handonmystupidheart - Tumblr blog

[handonmystupidheart]

April 17, 2024: You Belong to the World, Carrie Fountain

You Belong to the World Carrie Fountain

as do your children, as does your husband. It’s strange even now to understand that you are a mother and a wife, that these gifts were given to you and that you received them, fond as you’ve always been of declining invitations. You belong to the world. The hands that put a peach tree into the earth exactly where the last one died in the freeze belong to the world and will someday feed it again, differently, your body will become food again for something, just as it did so humorously when you became a mother, hungry beings clamoring at your breast, born as they’d been with the bodily passion for survival that is our kind’s one common feature. You belong to the world, animal. Deal with it. Even as the great abstractions come to take you away, the regrets, the distractions, you can at any second come back to the world to which you belong, the world you never left, won’t ever leave, cells forever, forever going through their changes, as they have been since you were less than anything, simple information born inside your own mother’s newborn body, itself made from the stuff your grandmother carried within hers when at twelve she packed her belongings and left the Scottish island she’d known—all she’d ever known—on a ship bound for Ellis Island, carrying within her your mother, you, the great human future that dwells now inside the bodies of your children, the young, who, like you, belong to the world.

--

Also by Carrie Fountain: Will You?

More like this: -> The World Has Need of You, Ellen Bass -> Why I’m Here, Jacqueline Berger -> from Burial, Ross Gay -> Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be, Ross Gay

Today in:

2023: Mammogram Call Back with Ultra Sound, Ellen Bass 2022: Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness, Franny Choi 2021: Weather, Claudia Rankine 2020: The Understudy, Bridget Lowe 2019: Against Dying, Kaveh Akbar 2018: Close Out Sale, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz 2017: Things That Have Changed Since You Died, Laura Kasischke 2016: Percy, Waiting for Ricky, Mary Oliver 2015: My Heart, Kim Addonizio 2014: My Skeleton, Jane Hirshfield 2013: Catch a Body, Oliver Bendorf 2012: No, Mark Doty 2011: from Narrative: Ali, Elizabeth Alexander 2010: Baseball Canto, Lawrence Ferlinghetti 2009: Nothing but winter in my cup, Alice George 2008: Poppies in October, Sylvia Plath 2007: I Imagine The Gods, Jack Gilbert 2006: An Offer Received In This Morning’s Mail, Amy Gerstler 2005: The Last Poem In The World, Hayden Carruth

[handonmystupidheart]

This for That

by Ron Padgett

What will I have for breakfast? I wish I had some plums like the ones in Williams’s poem. He apologized to his wife for eating them but what he did not do was apologize to those who would read his poem and also not be able to eat them. That is why I like his poem when I am not hungry. Right now I do not like him or his poem. This is just to say that.

[handonmystupidheart]

April 16, 2024: Love Comes Quietly, Robert Creeley

Love Comes Quietly Robert Creeley

Love comes quietly, finally, drops about me, on me, in the old ways.

What did I know thinking myself able to go alone all the way.

--

Also by Robert Creeley: Oh

Today in:

2023: After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning, Leila Chatti 2022: Will You?, Carrie Fountain 2021: After Graduate School, Valencia Robin 2020: in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say, Danez Smith 2019: from The Invention of Streetlights 2018: Returning, Tami Haaland 2017: An Ordinary Composure, James L. White 2016: Verge, Mark Doty 2015: Reasons to Survive November, Tony Hoagland 2014: Unhappy Hour, Richard Siken 2013: Just Once, Anne Sexton 2012: Talk, Noelle Kocot 2011: Why They Went, Elizabeth Bradfield 2010: Anxiety, Frank O’Hara 2009: The Continuous Life, Mark Strand 2008: An old story, Bob Hicok 2007: you can’t be a star in the sky without holy fire, Frank X. Gaspar 2006: For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu, A.M. Klein 2005: Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem, Bob Hicok

[handonmystupidheart]

LOVE POEM, WITH BIRDS

They are your other flame. Your world

begins and ends with the dawn chorus,

a plaint of saw-whet owl, and in between,

the seven different neotropical warblers

you will see on your walk to the mailbox.

It takes a while. I know now not to worry.

Once I resented your wandering eye that 

flew away mid-sentence, chasing any raft

of swallows. I knew, as we sat on the porch 

unwinding the cares of our days, you were 

listening to me through a fine mesh of oriole,

towhee, flycatcher. I said it was like kissing

through a screen door: You’re not all here.

But who could be more present than a man

with the patience of sycamores, showing me

the hummingbird’s nest you’ve spied so high 

in a tree, my mortal eye can barely make out 

the lichen-dabbed knot on an elbow of branch.

You will know the day her nestlings leave it.

The wonder is that such an eye, that lets not

even the smallest sparrow fall from notice,

beholds me also. That I might walk the currents

of our days with red and golden feathers

in my hair, my plain tongue laced with music.

That we, the birds and I, may be text and

illumination in your book of common prayer.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER

[handonmystupidheart]

April 8, 2024: As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse, Billy Collins

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse Billy Collins

I pick an orange from a wicker basket and place it on the table to represent the sun. Then down at the other end a blue and white marble becomes the earth and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet, open a bottle of wine, then I sit in a ladder-back chair, a benevolent god presiding over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing a homemade canticle of thanks for this perfect little arrangement, for not making the earth too hot or cold not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees and the owl become possible, not to mention the rolling wave, the play of clouds, geese in flight, and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again and give thanks for the trout, the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows, as sun and earth and moon circle one another in their impeccable orbits and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

--

Also: Seeing the Eclipse in Maine, Robert Bly

Enjoy today's eclipse, North America!

More space-related poems.

Today in:

2023: Neither Time Nor Grief is a Flat Circle, Christina Olson 2022: Pippi Longstocking, Sandra Simonds 2021: Waking After the Surgery, Leila Chatti 2020: Gutbucket, Kevin Young 2019: Insomnia, Linda Pastan 2018: How Many Nights, Galway Kinnell 2017: The Little Book of Hand Shadows, Deborah Digges 2016: Now I Pray, Kathy Engel 2015: Why I’m Here, Jacqueline Berger 2014: Snow, Aldo, Kate DiCamillo 2013: from The Escape, Philip Levine 2012: Thirst, Mary Oliver 2011: Getting Away with It, Jack Gilbert 2010: *turning, Annie Guthrie 2009: I Don’t Fear Death, Sandra Beasley 2008: The Dover Bitch, Anthony Hecht 2007: Death Comes To Me Again, A Girl, Dorianne Laux 2006: Up Jumped Spring, Al Young 2005: Old Women in Eliot Poems, David Wright

[handonmystupidheart]

April 5, 2024: May 5, 2020, John Okrent

May 5, 2020 John Okrent

It is beautiful to be glad to see a person every time you see them, as I was to see Juan, the maintenance man, with whom it was always the same brotherly greeting—each of us thumping a fist over his heart and grinning, as though we shared a joke, or bread. I barely knew him. Evenings in clinic, me finishing my work, him beginning his— fluorescence softening in the early dark. He wasn't even fifty, had four grandchildren, fixed what was broken, cleaned for us, caught the virus, and died on his couch last weekend. And what right have I to write this poem, who will not see him in his uniform of ashes, only remember him, in his Seahawks cap, and far from sick, locking up after me, turning up his music.

--

More like this:

Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry, Jericho Brown

When people say, “we have made it through worse before”, Clint Smith

Today in:

2023: Homeric Hymn, A.E. Stallings 2022: The Mower, Philip Larkin 2021: When people say, “we have made it through worse before”, Clint Smith 2020: Untitled, James Baldwin 2019: To Yahweh, Tina Kelley 2018: from how many of us have them?, Danez Smith 2017: Sad Dictionary, Richard Siken 2016: Lucia, Ravi Shankar 2015: Overjoyed, Ada Limón 2014: Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing, Margaret Atwood 2013: Anniversary, Cecilia Woloch 2012: Poem for Jack Spicer, Matthew Zapruder 2011: Now comes the long blue cold, Mary Oliver 2010: Jackie Robinson, Lucille Clifton 2009: In the Nursing Home, Jane Kenyon 2008: To the Couple Lingering on the Doorstep, Deborah Landau 2007: White Apples, Donald Hall 2006: Late Confession, Gary Soto 2005: Steps, Frank O’Hara

[handonmystupidheart]

A poem by Robert Hillyer

Early in the Morning

Early in the morning Of a lovely summer day, As they lowered the bright awning At the outdoor café, I was breakfasting on croissants And café au lait Under greenery like scenery, Rue François Premier. They were hosing the hot pavement With a dash of flashing spray And a smell of summer showers When the dust is drenched away, Under greenery like scenery, Rue François Premier. I was twenty and a lover And in Paradise to stay, Very early in the morning Of a lovely summer day.

Robert Hillyer (1895-1961)

Image: Le Café Mode, 24, rue François 1er, Paris

[handonmystupidheart]

A poem by Seamus Heaney

In Iowa

In Iowa once, among the Mennonites In a slathering blizzard, conveyed all afternoon Through sleet-milt pelting hard against the windscreen And a wiper’s strong absolving slumps and flits,

I saw, abandoned in the open gap Of a field where wilted cornstalks flagged the snow, A mowing machine. Snow brimmed its iron seat, Heaped each spoked wheel with a thick white brow,

And took the shine off oil in the black-toothed gears. Verily I came forth from that wilderness As one unbaptized who had known darkness At the third hour and the veil in tatters.

In Iowa once. In the slush and rush and hiss Not of parted but as of rising water.

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

[handonmystupidheart]

never before joined across the cold airless terror of space…

[handonmystupidheart]

Langston Hughes, “Litany.” Selected poems of Langston Hughes

[handonmystupidheart]

Maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. I don’t know. Maybe then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away⸺you know?⸺from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. But then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters and all that blood.

James Baldwin  This morning, this evening, so soon  

[handonmystupidheart]

- Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited (1945)

[handonmystupidheart]

June Jordan, “Resolution #1,003.” Haruko/Love Poems

[handonmystupidheart]

[handonmystupidheart]

THE LIFELINE

Here is what I know: when 

that bell tolls again, I 

need to go and make something,

anything: a poem, a pie, a terrible

scarf with my terrible knitting, I 

need to write a letter, remind myself

of any little lifeline around me.

When death sounds, I forget most

of what I learnt before. I go below. 

I compare my echoes with other people’s 

happiness. I carve that hole in my own 

chest again, pull out all my organs once

again, wonder if they’ll ever work again

stuff them back again. Begin. Again.

PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA

[handonmystupidheart]

the idiot, elif batuman