Circling the Waist of Wisdom

Circling the Waist of Wisdom

by Emily Ruth Hazel

1. A New Side of Knowing

All through college, I had a steady date

with the library. Cozy in a carrel, I held words,

studied the chemistry between them,

listened to their music, and learned

how molten meanings form beneath their layers.

Parting the pages of books, entering headfirst

into the turbulent waters of the world’s deepest minds,

I bartered sleep for knowledge. Wisdom

was a separate goal, something I hoped to acquire

at an antique shop decades down the road

after I had earned my senior discount.

I didn’t expect to meet Wisdom in the flesh

during a semester away in Ghana.

Yet there he was, working in an Internet café

I frequented on campus in Legon.

A friendly gatekeeper of all the world’s ideas,

he sold students access by the minute.

If I had pictured Wisdom as a person,

he would have had a waist-long beard

like cotton batting, the stuff of dreams pulled apart.

Instead, he was a young man, clean-cut,

smooth as Swiss chocolate.

His smile, wide as a banana leaf,

always offered a moment of welcome shade.

His given name a poet’s dream,

I wondered what it must be like for Wisdom

to wear that weighty, golden virtue around his neck:

a single blunder or a chain of poor decisions

could turn his name into an oxymoron,

making fools of his parents.

When my flash drive died mid-semester,

all the words I had carefully strung together

scattered like bright beads from a broken string.

Bargaining with technology was as pointless

as my attempts to whittle down

the price of bananas at the market.

(How was I to know there are some things

one simply doesn’t bargain for?)

Wisdom couldn’t replace my lost memory,

but he knew where to find what I needed.

I handed him hundreds of thousands of cedis—

what seemed like my entire college savings—

and true to his word, Wisdom traveled by tro-tro,

kilometers beyond helpful, to buy me a flash drive

that could hold twice as many insights

as I had time left to gather.

2. Seasoned with Wisdom

In Ghana, I cooked in unfamiliar kitchens,

gleaning lessons from friends. I found my way

through the maze of narrow aisles at the market

in search of rice, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, and oil;

discovered which peppers never to buy again;

learned to wait till the plantains’ skins grew black

and trust that the fruit, ready to fry,

would be perfectly sweet inside.

Ghanaians love to season conversations

with proverbs: a joke mixed in with a knowing look,

a warning when somebody stirs the pot.

They say, Where God boils his yam,

that is exactly where the devil roasts his fish.

And doesn’t a pinch of wisdom,

like cayenne pepper, deliver the kick we need?

Doesn’t it, like salt, preserve and bring out

the best in us, and sometimes burn?

A hard saying is the blunt edge of the knife

that spares us from the sharper side of pain,

keeps us from befriending wolves

in shearling jackets, from tripping at the cliff’s edge

and plummeting into the canyon of our appetites,

from running barefoot into the briar patch

of another romance before the berries are ripe.

3. Gold for the Keeping

To get lost is to learn the way. If you want to go

quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

When the desert winds arrive, even the sky is thirsty;

no one can prepare for harmattan by drinking a river.

They are worth more than rubies, these revelations

mined from the mind of an expert guide

or hewn from the rough terrain of a reckless life

or sifted through the swirling, careful spill of years.

How they glitter amidst the ordinary—a vein of insight,

flecks of light floating in a muddy stream.

While keepers of hard-earned wisdom

open their doors to seekers,

they never set out all their treasures

where anyone can see them from the street.

But those who don’t know better

display in their front windows every cheap conclusion

like a surplus of dollar store trinkets.

A simpleton may be mistaken for a sage

if he stays silent, but there is more hope for a fool

than for the speaker of unmeasured words.

The tongue weighs practically nothing,

but few have muscle enough to hold it.

4. Among Family

A man has to hold his mouth open a long time

before a rotisserie chicken flies into it.

When a woman is hungry, she says,

“Cook something for the children so they can eat.”

A nagging spouse is like the constant

dripping of a leaky roof. She thinks,

If he were wise, he would have fixed it the first time.

And he thinks, If she were wise,

she would stop asking and do it herself.

Through the cracks we catch glimpses of each other,

and marriage is like a peanut shell

that must be cracked to see what is inside.

A wise son brings joy to his parents,

a fistful of wildflowers to grace the family table.

A foolish child comes running home,

hungry for trouble, his legs a pair of scissors

puncturing the afternoon ahead of him,

a chorus of matches burning a hole in his pocket.

On greeting his parents, he thrusts out

his fists, demanding that they guess

which one holds a surprise. His fingers uncurl

to reveal what he has brought them,

and both hands are full of disaster.

5. Playing the Fool

Act One: Folly wears a jester’s hat

and stands before the court, clumsily juggling

swords and glass goblets.

Intermission: by the time the fool has learned

the game, the players have dispersed.

Act Two: Folly, in a dunce cap,

faces the blackboard, grasping a stub of chalk,

dragging out the dusty words,

I will not be what I am, I will not be what I am…

6. The Fool’s Apprentice

An over-the-counter remedy for foolishness,

wisdom’s potency, derived from

the root of experience, is easier to swallow

packed into the colorful capsule of a metaphor.

No one with any sense jumps in with both feet

to test the water’s depth.

Only fools know everything;

a wise driver admits to having blind spots.

Pity the fool’s apprentice who pulls out in traffic

in front of the master fool gunning it

toward rash and stupid schemes.

Better to meet a bear robbed of her cubs

than to cross a fool hellbent on folly.

A fool won’t flirt with wisdom,

though wisdom will deign to chase a fool.

7. In Hindsight

Wisdom is the often forgotten umbrella.

Sometimes I even choose to leave it dangling

from a doorknob, ignoring the slim prediction

of rain, then cursing my sheer foolishness

when the sky bottoms out.

I am the keeper of a junkyard of regrets,

decisions that have crashed or rusted through—

their engines and wheels, whatever healthy organs

they had, long since harvested.

This is how the rest of us wax wise:

by surveying the wreckage, salvaging

any usable parts, and selling as scrap metal

all that remains, hoping it will be recycled.

8. More Than a Mouthful

Wisdom is at home in the company of listeners

while the know-it-all lives lonely

in a house without a door, trapped within

the walls of pride he has built around himself.

The counsel of the wise is graciously given

and nourishing to many, but starving fools refuse it,

their stomachs stuffed with self-importance,

no room left for wisdom. Consumed by

their own lips, it is the thoughtless who cover their ears

and chew the air, mouths full of empty words.

Unlike the taste of what we know,

if proverbs are not offered as after-dinner mints

that melt away immediately, their pastel flavor

predictably sweet—can the wisdom of God

be contained in a shallow, glass bowl

into which we dip a spoon in passing?

If God’s words are instead as sticky

as Ghanaian toffee, can they be eaten

without being chewed? Perhaps they are meant

to make our jaws work, quiet us a moment,

keep us from filling all the space between us

with the sound of our own talking.

9. How Wide Around

Wisdom is like a baobab tree

spreading its roots and branches,

taking hold of both the soil and the sky.

The ancient trunk of wisdom is a fortress

we stretch to embrace; no one person’s arms

can wrap themselves around it.

10. Wearing Wisdom

What if God’s thoughts hide from human intellect

but reveal themselves to the heart?

What if our own wisdom is only in our minds,

not sewn into the linings of our lives?

What if the threads we wear

as we parade past all the spectators

are the same line of apparel made by the tailors

who fashioned the Emperor’s new clothes?

And what if we are also the people in the crowd,

each of us shamed into silence,

afraid that we ourselves will be exposed,

declared unfit for whatever positions we hold?

I reimagine the tale as it might be told

in Ghana, the Asantehene guaranteed the finest

kente cloth by master weavers:

the storyteller looks at me, declares,

When a naked person promises you cloth,

beware. A stitcher of lies will fit you for

a gorgeous gown woven out of air.

At the market in Accra, I fingered

dozens of fabrics, admiring eye-catching

patterns, swooning over the vibrant colors.

Later came the embarrassment of measurements

taken by strangers, then the excitement of seeing

my own designs take shape as wearable art.

Clothed in the work of their hands,

when I saw my reflection, I felt a new kinship

with the women around me, reminded

how much of what I’ve worn had meaning

to somebody else before it became my own.

Beneath the batik, close to my skin,

a slip of memory: my sister and I at a thrift shop

our mother used to take us to

in the basement of an old stone church.

When I was little, I would weasel my way

into the center of each round clothing rack,

disappear in a forest of dresses and pants.

Tucked in the far corner of the shop, beyond

a set of saloon doors, was a tiny fitting room.

Though I haven’t been back there in decades,

I can see myself now, standing in my stocking feet,

ducking down behind the swinging doors.

I am trying on the hand-me-down ways of wisdom,

slipping them over my head, blindly

fumbling for the armholes. There—

another transformation. Wearing a proverb

I haven’t committed to keeping,

again I am made new, and I am everyone

before me, all their stories echoing in the glass,

the tag’s plastic stem still poking me

from somewhere inside as I turn slowly,

studying myself from other angles

in the mirror of the word.