Bewildered by so many flowers

I woke up this morning, literally thinking, thinking that I needed to call on Monday and change Sophie's doctor's appointment from Wednesday when she'd have to miss school, to later in June when she's out of school. I thought about Easter, how I had no plans. I wondered what machinations of the brain had happened in the moment before that thought, how I'd gone from sleep to wake to thought to navel.

Navel-gazing -- I've always hated that term, probably because I do a lot of it. I lay in bed this morning, mourning Easter and the fact that I have no plans. I have no plans because I've made no plans, other than the filling of Easter baskets for the children. I won't be the Catholic that goes to church on Easter Sunday, but I will be the person who thinks deeply about the day's meaning in our culture, about the love reborn, about the spring.

Thought lies heavy in the morning over the navel. It depresses the bed beneath it.

There's this:

The Palm at the End of the Mind


After fulfilling everything
one two three he came back again
free, no more prophecy requiring
that he enter the city just this way,
no more set-up treacheries.
It was the day after Easter. He adored
the eggshell litter and the cellophane
caught in the grass. Each door he passed
swung with its own business, all the 
witnesses along his route of pain
again distracted by fear of loss
or hope of gain. It was wonderful
to be a man, bewildered by 
so many flowers, the rush
and ebb of hours, his own
ambiguous gestures--his 
whole heart exposed, then
taking cover.


--Kay Ryan