Men Untrained to Comfort

Jason Needly found his father, old Ab, at work
at the age of eighty in the topmost
tier of the barn. "Come down!" Jason called.
"You got no business up there at your age."
And his father descended, not by a ladder,
there being none, but by inserting his fingers
into the cracks between the boards and climbing
down the wall.

                           And when he was young
and some account and strong and knew
nothing of weariness, old man Milt Wright,
back in the days they called him "Steady,"
carried the rastus plow on his shoulder
up the high hill to his tobacco patch, so
when they got there his mule would be fresh,
unsweated, and ready to go.

                                                       Early Rowanberry,
for another, bought a steel-beam breaking plow
at the store in Port William and shouldered it
before the hardly-believing watchers, and carried it
the mile and a half home, down through the woods
along Sand Ripple.

                                        "But the tiredest my daddy
ever got," his son, Art, told me one day
"was when he carried fifty rabbits and a big possum
in a sack on his back up onto the point yonder
and out the ridge to town to sell them at the store."

"But why," I asked, "didn't he hitch a team
to the wagon and haul them up there by the road?"

"Well," Art said, "we didn't have but two
horses in them days, and we spared them
every way we could. A many a time I've seen
my daddy or grandpa jump off the wagon or sled
and take the end of a singletree beside a horse."

 

Wendell Berry, Leavings (Counterpoint Press, 2010)

Self-Care

Have you tried
rose hydrosol? Smokey quartz
in a steel bottle

of glacial water? Tincture
drawn from the stamens
of daylilies grown
on the western sides

of two-story homes?
Pancreas of toad?
Deodorant paste?

Have you removed
your metal fillings? Made peace
with your mother? With all
the mothers you can? Or tried

car exhaust? Holding your face
to the steaming kettle?
Primal screamed into

a down-alternative pillow
in a wood while tree-bathing?
Have you finally stopped
shoulding all over yourself?

Has your copay increased?
Right hip stiffened?
Has the shore risen
as you closed up the shop?
And have you put your weight
behind its glass door to keep
the ocean out? All of it?

Rang the singing bowl
next to the sloping toilet?
Mainlined lithium?

Colored in another mandala?
Have you looked
yourself in the mirror
and found the blessed halo

of a ring light in each iris?
Have you been content enough
being this content? Whose

shop was it?

 

Solmaz Sharif, Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022)

For Anna Catherine on Thanksgiving

The first girl in generations,
   you came when the century clicked
   from nines to zeroes to plus one.
Capped on a pallet, you flexed
   your toes and let us count
   your fingernails.
                              We studied you
   as our particular event,
   our small surprise, our bonus.
Months earlier, I prayed
   that you'd be born intact
   and healthy, and you were.
Today I wish you beauty, grace,
   intelligence—the commonplace
   grandfatherly clichés....
                                             What
   makes us crave for those
   we love such bounties of perfection?
Life, just life, is never
   miracle enough no matter
   how we try to church ourselves....
Squirming in my arms, you save me
   from my tyranny of dreams
   with nothing but your version of a kiss
   and the sure, blind love of innocence.

 

Samuel Hazo, The Song of the Horse (Autumn House Press, 2008)

Radio

When I was a kid I listened to the radio late at night. I tuned it
low as I could and put my ear right up next to it because my dad
didn't like it. He'd say, "Turn off that radio. It's after midnight!"
No matter how low I tuned it he could still hear, from down the
hall and through two closed doors. He was tired. It had been a
long day and this was just one more thing, the final thing, keep-
ing him from the sleep, the absolute dead silence he wanted. As
for me, whatever music I was listening to, some rock station way
down on the border, probably, "100,000 watts of pure power,"
has become even more faint over the years. But I can still hear it.

 

Louis Jenkins, Before You Know It: Prose Poems 1970-2005 (Will O’ the Wisp Books, 2009) 

Turkeys

One November
a week before Thanksgiving
the Ohio river froze
and my great uncles
put on their coats
and drove the turkeys
across the ice
to Rosiclare
where they sold them
for enough to buy
my grandmother
a Christmas doll
with blue china eyes

I like to think
of the sound of
two hundred turkey feet
running across to Illinois
on their way
to the platter
the scrape of their nails
and my great uncles
in their homespun leggings
calling out gee and haw and git
to them as if they
were mules

I like to think of the Ohio
at that moment
the clear cold sky
the green river sleeping
under the ice
before the land got stripped
and the farm got sold
and the water turned the color
of whiskey
and all the uncles
lay down
and never got up again

I like to think of the world
before some genius invented
turkeys with pop-up plastic
thermometers
in their breasts
idiot birds
with no wildness left in them
turkeys that couldn't run the river
to save their souls

 

Mary Mackey, Breaking the Fever (Marsh Hawk Press, 2006)

You

Our friends' wedding:
I'd lied, called it a funeral
to get army leave
so I could be with you.
It was surprise, a present
and your blush of pleasure
cheered me like a crowd.

So here we are on the step
above 'the happy couple'
who will one day divorce-
looking into the future
which is now.

Ten friends together
in that photograph.
Fifty years on
and four are dead.
Who will be next?
Who will be last
and put out the light?

It's time to tell you again
how much I loved the girl
who blushed her welcome.
Forgive my trespasses.
Stay close. Hold my hand.

 

C. K. Stead, The Red Tram (Auckland University Press, New Zealand)

My House

 

i only want to

be there to kiss you

as you want to be kissed

when you need to be kissed

where i want to kiss you

cause its my house and i plan to live in it

 

i really need to hug you

when i want to hug you

as you like to hug me

does this sound like a silly poem

 

i mean its my house

and i want to fry pork chops

and bake sweet potatoes

and call them yams

cause i run the kitchen

and i can stand the heat

 

i spent all winter in

carpet stores gathering

patches so i could make

a quilt

does this really sound

like a silly poem

 

i mean i want to keep you

warm

 

and my windows might be dirty

but its my house

and if i can't see out sometimes

they can't see in either

 

english isn't a good language

to express emotion through

mostly i imagine because people

try to speak english instead

of trying to speak through it

i don't know maybe it is

a silly poem

 

i'm saying it's my house

and i'll make fudge and call

it love and touch my lips

to the chocolate warmth

and smile at old men and call

it revolution cause what's real

is really real

and i still like men in tight

pants cause everybody has some

thing to give and more

important need something to take

 

and this is my house and you make me

happy

so this is your poem

 

Nikki Giovanni, ralphlevy.com accessed on October 23, 2022

Custer

He is a hard one to write a poem about. Like Napolean.
Hannibal. Genghis Khan. Already so large in history. To do it
right, I have to sit down with him. At a place of his own
choosing. Probably a steakhouse. We take a table in a corner.
But people still recognize him, come up and slap him on the
back, say how much they enjoyed studying about him in school
and ask for his autograph. After he eats, he leans back and
lights up a cigar and asks me what I want to know. Notebook in
hand, I suggest that we start with the Little Big Horn and work
our way back. But I realize I have offended him. That he
would rather take it the other way around. So he rants on
about the Civil War, the way west, the loyalty of good soldiers
and now and then twists his long yellow hair with his fingers.
But when he gets to the part about Sitting Bull, about Crazy
Horse, he develops a twitch above his right eye, raises his
finger for the waiter, excuses himself and goes to the restroom
while I sit there along the bluffs with the entire Sioux nation,
awaiting his return.

 

David Shumate, High Water Mark (University of Pittsburg Press, 2004)

Passengers

At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats
with the possible company of my death,
this sprawling miscellany of people -
carry-on bags and paperbacks -

that could be gathered in a flash
into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.
Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain

we would all ascend together,
holding hands like a ring of sky divers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common spot

for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillarless Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss our ashes into the sunny air.

It's just that the way that man has his briefcase
so carefully arranged,
the way that girl is cooling her tea,
and the flow of the comb that woman

passes through her daughter's hair...
and when you consider the altitude,
the secret parts of the engines,
and all the hard water and the deep canyons below...

well, I just think it would be good if one of us
maybe stood up and said a few words,
or, so as not to involve the police,
at least quietly wrote something down.

 

Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2001) 

In the Distant Past

Things weren’t very specific
when I was in labor,

yet everything was
there, suddenly: all that

my body had known,
even things I’d only been

reminded of occasionally,
as when a stranger’s scent

had reminded me
of someone I’d known

in the distant past. The few
men I’d loved but didn’t

marry. The time, living
alone in Albuquerque,

when I fainted in the kitchen
one morning before work

and woke up on the floor,
covered in coffee. Finally,

it was coming. It was all moving
forward. Finally, it was all going

to pass through me. It was
beginning to happen

and it was all going to happen
in one single night.

No more lingering
in the adolescent pools

of memory, no more giving it
a little more time to see

if things would get better
or worse. No more moving

from one place to the next.
Finally, my body was all

that had ever been given
to me, it was all I had,

and I sweated through it
in layers, so that when,

in the end, I was finally
standing outside myself

and watching, I could see
that what brought me

into the world was pulling
you into the world,

and I could see that my body
was giving you up

and giving you to me,
and where in my body

there were talents, there
were talents, and where

there were no talents,
there would be scars.

 

Carrie Fountain, Instant Winner, (Penguin, 2004)

Pray for the Bad Guys

             Bless those who curse you,
           pray for those who abuse you.
                           —Luke 6.28

The more monstrous a person's evil,
the more evil their monsters,
and the more unable they are to overcome them.
They need you.
They need you to stand beside them and pray
as they can't, pray for their redemption.
If you want peace in the world,
if you want justice for all the oppressed,
for the abused and enslaved and trafficked,
then you want most of all
the redemption of all wrongdoers.
God's great justice is not revenge.
That's too cheap, too human, too small.
No, God's justice is actual harmony
and fullness of life for everybody.
Not payback, that endless loop,
but transformation (which is harder).
Pray for the bad guys,
even the tyrants and torturers, that with love
God will wrench them out of their hell
and deliver us all.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net November 4, 2022

After Reading Peterson's Guide

 

I used to call them

Morning Doves, those birds

with breasts the rosy color

of dawn who coo us awake

as if to say love . . .

love . . . in the morning.

 

But when the book said

Mourning Doves instead

I noticed their ash-gray feathers,

like shadows

on the underside

of love.

 

When the Dark Angel comes

let him fold us in wings

as soft as these birds’,

though the speckled egg

hidden deep in his nest

is death.

Linda Pastan, chronicillnessliving.blog, May 5, 2020

The Husband

He comes every day to eat lunch and sit
with her in the sunroom. Sometimes he reads
letters out loud from their children or friends;
sometimes he reads the paper as she sleeps.
One day the staff makes her favorite cake
to celebrate their anniversary,
and he tells how, to buy her ring, he worked
months of overtime at the factory,
so she thought he was seeing someone else.
"As if I would look at other women
when I have Pearl," he says, shaking his head.
She begins to cry and tells him, "You're sweet,
but I miss my husband." He pats her hand.
"I know," he says, "It's all right. Try some cake."

 

Joseph Mills, Love and Other Collisions (Press 53, 2010) 

Walk Gently

Walk gently on this earth with purposeful steps

You share this space with seven billion human beings

And countless other precious life forms

Just like you

They all want to be happy

Just like you

They all need love

We’re not going to survive unless we walk

Gently on this earth together,

Until we touch something in others that

Feels just like the shards of our own pain,

The fluttering warmth of our own joy,

Until we sew their wounds into our hearts

And seal it with our own skin

 

Kaveri Patel, tarabranch.com June 10, 2022

  

Sometimes When I Catch Myself

Sometimes when I catch myself
judging someone else—
a stranger or perhaps a beloved—

I imagine my son and father watching me,
not looking down from above,
I imagine them looking out from inside me.

I don’t worry I am disappointing them—
I feel certain they would be generous with me.
See how human she is, they might say,

loving me despite my humaness,
because of my humanness.
In that moment of imagining,

I feel myself soften,
feel my heart unfurl like a new leaf in spring,
feel how possible it is to be generous

with the humanness of myself and others
and the relief it brings.
In that moment, it is easy to be alive.

Easy to notice my annoyance
and be gentle with the self who gets annoyed.
Easy to touch my palm to my heart

and know it as the palm of my son,
the palm of my father,
reminding me how truly I want to walk it,

this path of compassion.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com July 17, 2022