Mary Oliver + E. E. Cummings
And Let This Be Blessing
You have your grandmother's almond eyes.
You have your mother's hands.
You have the last thirteen years with me.
And you will have the rest.
(Like Leonard, a baffled poet tries to keep the meter,
Composing as she goes)
You took two baskets of magenta and purple
Orange flames showing through,
You hung them on the iron crook
I wasn't strong enough to plant.
The afternoon was warm, the sun bit my tender skin.
I cried because I never thought I'd be here,
Thirteen little years in.
A dragonfly visited our garden, a tiny teal caterpillar
Tickled my arm as you found a native bee.
And let this be a blessing.
(Incense smells like lilies to me,
Oh, this sounds like praise to me).
We have planted, we have lifted, we have disturbed the land
But I think it accepts us.
Let this be a blessing.
Back to our garden, back to your dirty hands,
Back to our round and full and bright and summer,
Back to our rosemary, mint, our foxglove, our butterfly bushes,
Back to our floribunda, our world.
You were panting, hauling mulch,
Then tenderly tucking honey suckle, pumpkins, berries.
''Did you ever think we'd be married,
Working on our garden?''
I choked up, unable to give a pat reply.
I heard echoes of her hospital room,
I was thrown back twenty years to an old grief
Smeared with pollen and late sun.
The last whiff of her perfume
Still flickered in my brain.
The dead are with me even here.
The past is with me, even in life.
The past is with me, even in happiness, even here.
And that is a blessing.
Cleaning the Kitchen, Waiting on Hold
''Your call is very important to us, please continue to hold.''
This is it, this is the life. Cleaning out my fridge, my kitchen,
Talking to myself about poetry, listening to a recording on my phone.
This is me: cleaning, worrying, worrying about words,
Waiting to dial the right extension,
Waiting to talk to the right machine.
Suspicious milk and queasy curds, furry avocados, meat gone limp and grey,
Receipts and plastic bags, artifact and reticence,
What is it that holds me back? How important is my call?
They say you should never write an ars poetica,
But I have to, I have to ask,
I have to do the thing I can't.
A dripping pipe, mysterious stickiness, the slime of old peels.
Mummified potatoes, ragged onion skins, wist and deference.
What's left? Who should I write for? How long can I hold?
Who are my men and women?
Who's my proud and broad,
My spice and sundering sound?
Carton and schedule, ticket and card. ''Please continue...''
Days measured in papers and books, twist-ties and butchers' string.
Kitchen table concerns. ''Your call is very important.'' Indeed.
Who should I be talking to?
How can I do the thing I shouldn't?
How can do I the thing I can't?
Where's my proud and broad, where's my spice and sex?
Where's the brassy break and pulsing youth?
Who should I be talking to? ''Please continue to hold.''
How do you weave magic from this?
How do you write from the forgotten appointments,
Train windows, tissues, drafts, and measurements?
Who should I be talking to? What should I be doing?
''Your call is very important to us, please continue to hold.''
This may well be it. This may well be my life.
Still, I can't resign myself completely to a bland program.
The window is open. Spring is slapping through late winter's rot,
And I'm still alive enough to do the thing I can't.
Mother Tongue
Scholars will tell us
Certain words have survived
Since the dawn of human speech:
Mother, fire, fish, and forest
Worm and knot and sweat and string.
(You've been here before.)
(It's not holy, but we've been here before.)
Knowing this, I try to tell the story,
I try to trace the history, I try to wake the dead.
I try to pronounce the primordial word
Because it's still there.
There is a mother tongue,
There is a prayer,
There is a meristem line
Of thought, of feeling, descant and rhyme.
Is the mother tongue still spoken?
Does the harp string still sound?
Does the prayer still reach that high?
(How much of her can you hear through me?)
(How much of her belongs to the dead?)
Like the words, certain treasures have survived
Since the dawn of human love:
A baby's hand on your cheek, a path in the woods,
A gray dawn coming through the teeth of the mountains.
There is a story, there is a mother tongue.
And I hear it now
As the taste of the new storm coats the evening,
The gravel on our street sends up dust.
Rain is coming again,
There is a path in the forest,
There is a meristem line.
We still know how to stitch these prayers.
There is the mother tongue,
There is the blessing of time.
Poet, Sucker, Fool
In the beginning, there was the word.
The breath forced from the lungs, through the throat,
Wet bellows inflated to feed the flame.
In the sainted past, the poet and fool were power.
The poet, alchemist, distilled symbol to song.
The fool, seer, would say what could not be said.
Between the two of them, the divine madness of language,
The folie a deux, would spread.
And here we are now. Good God, I'm a sucker.
In the beginning, the word was sacred.
We are people of the word.
We are people of the water and the stone.
We are people of the story.
We are people of the poem.
Oh, the word was the world, the world was the word.
The word on the street is that this craft is empty.
(And yet, don't small men kill the poets first?)
I'm afraid a lot but my candle burns.
I'm discouraged a lot, but my magic builds.
Take my hand. I know this, my love.
Be with me. I say this, my love.
I sing this, I tell you this, my love:
Fire is a process not an object.
Poetry is a choice, not a gift.
Meter is a map, enjambment a liminal space.
The poet and the fool are alive and well.
The poet and the fool are alive and well,
Sailing the winedark currents
(Here be monsters, here be critics).
The poet and and the fool are alive and well,
The poet and the fool are alive and well,
Holy suckers both.
We are alive and we are well.
Holy suckers all.
Never write an Ars Poetica
I've crawled on my fat belly
And I've smelled the black dirt.
I've rolled like a snake in the Orange County mud.
I've rolled like a snake in the 5 quilts on my bed,
Dry eyes peeled at the stream and the feed, despairing.
Lately, people have gone to great lengths to dissuade
The human hand and the human mind
Empathy is a sin now, unimpeded cancerous growth is a good.
How in the hell do you write a poem in a time like this?
I've licked that black dirt from my lips and
I've peered between the roots, reading the augurs.
And let me tell you,
This will all decay one day,
I will be a carcass and so will you.
But as long as we have rot and ret,
As long as babies swim into their mothers' arms,
As long as a beast lays its body to yours,
As long as we place a stone on a grave,
As long as we close our eyes to music,
As long as your hand falls over my hip,
I'll have a job to do.
Second Floor Stacks
The glass-eyed thief prowls the second floor stacks.
Sequestered with the little tombs, the racks of forgotten names,
And the tart appraisals, or dusty wreaths of praise
That crown the remains of human labor,
Safe from the gentle jealousy of Friday afternoon's late light,
And the relentless, seductive signal of the street below,
She is free to ignore the light and noise,
Bowing and arching, tapping on her brain.
She is free to disregard the moist and silky reminders
Of spring trying to sneak in by the dull casements (cracked against rot),
Grimed with decades, hung with abandoned webs, nests, and wings.
She is free to feed on memories, to rest from the pressure of action.
A lungful of old ink and must, she drinks a greedy breath,
Capturing the scent of this place,
Wanting something strange to take back to her rude and shouting shore.
She carefully folds her prize away as
The floor settles, with a arch remark, with a dry protest,
Under her thick black boots
And the warmth of her fallible skin.
The glass-eyed, loving thief finds a path
Through these genteel graves.
She pats the titles, mouths the words
On the carefully interred ribs.
Every few steps, she pulls one from its shelf,
Strokes the flaking skin, sniffs the trace of escaping chemicals,
Half-expecting it to scream like a mandrake
As she silently addresses its withered face.
She fills her living, twitching lungs with time’s passage.
The glass-eyed lover, as carefully as she can,
Quietly as she dares,
Courts the past contained.
She hopes to coax a token, tiny word, some small sympathy,
From the quiet printed dead.
Recedere
The darkness relents and comes to morning.
My raging memory dies to salt, and I retreat
From the sea that had possessed me.
I return, shaken, holding my head,
Still feeling hunted, still afraid.
(try to be still try to be still)
I try to pull a breath up through
the lingering panic.
I have to leave our bed,
I know it was a dream, a midnight worry,
But I am half convinced that
Devils dance on my pillow.
Hoofbeats still pounding in my veins,
I make a padding circuit of the house,
Checking locks and switches.
Eventually, my mind relents,
And through the shadowed glass of recollection,
I reach for you.
You roll and sigh as I return,
Waxing and waning, climbing back to you.
The hours grow smoother, and I grow calmer.
Rain laces the window and I watch the sky become lighter.
The last memory of fear dissolves
With the release of a contented heart.
Through the thickness of hours spent in fearful watch,
I drift closer to our shores,
I drift closer to you, trusting all is well.
You reach for me, slightly out of sleep,
Mostly out of habit.
Somehow you know how I felt,
Like I still did not belong,
A gentle exile from time.
You reach for me over the rippling lines of linen,
You bring me back, rising against my tormenting will,
Innocent now of my worry.
You bring me back. In your wisdom, you bring me back,
your love's hands on my storming head,
Your lips pressed to mine.
