If I am brutally honest
I also nod to those times
When by taking it apart
I broke it more
Made it worse
Deepened the sorrow
Foiled my best intentions.
So finally
I retire
Step back
Look from a distance
And begin to see beauty in the rusty patches
Hear harmony in the creaks and groans
Notice the miracle of new life
Spontaneously sprung
From the remnants of what I once fled,
From what I once worked
So hard
To avoid,
From the ravages of time
And life
And entropy
And wrong turns
And missed opportunities
And crossed wires
And misfires
And parts worn through with age.
These are no longer my job to salvage
Indeed
Decay is the fertile ground
That feeds the desire
For scrapping the dysfunctional
For releasing old designs
For beginning
Finally
Anew.