Thirty Six

It’s nice sometimes
to open up the heart a little
and let some hurt come in.
It proves you’re still alive.

If nothing else
it says to you–
clear as a high hill air,
uncomfortable
as diving through cold water–

I’m here.
However wretchedly I feel,
I feel.

I’m not sure
why we cannot shake
the old loves
from our minds.
It must be that
we build on memory
and make them more
than what they were.
And is the manufacture
just a safe device
for closing up the wall?

I do remember.
the only fuzzy circumstance
is sometimes where and how.
Why, I know.

It happens
just because we need
to want and to be
wanted, too,
when love is here or gone
to lie down in the darkness

and listen to the warm.

—Rod McKuen

After a while

After a while you learn 
the subtle difference between 
holding a hand and chaining a soul 
and you learn 
that love doesn’t mean leaning 
and company doesn’t always mean security. 
And you begin to learn 
that kisses aren’t contracts 
and presents aren’t promises 
and you begin to accept your defeats 
with your head up and your eyes ahead
with the grace of woman, 
not the grief of a child 
and you learn 
to build all your roads on today 
because tomorrow’s ground is 
too uncertain for plans 
and futures have a way of falling down 
in mid-flight. 
After a while you learn 
that even sunshine burns 
if you get too much 
so you plant your own garden 
and decorate your own soul 
instead of waiting for someone 
to bring you flowers. 
And you learn that you really can endure 
you really are strong 
you really do have worth 
and you learn 
and you learn 
with every goodbye, you learn…

—Veronica Shoffstall

In The Secular Night by Margaret Atwood

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It’s two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it’s baby lima beans.
It’s necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You’d be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn’t now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone’s been run over.
The century grinds on.

(via cankerbloxxom)

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light—
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

—Billy Collins

ask me

some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes i have made. ask me whether
what i have done is my life. others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

i will listen to what you say.
you and i can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. we know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
what the river says, that is what I say.

—william stafford

From an Atlas of the Difficult World

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

—Adrienne Rich

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

joshdivision:

talking to you
is like navigating a raging flood
whilst being pursued by a large underwater monster
and being constantly hugged
by tiny rabbits
wearing matching bows

talking to you
is like being inside a pillow fort
and the power is out
and it’s raining outside
and being unsure whether anyone else in the world is even alive anymore
and not caring

i wish i could turn you into an abstract notion
and carry you around in my mind

You want poetry? Read this guy’s poetry.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


— Mary Oliver

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

—W. S. Merwin

A Week in the Life of the Ethnically Indeterminate

semisetadrift:

Monday
Sitting in MacDonalds on 103rd & 3rd
I notice a couple staring at me
and hear them say Indian.
They walk towards me.
The woman has white skin,
blond hair, blue eyes.
The man has ebony skin, 
black hair, brown eyes.
Excuse me, says the woman, 
we were wondering 
where you were from.
Yeah, says the man
because you look like 
our people.
I look at the whiteness
and the blackness,
wondering who their people are.
We’re Puerto Rican, they say
and walk away. 

Tuesday
Walking to the store 
in Crown Heights I see
an African-American man
sitting behind a table
selling incense and oils 
he calls out sister, hey sister, 
baby and then makes a noise 
like he’s calling a cat.
I don’t respond.
On the way back 
from the store
he calls out, mira, mira, 
hey baby, 
in any language, 
English, Feline or Spanish 
I don’t respond. 

Wednesday
I am buying lunch 
at the falafel stand
on 68th and Lex
and the man serving me asks,
you from Morocco?
No, I say, Cyprus. 
Where’s Cyprus? he asks.
Above Egypt
to the left of Israel
and below Turkey.
Oh, he says looking blank.
How much for the falafel, I ask?
For you three dollars.
For Americans three fifty.
I go to pay and another man
stares hard into my face
and says, Are you a Jewish chick?
No, I say, just leave me alone.
I know who you are, he screams.
I know who you are.
You’re just a nigger from Harlem,
passing for white
with a phony accent.
Nigger, he repeats
as I walk away. 

Thursday
My boss calls me up.
I have a funny question 
to ask you, he says.
When you fill out forms 
what do you write for ethnicity?
I check other, I say.
Well, I have to fill out this form
and it doesn’t have other.
We look really bad on paper.
all the positions of power are white
and all the support staff are black.
Could you be Asian? 

Friday
I am with my Indian immigration lawyer.
Do you mind if I ask you 
a personal question, he says.
Go ahead, I say, thinking 
he is going to ask me 
how I’ve reached my mid thirties 
and have never been married.
But instead he says, 
I know you’re a Cypriot 
from London
but do you have 
any Indian blood in you? 
There are so many 
mixed marriages these days
and you look like the offspring. 

Saturday
I am at a conference
and a European-American woman
looks at me excitedly 
as though she’s just won a prize.
Oh, I know where you’re from, she says
my daughter-in-law is an Indian 
with a British accent too.
I’m not Indian, I say.
She continues to not see me
as she concentrates on 
hiding her anger 
for not winning the trophy
in her self-imposed
guess the ethnicity competition
and then she walks away. 

Sunday
I go to lunch at the home of a friend
whose family are Africans of the diaspora. 
They don’t ask me where I’m from.
Later, my friend tells me,
They’ve decided you’re
a biracial Jamaican. 

That evening,
I’m at a poetry reading
and an African-American woman
crosses the room 
to ask me this question,
Are you the colonized
or the colonizer?
What do you think, I ask.
You could be both, she responds
and walks away.

Elena Georgiou

Antilamentation

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

—Dorianne Laux

The First Move

When the grids you slot them into dissolve,
think how people always surprise you.
Always better, kinder, than you allowed.
Think how each suffers as much and more than you.

Think how you love the things of this world.
The birds, the stone, the flowers, the water.
Everything that cannot love you back.
How easy to love the wordless wild and dead.

Your father said he believed in mercy,
not forgiveness. You never forgave him.
Think how the heart hardens in its cage,
repeating its moves. You must learn how to love.

— Mark Roper (via humyara)