readapoem

[readapoem]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143935/becoming-seventy

[readapoem]

would my terror be more peaceful

in those brown, uninterrupted hands?

[readapoem]

She was tremendously generous and parsimonious at the same time. She would do anything for you, but she would disappoint you on such a regular basis that you wanted to scream. She wanted to be a teacher, and her father forbade her and she wanted to be a nurse and her father forbade her and you wonder who she might have been if it was a different world and she’d had a different father and she became a teacher or a nurse. She was cheerful and sad at once. She loved to have company, but people made her nervous. She loved children, but children made her nervous. She was a terrible snob with an eerie oceanic empathy for people from every walk of life. She was the healthiest hypochondriac in the history of the universe. She was both gentle and demanding. She was a gossip with a heart as big as a province. Children loved her, which is a good sign.

You wonder who she might have been if her father had loved her more than himself. You wonder who she might have been if she wasn’t the only girl among her brothers. You wonder who she might have been if the dark snow did not fall over her like a shroud on a regular and saddening basis. It is instructive to hear that her home was so warm and friendly that those who walked in the door found it difficult to walk out. She was a reader of epic proportions whose shelves were lined with self-help muck shoulder to shoulder with Edward Gibbon and Anthony Trollope. You never met a woman who could recite poetry so easily from memory, though it is instructive to note that she never remembered a poem exactly as written.

She loved dogs but spent the last 40 years of her life without one because they made her nervous. She loved her daughters but never missed a chance to comment tartly on their hair, clothing, choice of paramour, and unrefined cooking. She wanted to be informed and invited to every event of every conceivable shape and flavor, though she hardly ever attended them but woe unto the being who did not inform her of said event because he knew and she knew she would not attend. No one in the history of the universe was ever more artful at making a remark that was hilariously blunt and witty and admirably suited to the occasion but which could just as easily be construed as a slip of the tongue—you were never quite sure if she was witty or flitty; my favorite such bon mot being her toast at the engagement dinner of her final daughter, a siren who had been engaged once before but who had broken off the first engagement, and at the second engagement’s dinner her mother rose, hoisted her goblet, and said let’s just hope this one comes off, which still makes me laugh, not to mention my dad, who never really recovered from that moment; he still has champagne stuck in his nose all these years later, he says.

She lived to be 90, moaning to the end about a procession of ills, but it was no ill that felled her, finally, unless time be a disease from which we cannot recover; and she died flanked by her children, who held her hands and watched her go. In her last weeks, her nurses said, she spoke more and more of and to her mother and her husband, both of whom had gone ahead long years before, and she spoke of and to them with anticipatory joy. She left instructions for her children that her ashes be poured into the old blue cookie jar that had been the jewel of her kitchen for 50 years, and the jar be placed on her husband’s grave, so that she would again be with him, in forms beyond our ken. So she rests as of this morning, and though many mourn her, there are more who smile when they imagine her reaching for the face of the man she loved, and her own mother reaching out for her baby girl, and the tide of time in full retreat, and all pains fled and gone, and joy the only language on every holy tongue.

[readapoem]

We prefer to do it with the lights on,

the Victrola scratching How long can it last?

against the tremble of curtains. Patient,

we learn the walls, their glossary of knocks,

translating harlequin and dust. What we

know lives here—lonely bone star blossom

of the spider plant, lost bee on the sill,

the recorder’s static alive and puckering.

I tell you our future is the guttering candle

in the basement birdcage. Prove it, you say,

and I set both its shadows swaying. Our history—

the attic window, how the unseen surprises

the photograph. You ask what is there

to be afraid of. I ask the past to make itself

known to me. We only have to make it through

the night, so we close the dolls’ eyes. Danger

midwifes the heart’s spring. We are cabbage roses

grooming the parlor air with unsexed pistils.

I have this kiss and its sleepless itinerary.

Your lip, pink logic and cushion. The door

tests its lock, and I let you ruin each light

orb and whisper with physics. If we’re sure

something is here, then we have to find out

what it wants. A voice on the recorder, sweet

as gravecake—don’t go. We can admit it wasn’t

proof we came for, it was the question.

[readapoem]

If there is only enough time in the final minutes of the 2oth century for one last dance I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,

say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.

My palm would press into the small of your back as the past hundred years collapse into a pile of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,

just as the floor of the 19th century gave way and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.

There will be no time to order another drink or worry about what was never said,

not with the orchestra sliding into the sea and all our attention devoted to humming whatever it was they were playing.

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This morning as I walked along the lake shore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress

still at her machine in the tailor's window, and later for a bowl of broth, steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought, without recompense, without gifts, or unkind words, without suspicion, or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,

the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door - the love of the miniature orange tree, the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower, the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor-just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest on a low branch overhanging the water and for the dead mouse,

still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always standing on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail to a pile of leaves in the woods, I found myself standing at the bathroom sink gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,

so at home in its pale green soap dish.

I could feel myself falling again as I felt its turning in my wet hands and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

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This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills,

the thyme and rosemary that grew there,

crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks

and, lower down, where there was real dirt,

competing with other things, blueberries and currants,

the small shrubby trees the bees love—

Whatever we ate smelled of the hills,

even when there was almost nothing.

Or maybe that’s what nothing tastes like, thyme and rosemary.

Maybe, too, that’s what it looks like—

beautiful, like the hills, the rocks above the tree line

webbed with sweet smelling herbs,

the small plants glittering with dew—

It was a big event to climb up there and wait for dawn,

seeing what the sun sees as it slides out from behind the rocks,

and what you couldn’t see, you imagined;

your eyes would go as far as they could, to the river, say,

and your mind would do the rest—

And if you missed a day, there was always the next,

and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,

the hills weren’t going anywhere,

the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,

the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit—

The streetlight’s off: that’s dawn here.

It’s on: that’s twilight.

Either way, no one looks up. Everyone just pushes ahead,

and the smell of the past is everywhere,

the thyme and rosemary rubbing against your clothes,

the smell of too many illusions—

Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room.

Whatever was left, that was ours for a while.

But eventually the hills will take it back, give it to the animals.

And maybe the moon will send the seas there,

and where we lived will be a stream or river coiling around the base of the hills,

paying the sky the compliment of reflection.

I went back but I didn’t stay.

Everyone I cared about was gone,

some dead, some disappeared into one of those places that don’t exist,

the ones we dreamed about because we saw them from the top of the hills—

I had to see if the fields were still shining,

the sun telling the same lies about how beautiful the world is

when all you need to know of a place is, do people live there.

If they do, you know everything.

The hills are terrible, they hide the truth of the past.

Green in summer, white when the snow falls.

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One day I woke up in a new body

one that contained another and it made

me dizzy Now you pull your hand from your

mouth as if to show me something I've known

never

Like those birds carrying mouthfuls

of steam all the stark winter months I held

you in my body long as I could Weighted

then with sadness too my fear

you

might dissipate a fever brief and

untethered as the man I saw dancing

wrapped in a bearskin rug head passing through

its teeth, its tender jaws I had never held

anyone so close

your eyes inside my

eyes tongue inside my tongue Now when I cup

your sleeping face against the bow of my

shoulder arrow notched I am just waiting

one more moment

before I let you go

I know the quiver of your heart is out-

side the inside of me What to do with

this new body you left behind the light

that streams through its too-thin walls of fraying silk?

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I stood inside myself

like a dead tree or a tower.

I pulled the rope

of braided hair

and high above me

a bell of leaves tolled.

Because my hand

stabbed its brother,

I said: Make it stone.

Because my tongue

spoke harshly, I said:

Make it dust.

And yet

it was not death, but

her body in its green dress

I longed for. That’s why

I stood for days in the field

until the grass turned black

and the rain came.

[readapoem]

Darling, I left the house in the evening to get some fresh air

spreading out from the ocean, and gaze at the panorama.

The sunset was smoldering like a Chinese fan in a parterre,

and a cloud puffed up like the cover of a concert piano.

A quarter century back, you craved lula and dates, my dear,

drew with India ink in a notepad, and sang a little,

had fun with me; but later, met some chemical-engineer

and, judging by letters, you've become dimwitted.

You’ve been seen in the city and provinces, in churches for

funeral services of common friends, which seem to come by

continuously now; and I’m glad there are distances more

unthinkable than the one between you and I.

Don’t take it the wrong way. No more links exist

with your voice, body and name; no one tore them apart,

but to forget one life - any man requires, at least,

one additional life. And I’ve lived the part.

You’ve been lucky as well: for where else besides

photographs, will you stay young, wrinkle-free, fun, and light.

Time, colliding with memory, learns of its lack of rights.

I smoke in the dark and inhale the rancid tide.

[readapoem]

Now that the sun has set and the rain has abated,

And every porch light

          in the neighborhood is lit,

Maybe we can invent something; I'd like a new

Way of experiencing the world, a way of taking

Into myself the single light shining at the center

Of all things without losing the dense, eccentric

Planets orbiting around it.

          What you'd like is a more

Attentive lover, I suppose—· Too bad that slow,

Wet scorch of orange blossoms floating towards

The storm drain is not a vein of stars . . . we could

Make a wish on one of them; not that we would

Wish for anything but the impossible.

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Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.

Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.

Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels

so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out

the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue

recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn

some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,

Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full

of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward

what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.

We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,

if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big

people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?