Category: Poetry

Winter Grace

Patricia Fargnoli

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.

I Was Reading a Scientific Article

Margaret Atwood

They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,

each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.

It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate

red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.

I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light

You rest on me and my shoulder holds

your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:

my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colours, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene

its other air
its claws

its paradise rivers

Peace

C.K. Williams

We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who
even knows now what about,
what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another’s craws
like fishbones,
the cadavers of our argument dissected, flayed, but we go on with it, to
bed, and through the night,
feigning sleep, dreaming sleep, hardly sleeping, so precisely never touch-
ing, back to back,
the blanket bridged across us for the wintry air to tunnel down, to keep
us lifting, turning,
through the angry dark that holds us in its cup of pain, the aching dark,
the weary dark,
then, toward dawn, I can’t help it, though justice won’t I know be served,
I pull her to me,
and with such accurate, graceful deftness she rolls to me that we arrive
embracing our entire lengths.

Feeling East

Gail Brandeis

I used to think East
was wherever I pointed my right
hand. I was six, my body
the center of space, the axis
on which directions turned.
When I learned directions
are fixed, that our bodies
move through space
like fish, East became
the sunrise, but, even more so,
the lake. Around Chicago, Lake
Michigan is what is East,
and my body could always feel
its presence. Riding home
from the city, dozing
in the back seat, I always knew
where we were.

Living out West now, I find
directions hazy as smog. My right
hand points to mountains, to palms,
but their presence looms light
in my body. When I get lost,
and I do, I close my eyes
and try to feel East,
tracing sharp shores of memory,
the pull of the lake in my blood,
following the three right turns home.

Dew Light

W.S. Merwin

Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age

Don’t Hesitate

Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Last Night I Was a Child Again in Raleigh

Corey Mesler

Last night I was a child again
in Raleigh. And the
Dorich boys were on the roof
and my sister was
waiting behind the Monopoly
board and it was summer
and the heat was like
a separate personality and
dogs wandered here and
there unhindered by fences or
leashes and I could see
how my future spread out be-
fore me like a relief map
without relief and I only wanted
to fit in again, to find
my family intact, Scamp still
alive and my father,
regal in his recliner, an
ashtray full of cigarettes
near him and I wanted to say,
Father, stop now, stop please,
let this not be dream. Let it
be true that I am a child again
in Raleigh, under the
finest sun anyone had ever seen,
never to be seen again.

Letter to My Husband Far Away

Gillian Wegener

The house is not empty without you.
It thrums and bumps, the walls relax and sigh.
The water heater dutifully comes on, rumbles
with heat, waiting for your shower to start.
How many times today have I heard
your truck in the driveway, the floor creak
with your step, felt your breath against
the back of my neck. At least that often,
I’ve turned to tell you something,
or hand you a piece of cheese or plum,
but it’s two more days until you return.
It’s just me in this room, with this plum,
with this good fortune, with this far-flung love.

On Closing the Apartment of my Grandparents of Blessed Memory

Robyn Sarah

And then I stood for the last time in that room.
The key was in my hand. I held my ground,
and listened to the quiet that was like a sound,
and saw how the long sun of winter afternoon
fell slantwise on the floorboards, making bloom
the grain in the blond wood. (All that they owned
was once contained here.) At the window moaned
a splinter of wind. I would be going soon.

I would be going soon; but first I stood,
hearing the years turn in that emptied place
whose fullness echoed. Whose familiar smell,
of a tranquil life, lived simply, clung like a mood
or a long-loved melody there. A lingering grace.
Then I locked up, and rang the janitor’s bell.

June 15th, 8pm

Marge Piercy

The evening comes slowly over us,
over the cardinal and the wren still
feeding, over the swallows suddenly
swooping to snatch up mosquitoes

over the marsh where the green
sedge lately has a tawny tinge
over two yearlings bending long
necks to nibble hillock bushes

finally separate from their doe
mother. A late hawk is circling
against the sky streaked lavender.
The breeze has quieted, vanished

into leaves that still stir a bit
like a cat turning round before
sleep. Distantly a car passes
and is gone. Night gradually

unrolls from the east where
the ocean slides up and down
the sand leaving seaweed tassels:
a perfect world for moments.