DESIGNER
Designer jeans – now that’s a concept.
Wear them in the rugged
The rugged outdoors.
Where the first designer had more fun
Than we can wrap our mortal minds around.
Old question: how can one not believe
Looking at the design, harmonic, extravagant?
Colors blending and clashing, flamboyant.
Scents beyond Chanel, Tabu and Old Spice.
Powder-puff bunny tails, scrawny-necked turkeys
And three graceful wary deer I couldn’t have put together
No, not in a million years – or a day.
A-theist? No-God. And this body, this mind
Can say, “it’s happenstance.
Accident of nature?”
Oh give me a home in the psalms, or in Job.
“What is man?” “Where
were you when..?”
Designer, architect, arborist, weaver,
Planner, even, of designer jeans.
Marilyn Jaeger, August 22, 2014, after a country walk
Working definition of art: we revisit the artifact because--more than the lure of a midnight snack--we are both awestruck and beholden to nourish our soul. And by 'our', we have to admit we are not Major Tom (aesthetic as he is 'drawn') floating in a tin can, far above the earth... David Bowie's "Space Oddity" is indisputably art, partly because we weep for his disconnect with design.
ReplyDeleteYour poem, Mom, inspires with each read. Philosophers must contemplate the divinity and what we make of banality in designer jeans. I've been too modest in my 47 years to ever consider myself a designer of anything--yes, that ROC in the backyard was fun to construct, and rhymes here and there... I have absolute zero 'pendence' (inclination or slope) to lord over anything. But in the cognizance of Eden, all of us pre-Calvary are indicted: all of us try to knit our own genes. Your poem, maternally, nurtures my rather raw efforts in the past couple days:
Differences in brain and mind,
eyesight and dreams,
pain and sorrow,
molecular movement and time,
nod-knowing yesterday and tomorrow,
let alone the search for rhyme:
we manifest inexorable design.
Maybe it’s Singer’s
‘Something is There’,
or Aquinas proofs which resign
the unmoved mover as cause-before-care
regardless of wisdom and signs.
If in our genes we can tailor-fit
(lo and behold) jeans,
we should be gods
to our own apparel! We’ll posit,
throw measures to pendence, make odds
and nude bids to sell the new it.
If we’re Gods to our jeans, then
they are bound to
be unruly beings, able to
sort out their own kith and ken,
despots decrying designs and threads due;
needing to knit the image again.
My mother poses the difference
as she has been design-
ated to do: “Behold
the birds of the air”—prescience
attends how their migratory flights unfold
(radars are of no consequence),
and thereby can fly with no bet
to deny. They may
not sing to Bach and his
Air for Suite #3 in D Major, yet
God Almighty don’t we! Pitch a perfect this:
we design hopes we hardly get.