In the Beginning

I think this place was often a village,
and smoke from the fires hung like
ropes in the air. I think we are standing
on bones and feathers, broken shells.

This place was star-crossed, moon
beamed, earth-quaked. The wind
blew on a silver horn, and light
went around in a golden bowl.

This place was once a river,
and before that it was a garden
filled with every kind of fruit tree,
everything that is good to eat.

I think something happened here;
I think this is the place where
deals were made, and angels held
their breaths in the sky above.

 

Joyce Sutphen, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow Press)

In View of the Fact

The people of my time are passing away: my

wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who

 

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it's

Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

 

it was once weddings that came so thick and

fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

 

now, it's this that and the other and somebody

else gone or on the brink: well, we never

 

thought we would live forever (although we did)

and now it looks like we won't: some of us

 

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don't know

what they went downstairs for, some know that

 

a hired watchful person is around, some like

to touch the cane tip into something steady,

 

so nice: we have already lost so many,

brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

 

address books for so long a slow scramble now

are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

 

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,

Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

 

at the same time we are getting used to so

many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

 

to the ones left: we are not giving up on the

congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on

 

the nice old men left in empty houses or on

the widows who decide to travel a lot: we

 

think the sun may shine someday when we'll

drink wine together and think of what used to

 

be: until we die we will remember every

single thing, recall every word, love every

 

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to

others to love, love that can grow brighter

 

and deeper till the very end, gaining strength

and getting more precious all the way. . . .

 

A.R. Ammons, Bosh and Flapdoodle (W. W. Norton & Co., 2005)

The Investigation

There were some things I would never know —

I realized that, but I wanted to understand
as much as I could before I let it go.

I couldn't stop making phone calls to Chicago —
to his doctor, his insurance agent, his doorman;
the coroner, who told me more than I wanted to know;

to his psychiatrist, who made a show
of sympathy and dismissed out of hand
my speculations — but I wouldn't let them go.

The detective sounded weary, which was no
surprise: it was 2 a.m. He patiently explained
what he could, then sighed, "You'll never really know."

I weighed the possibilities, made lists, wrote memos
to myself: was it spontaneous or planned —
and for how long? I couldn't let it go.

I kept calling my brother and sister to let them know
what I had figured out. Each time they listened
but then told me what I had always known:
we would never understand. I had to let it go.

 

Jeffery Harrison, Incomplete Knowledge: Poems (Four Way Books)

Hitchhiker

After a moment, the driver, a salesman
for Travelers Insurance heading for
Topeka, said, "What was that?"
I, in my Navy Uniform, still useful
for hitchhiking though the war was over,
said, "I think you hit somebody."
I knew he had. The round face, opening
in surprise as the man bounced off the fender,
had given me a look as he swept past.
"Why didn't you say something?" The salesman
stepped hard on the brakes. "I thought you saw,"
I said. I didn't know why. It came to me
I could have sat next to this man all the way
to Topeka without saying a word about it.
He opened the door and looked back.
I did the same. At the roadside,
in the glow of a streetlight, was a body.
A man was bending over it. For an instant
it was myself, in a time to come,
bending over the body of my father.
The man stood and shouted at us, "Forget it!
He gets hit all the time!" Oh.
A bum. We were happy to forget it.
The rest of the way, into dawn in Kansas,
when the salesman dropped me off, we did not speak,
except, as I got out, I said, "Thanks,"
and he said, "Don't mention it."

 

Galway Kinnell, Imperfect Thirst (Houghton Mifflin)

Chicken Killing

I was 5 and the chickens were my friends

I would pull an ear of corn from the crib
hack it against a brick and cry    here biddy biddy biddy

and they'd come running to peck between my bare
toes with beaks hard and smooth as sanded oak

when the crabapples rotted and fell off the tree into the yard
they would gobble them up and get drunk

then dance the crabapple dance  cluck
and strut, bump into each other, fly into the side

of the henhouse and stagger around laughing at chicken jokes

I laughed at their jokes    I partied
hard with those hens

one afternoon when we got back from
Hebron Baptist Church where you got to fan yourself
with funeral parlor fans

Uncle Wid went to the chicken yard with an ear
of corn    here biddy biddy biddy    he cried

and when the chickens ran up to peck
he grabbed two by the neck and swung them
over his head like sacks    wap    wap    and their heads
were off in his hands and their bodies were still

flying around the yard because no one had
told them they were dead
yet

 

Mary Mackey, Breaking the Fever: Poems (Marsh Hawk Press)

Nancy Drew

Merely pretty, she made up for it with vim.
And she got to say things like, "But, gosh,
what if these plans should fall into the wrong
hands?" and it was pretty clear she didn't mean
plans for a party or a trip to the museum, but
something involving espionage and a Nazi or two.

In fact, the handsome exchange student turns
out to be a Fascist sympathizer. When he snatches
Nancy along with some blueprints, she knows he
has something more sinister in mind than kissing
her with his mouth open.

Locked in the pantry of an abandoned farm house,
Nancy makes a radio out of a shoelace and a muffin.
Pretty soon the police show up, and everything's
hunky dory.

Nancy accepts their thanks, but she's subdued.
It's not like her to fall for a cad. Even as she plans
a short vacation to sort out her emotions she knows
there will be a suspicious waiter, a woman in a green
off the shoulder dress, and her very jittery husband.

Very well. But no more handsome boys like the last one:
the part in his hair that was sheer propulsion, that way
he had of lifting his eyes to hers over the custard,
those feelings that made her not want to be brave
confident and daring, polite, sensitive and caring.

 

Ron Koertge, Fever (Red Hen Press)

dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.

If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

 

Billy Collins, peacefullpresence.blogspot.com December 16, 2023

Things You Didn't Put on Your Resume

How often you got up in the middle of the night
when one of your children had a bad dream,

and sometimes you woke because you thought
you heard a cry but they were all sleeping,

so you stood in the moonlight just listening
to their breathing, and you didn't mention

that you were an expert at putting toothpaste
on tiny toothbrushes and bending down to wiggle

the toothbrush ten times on each tooth while
you sang the words to songs from Annie, and

who would suspect that you know the fingerings
to the songs in the first four books of the Suzuki

Violin Method and that you can do the voices
of Pooh and Piglet especially well, though

your absolute favorite thing to read out loud is
Bedtime for Frances and that you picked

up your way of reading it from Glynnis Johns,
and it is, now that you think of it, rather impressive

that you read all of Narnia and all of the Ring Trilogy
(and others too many to mention here) to them

before they went to bed and on way out to
Yellowstone, which is another thing you don't put

on the resumé: how you took them to the ocean
and the mountains and brought them safely home.

 

Joyce Sutphen, writersalmanac.publicradio.org December 5, 2006

His Elderly Father as a Young Man

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn't in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn't want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with an imitation pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.

When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away -
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed,
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such a letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.

 

Leo Dangel, Home From the Field (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997) 

For All of Our Thirty Years, My Husband Has Saved Birds

And once, on vacation, a little brown bat
trapped in a wood stove. So, things that fly:
a goldfinch that landed on our deck and

fluttered into the house, both our cats mad
with pursuit. Ken body-blocked the cats, dove
at the floor, grabbed the bird. I remember

its oil-dark eyes, its yellow and black head
turning to gaze at us from his gentle fist, then
its flight into the woods. A baby duck, lost

but too far gone to survive. Another duck,
full grown, attacked by a hawk: Ken ran
howling toward the struggle, his degree in

voice scaring the red-tail aloft: opera with
a joyous ending. He settled the duck back
in the creek and it paddled off. A pileated

woodpecker, tumbled down our unused
second chimney: Ken’s invention of ropes
pulled taut through an old stovepipe hole,

how the bird grasped that with claws and
beak, and flew, panicked, into my office--
at windows, at walls, seagull-lamenting,

until Ken got hands around it, too, as it
cursed him and tore his fingers. His calm
walk outside with the bird, how he filled

the hollow places on our patio with a hose
so it could drink. It did—and took off. Last of
all me, in no real peril except for my doubt

that any salvation lasts for long. Maybe,
back at our beginning, I was still a bit wild.
Maybe he liked knowing I could just fly away.

 

Christine Potter, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily January 24, 2024

Beginners

 Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Elliot Gralla

But we have only begun 

To love the earth. 

We have only begun

To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?

-- so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?

-- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,

only begun to envision

how it might be 

to live as siblings with beast and flower, 

not as oppressors.

Surely our river

cannot already be hastening

into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot 

drag, in the silt,

all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet--

there is too much broken

that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other

that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know

the power that is in us if we would join

our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding

that must complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

Denise Levertov, Candles in Babylon (New Directions Publishing Corp, 1982) 

The Psychiatrist Says She Is Severely Demented

But she's my mother. She lies in her bed,
Hi Sweetie, she says.
Hi Mom. Do you know my name?
I can't wait for her answer, I'm Bobbi.
Oh, so you found me again, she says.
Her face and hair have the same gray sheen
Like a black and white drawing smudged on the edges.
The bedspread is hot pink, lime green. Her eyes,
Such a distant blue, indifferent as the sky. I put my hand
On her forehead. It is soft, and she resembles my real mother
Who I have not spoken to in so many years.
I want to talk to her as her eyes close.
She is mumbling something, laughing to herself,
All the sadness she ever had has fled.
And when she opens her eyes again, she stares through me
And her eyes well up with tears.
And I stand there lost in her incoherence,
Which feels almost exactly like love.

 

Bobbi Lune, Letters from the Lawn: Poems by Bobbi Lune (CustomWords) 

Night Talks

When one would wake in the night, the other
followed. Then, in their bed, next to their window
that was always open, my mother and father
would talk to the sound of cars going by,
the hum of streetlights, the occasional bark
of a neighbor’s dog. They spoke of high school
dances, family vacations, raising children,
being grandparents. And their faces, soft with age and sleep, were hidden in the dark,
so they could speak at last of their lost son,
without any need to shield each other from
that pain. It must have been a relief to unpack
the shared sadness they courageously carried,
to put it down, if only for an hour. It was like
I could hear them from my own bed
across town, as I slipped into a deeper sleep,
reassured and comforted by their beloved
familiar voices echoing among the stars.

 

Terri Kirby Erickson, Night Talks: New and Selected Poems (Press 53, 2023)

Trust

It's like so many other things in life
to which you must say no or yes.
So you take your car to the new mechanic.
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.

The package left with the disreputable-looking
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers—
all show up at their intended destinations.

The theft that could have happened doesn't.
Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees, and the river, even
when frozen, arrives at the right place.

And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

 

Thomas R. Smith, Waking before Dawn (Red Dragonfly Press)

Father

May 19, 1999

Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient, fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day — the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that at the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.

 

Ted Kooser, Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)

The Halls

 Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car;

your office door closes behind you and at that moment

you turn invisible—not even a ghost in that hall

from the hall’s point of view.

If the halls don’t know you, the halls and the rooms

of the buildings where you worked for seven years—

if the halls don’t know you,

                                                       and they don’t—

some new woman or two new men come clattering

down these halls in the month after your departure, indeed

just two days after you left forever

they come clattering with ideas about

the relation between mind and body or will and fate

filled with hormones of being the chosen workers here

and they feel as if the halls and rooms begin to recognize them,

accept them, as if there is a belonging in the world—

 

but these new workers are wrong, the halls don’t know

who is working under the unobtrusive fluorescent panels:

 

this is appalling and for a minute you are appalled

though your being so now is not an event

in the life of your new rented house or even

your new condominium . . .

So if they don’t, if they don’t know you,

the halls, the walls, the fixtures,

then what? Then there is for you

no home in that rock, no home in the mere rock of

where you work, where you briskly walk, not even

in the bed where your body sleeps alone or not—

 

so if there is to be a place for you, for you

it must not be located in plaster and tile and space,

it will have to be in that other house,

the one whose door you felt opening just last night

when you dialed from memory and your friend picked up the phone.

 

Mark Halliday, Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999)