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Adding It Up
By Philip Booth
My mind’s eye opens before
the light gets up. I
lie awake in the small dark,
figuring payments, or how
to scrape paint; I count
rich women I didn’t marry.
I measure bicycle miles
I pedaled last Thursday
to take off weight; I give some
passing thought to the point
that if I hadn’t turned poet
I might well be some other
sort of accountant. Before
the sun reports its own weather
my mind is openly at it:
I chart my annual rainfall,
or how I’ll plant seed if
I live to be fifty. I look up
words like “bilateral symmetry”
in my mind’s dictionary; I consider
the bivalve mollusk, re-pick
last summer’s mussels on Condon Point,
preview the next red tide, and
hold my breath: I listen hard
to how my heart valves are doing.
I try not to get going
too early: bladder permitting,
I mean to stay in bed until six:
I think in spirals, building
horizon pyramids, yielding to
no man’s flag but my own.
I think a lot of Saul Steinberg:
I play touch football on one leg,
I seesaw on the old cliff, trying
to balance things out: Job,
wife, children, myself.
My mind’s eye opens before
my body is ready for its
first duty: cleaning up after
and old-maid Basset in heat.
That, too, I inventory:
the Puritan strain will out,
even at
This site is dedicated to how one should take care of the soil. Coming soon will be discussions on how the individual can compost at home, use organic rather than man-made chemicals to feed the soil, and foster the environment of the soil to produce a synergistic relationship between the microorganisms of the soil and the plants they host.