Spiritual Mom

Mom got spiritual in her late fifties,
and we really had no patience for all
the forgiveness. It was disconcerting
the way she’d kneel down on the floor
in the middle of the conversation
and hug the dog, whispering affirmations
into its long ear, stroking and folding it
inside out like a pocket. When she emptied
her bank account and gave all the money
to whoever asked, wandering around downtown,
reaching into her purse to offer whatever
her fingers touched first, it was the last
straw. We did an intervention, as they call it
in the field of addiction. We sat her down
and confronted her on her spiritual habit.
The room grew quiet as Mom wept softly,
her eyes searching the floor for what to say.
The silence was terrible—even the dog
cocked its head in that doglike listening way
for some kind of affirmation that Mom
had heard us, and understood, and would cease
her spiritual ways, or at least be in the world
a little more and no longer walking around like
she didn’t have a colon, with one foot in Heaven
and an ear to the hot little mouth of God.

Paul Hostovsky

Going Away

Now as the year turns toward its darkness
the car is packed, and time come to start
driving west. We have lived here
for many years and been more or less content;
now we are going away. That is how
things happen, and how into new places,
among other people, we shall carry
our lives with their peculiar memories
both happy and unhappy but either way
touched with a strange tonality
of what is gone but inalienable, the clear
and level light of a late afternoon
out on the terrace, looking to the mountains,
drinking with friends. Voices and laughter
lifted in still air, in a light
that seemed to paralyze time.
We have had kindness here, and some
unkindness; now we are going on.
Though we are young enough still
And militant enough to be resolved,
Keeping our faces to the front, there is
A moment, after saying all farewells,
when we taste the dry and bitter dust
of everything that we have said and done
for many years, and our mouths are dumb,
and the easy tears will not do. Soon
the north wind will shake the leaves,
the leaves will fall. It may be
never again that we shall see them,
the strangers who stand on the steps,
smiling and waving, before the screen doors
of their suddenly forbidden houses.

Howard Nemerov

Five Wishes

I’d like to have a wild bird
Perch on my hand
A sparrow or
A chickadee
Sudden with her sharp feet
And fragile daring

I’d like to see again
The etchings Rembrandt made
Of stories from the Bible

Though they’re as plain
As Bethlehem’s hay
A radiance fills them

And I would like to visit
The Laguna Indians
And their old church
Made of whitewashed clay
With logs for rafters

And in it their Madonna
To whom they’ve given
A white lace apron

And I would like to learn
To accept my death
To accept our dying
That strange dawn

So deeply scandalous
That God himself wept
At the death of his friend

I’d like to find
The shrine of Chimayo
Where the lame leave crutches

I’d like to go there
With my daughter Katie

It would be enough
Just to be there
Without any miracle.

Anne Porter

You Asked For it

There was a show on TV called
You Asked For It. Viewers would write in
and ask to see unusual things, such as
the world’s greatest slingshot expert.
I watched it every week
on our humble Motorola, although
the only episode I can remember now
is the one about the slingshot expert.

He was a grown man, as I recall,
and he lived in an ordinary place like New Jersey.
At a distance of ten or twenty paces
he could pulverize one marble with another.
He could hit a silver dollar
tossed into the air. He was the kind
of father I wanted to have,
an expert shot, never missing.

And I think of him now, perhaps long dead,
or frail and gray, his gift forgotten.
Just another old guy on a park bench
in Fort Lauderdale, fretting about Medicare,
grateful for the sun on his back, his slingshot
useless in this new world.

George Bilgere

Tamanrasset

On account of my knees
I thought a camel would be appropriate:
I could be helped on
and eventually off again.
Have you ever
got on a camel?
They go down for you
on their own padded knees
and close their eyes while they wait
for you to be set in place,
like priests waiting for all the communicants
to be done, in some high church.
Then they rise, tipping you,
heaving beneath you
but you don’t fall,
you are suddenly
feet up in the air,
carried forward on the long sway
of their stride.
They will carry you across deserts,
across days and datelines
until you arrive one far-off day
in the city of Tamanrasset
where you have been waiting all your life
to go.

Rosalind Brackenbury

"There are no endings in life,
only beginnings."
She did not believe it.
Just yesterday her paycheque had ended,
the year before that her career had ended,
and five years before that,
her relationship with her sister had ended.
There was no pause or restart button,
there was no way to try again in parallel universe Z,
the universe where every moment was a perfect coincidence,
the kind where opportunities happen.
Everything was an ending,
this is gone,
this is gone,
you are gone.
One day older,
a hundred years have passed between then and now
and she has been reading the same sentence.
His face is still fresh in her mind.
She wonders about all the things that never began.

Spring Evening on Blind Mountain

I won’t drink wine tonight
I want to hear what is going on
not in my own head
but all around me.
I sit for hours
outside our house on Blind Mountain.
Below this scrap of yard
across the ragged old pasture,
two horses move
pulling grass into their mouths, tearing up
wildflowers by the roots.
They graze shoulder to shoulder.
Every night they lean together in sleep.
Up here, there is no one
for me to fail.
You are gone.
Our children are sleeping.
I don’t even have to write this down.

Louise Erdrich

When I Turned a Hundred

I wanted to go on an immense journey, to travel night and day into
the unknown until, forgetting my old self, I came into possession
of a new self, one that I might have missed on my previous travels.
But the first step was beyond me. I lay in bed, unable to move,
pondering, as one does at my age, the ways of melancholy—how it
seeps into the spirit, how it disincarnates the will, how it banishes
the senses to the chill of twilight, how even the best and worst
intentions wither in its keep. I kept staring at the ceiling, then suddenly
felt a blast of cold air, and I was gone.

Mark Strand

The Blessing

The room darkened, darkened until
our nakedness became a form of gray;
then the rain came bursting,
and we were sheltered, blessed,
upheld in a world of elements
that held us justified.
In all the love I had felt for you before,
in all that love,
there was no love
like that I felt when the rain began:
dim room, enveloping rush,
the slenderness of your throat,
the blessed slenderness.

John Updike

Happiness

It is fitting that today's poem would be about happiness.



There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon,
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Jane Kenyon

What lips my lips have kissed....

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I spilled the sauce
all over my burger
and I told him about it.
He said, "That's good Shani,
you should write about it."
So I sat down at my computer
and moved my fingers
and words came out and around
and it was tough for me to reconcile
what I was feeling with what was reality
and mostly I do not miss him
but sometimes I do
and I wonder if he will be in future stories
with me and others too.
But he is a pipedream that is broken
and I no longer want him
for he wrapped me around his little finger
and then he dropped me.
The man I love is the man I will marry.
I can love more than one,
that's true,
but to only one will I promise
my heart, my cage,
my pretty little secret,
the way my eyes shine when he says, "I love you."

Here I stand from afar
watching you live your life
and you don't even know it.
I enjoy being a voyeur,
though the area between my legs
remains as dry as the words
exchanged between us this past year.
I wonder how she'll look
and I wonder how you will too,
her and you
something borrowed, something blue.
Don't you know you invited me
the minute you said hello again
and never said goodbye?
I want you to be in love with her,
I know you are.
I wouldn't want you to be heartbroken too.

Valentine

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

Carol Ann Duffy

The Red Wing Church

There’s a tractor in the doorway of a church
in Red Wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud
and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow
sprawls beggarlike behind it on some planks
that make a sort of roadway up the steps.
The steeple’s gone. A black tar-paper scar
that lightning might have made replaces it.
They’ve taken it down to change the house of God
to Homer Johnson’s barn, but it’s still a church,
with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass
and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs
that give the sermon’s topic (reading now
a bird’ s nest and a little broken glass).
The good works of the Lord are all around:
the steeple top is standing in a garden
just up the alley; it’s a hen house now:
fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.
Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,
the stained-glass windows style the mayor’s house,
and the bell’s atop the firehouse in the square.
The cross is only God knows where.

Ted Kooser

In Disgrace

Life is absurd. A man can count on that.
After the great triumph, you’re left standing alone,
Standing on the corner, holding your hat,
Trying to call a friend on your cell phone.
Men my age are arrested for public exposure
Who only needed to take a leak in the bushes.
They didn’t run through the park with no clothes or
Flash anyone. Life is like that. Some parts precious,
Moments of glory, and then the need for urination,
Then a disgrace in men’s eyes, and crying bootlessly.
Here I am, a man of a certain reputation,
But your love, darling, is worth all of that to me.
      Were I an outlaw, branded far and wide, No Good,
      You’d love me just the same. I know you would.

Ramon Montaigne

Adage

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

Music

When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold

And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying

Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country

I’ve never understood
Why this is so

But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow
For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest

And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country

We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams

And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows

Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.

Anne Porter

They say it's the new year
and I believe them.
How could they be lying to me
when the whole world lights up in flames
like clockwork,
first Beijing then New York.

Sometimes I feel they lie to us
about the passage of time.
It is moving fast and slow through me.
Inside I am five, fifteen, twenty
yet outside I am supposed to make money,
buy a house,
be in a movie.

I do not believe them anymore
when they say another year has passed.
Time is arbitrary and so am I.
Who says I am changed?
Who says I am the same?
Today is just another day.

You got engaged
and it came as a shock to my system
even though I fell out of love first.
The thought of you planning a wedding
with someone else and not me took a while
to sink in,
I still wonder if it is me you are visualizing
in that ivory gown,
walking toward you, you
you and only you.
I told you I didn't love you anymore
and that is true,
but still that came as a shock to my system
to know that maybe you loved her too
despite what you told me.
I guess somewhere in my heart of hearts
I'll always wonder what it would be like
to have known life with you.
Alas alternate realities do not coincide with mine
so I'll let it go until you tell me more,
Congratulations,
she'll make a beautiful bride,
I hope you have a happy life.

"I'm trying to get out of your face,"
he whispered to the bus,
"I'm old enough now to work."
The bus rumbled back
some misunderstood grunts
and all the creatures laughed at him.
"Him, independent?" they tittered.
But he didn't let it get to him
as he limped in the dank grey weather,
"Onwards and upwards," he whispered.
Didn't he too have a god in him like the rest of us?
Couldn't he too have a chance?

Everything We Don't Want Them to Know

At eleven, my granddaughter looks like my daughter
did, that slender body, that thin face, the grace

with which she moves. When she visits, she sits
with my daughter; they have hot chocolate together

and talk. The way my granddaughter moves her hands,
the concentration with which she does everything,

knocks me back to the time when I sat with my daughter
at this table and we talked and I watched the grace

with which she moved her hands, the delicate way
she lifted the heavy hair back behind her ear.

My daughter is grown now, married
in a fairy-tale wedding, divorced, something inside

her broken, healing slowly. I look at my granddaughter
and I want to save her, as I was not able

to save my daughter. Nothing is that simple,
all our plans, carefully made, thrown into a cracked

pile by the way love betrays us.


Maria Mazziotti Gillan

It is odd to think that you,
you beautiful creature,
are just a skeleton like the rest of us.

Static

Well, Old Flame, the fire’s out.
I miss you most at the laundromat.
Folding sheets is awkward work
Without your help. My nip and tuck
Can’t quite replace your hands,
And I miss that odd square dance
We did. Still, I’m glad to do without
Those gaudy arguments that wore us out.
I’ve gone over them often
They’ve turned grey. You fade and soften
Like the hackles of my favorite winter shirt.
You’ve been a hard habit to break, Old Heart.
When I feel for you beside me in the dark,
The blankets crackle with bright blue sparks.

Barton Sutter

Good Stories

1.
The one where the preacher’s kid
from Georgia, growing up in a house
with no books but the Bible,
became a great poet.

2.
The one where the great poet
remained faithful to his wife
even after her stroke, devoted
to her for fifty years.

3.
The one where he won the Nobel Prize
and finally got to live by the sea,
fishing every dawn
waist deep in the blue-green water.

4.
The one where, near the end,
he found the love of his life
and left behind the child
he’d never wanted before.

5.
Once there was a man
who failed at everything he tried
but wrote it all down
before he died.

William Greenway