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IV The Things I Know

The things I know: how the living go on living and how the dead go on living with them

So that in a forest even a dead tree casts a shadow and the leaves fall one by one and the branches break in the wind and the bark peels off slowly and the trunk cracks and the rain seeps in through the cracks and the trunk falls to the ground and the moss covers it

and in the spring the rabbits find it and build their nest inside and have their young and their young will live safely inside the dead tree

So that nothing is wasted in nature or in love.

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The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.

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A Meeting

In a dream I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: "How you been?" He grins and looks at me. "I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees."

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Not Horses

What I adore is not horses, with their modern domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore is a bug that lives only one day, especially if it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day when no one thinks of anything else, least of all that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve been into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s busy, so distraught they forget to kill me, and even that won’t keep me alive. I share my home not with horses, but with a little dog who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps, makes her muscle known to every statue. I wish she could have a single day of   language, so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid — our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.

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The Anatomy of Grief

I keep forgetting to close the doors of my poems. You keep sneaking in.  There’s always a radio playing. Sometimes you’re bopping your head to static.  The way you sing my name so sweetly, now.  Like you’ve drilled holes through the letters to extract their sap.  You hand me a flashlight. We search for the lost fragments of Sappho’s lyrics but find only single words on scraps of papyrus: desire, fire, immortal. You tell me this is how you died: by eating words that weren’t for you. Black ink staining your lips. When I return from the underworld each night, I know things I didn’t know before.  About the anatomy of a bell—crown, mouth, lip, shoulder, waist.  About the anatomy of a book—head, spine, joints. About the anatomy of love—crushed mint, forsythia. I ask what you do when you can’t sleep. You say:  Sometimes, late at night, I let the radio listen to me.

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Sonnet (from “50 Sonnets”)

Eleanor Brown

Not if you crawled from there to here, you hear? Not if you begged me, on your bleeding knees. Not if you lay exhausted at my door, and pleaded with me for a chance. Not if you wept (am I making this clear?) or found a thousand different words for 'Please', ten thousand for 'I’m sorry'; I’d ignore you so sublimely; every new advance would meet with such complete indifference. Not if you promised me fidelity. Not if you meant it. What impertinence, then, is this voice that murmurs, 'What if he didn’t? That isn’t his line of attack. What if he simply grinned, and said, I’m back?'

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Basket of Figs

Ellen Bass

Bring me your pain, love. Spread it out like fine rugs, silk sashes, warm eggs, cinnamon and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me the detail, the intricate embroidery on the collar, tiny shell buttons, the hem stitched the way you were taught, pricking just a thread, almost invisible. Unclasp it like jewels, the gold still hot from your body. Empty your basket of figs. Spill your wine. That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it, cradling it on my tongue like the slick seed of pomegranate. I would lift it tenderly, as a great animal might carry a small one in the private cave of the mouth.

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What Every Woman Should Carry

Maura Dooley

My mother gave me the prayer to Saint Theresa. I added a used tube ticket, Kleenex, several Polo mints (furry), a tampon, pesetas, a florin. Not wishing to be presumptuous, not trusting you either, a pack of 3. I have a pen. There is space for my guardian angel, she has to fold her wings. Passport. A key. Anguish, at what I said/didn’t say when once you needed/didn’t need me. Anadin. A credit card. His face the last time, my impatience, my useless youth. That empty sack, my heart. A box of matches.

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Spark

Henry Bukowski 

I always resented all the years, the hours, the minutes I gave them as a working stiff, it actually hurt my head, my insides, it made me dizzy and a bit crazy — I couldn’t understand the murdering of my years yet my fellow workers gave no signs of agony, many of them even seemed satisfied, and seeing them that way drove me almost as crazy as the dull and senseless work.

the workers submitted. the work pounded them to nothingness, they were scooped-out and thrown away.

I resented each minute, every minute as it was mutilated and nothing relieved the monotonous ever- structure.

I considered suicide. I drank away my few leisure hours.

I worked for decades.

I lived with the worst of women, they killed what the job failed to kill.

I knew that I was dying. something in me said, go ahead, die, sleep, become them, accept.

then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest bit. it needn’t be much, just a spark. a spark can set a whole forest on fire. just a spark. save it.

I think I did. I’m glad I did. what a lucky god damned thing.

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i am running into a new year

Lucille Clifton

i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when i was sixteen and twentysix and thirtysix even thirtysix but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me

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A Spell for Creation

Kathleen Raine

Within the flower there lies a seed, Within the seed there springs a tree, Within the tree there spreads a wood. In the wood there burns a fire, And in the fire there melts a stone, Within the stone a ring of iron. Within the ring there lies an O, Within the O there looks an eye, In the eye there swims a sea, And in the sea reflected sky, And in the sky there shines the sun, Within the sun a bird of gold. Within the bird there beats a heart, And from the heart there flows a song, And in the song there sings a word. In the word there speaks a world, A world of joy, a world of grief, From joy and grief there springs my love. Oh love, my love, there springs a world, And on the world there shines a sun, And in the sun there burns a fire, Within the fire consumes my heart, And in my heart there beats a bird, And in the bird there wakes an eye, Within the eye, earth, sea and sky, Earth, sky and sea within an O Lie like the seed within the flower.

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Is/Not

Margaret Atwood

Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow/traveller Give up this medical concern, buttoned, attentive, permit yourself anger and permit me mine which needs neither your approval nor your suprise which does not need to be made legal which is not against a disease but agaist you, which does not need to be understood or washed or cauterized, which needs instead to be said and said. Permit me the present tense.

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Advice to a Discarded Lover

Fleur Adcock

Think, now: if you have found a dead bird, Not only dead, not only fallen, But full of maggots: what do you feel – More pity or more revulsion? Pity is for the moment of death, And the moments after. It changes When decay comes, with the creeping stench And the wriggling, munching scavengers. Returning later, though, you will see A shape of clean bone, a few feathers, An inoffensive symbol of what Once lived. Nothing to make you shudder. It is clear then. But perhaps you find The analogy I have chosen For our dead affair rather gruesome  – Too unpleasant a comparison. It is not accidental. In you I see maggots close to the surface. You are eaten up by self-pity, Crawling with unlovable pathos. If I were to touch you I should feel Against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin. Do not ask me for charity now: Go away until your bones are clean.

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In Blackwater Woods

Mary Oliver

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars

of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,

the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders

of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is

nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned

in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side

is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world

you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it

against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

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A Little Tooth

Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two, and four, and five, then she wants some meat directly from the bone. It's all over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet talker on his way to jail. And you, your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue nothing. You did, you loved, your feet are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

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Small Kindnesses

Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

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I Worried

Mary Oliver

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not how shall I correct it? Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, can I do better? Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows can do it and I am, well, hopeless. Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia? Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.