The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver, Dream Work (Grove/Atlantic, 1986)

Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale

I'm thinking of a fairy tale,
Cinder Elephant,
Sleeping Tubby,
Snow Weight,
where the princess is not
anorexic, wasp-waisted,
flinging herself down the stairs.

I'm thinking of a fairy tale,
Hansel and Great,
Repoundsel,
Bounty and the Beast,
where the beauty
has a pillowed breast,
and fingers plump as sausage.

I'm thinking of a fairy tale
that is not yet written,
for a teller not yet born,
for a listener not yet conceived,
for a world not yet won,
where everything round is good:
the sun, wheels, cookies, and the princess.

Jane Yolen, Such a Pretty Face (Meisha-Merlin Publishing, Inc, 2000)

I Married You

I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naïve ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.

I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity --
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.

Linda Pastan, Queen of a Rainy Country (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006)

Bondage Love

Houdini's audiences loved him.

They were poor people, illiterates:
hod carriers, icemen, washerwomen,
undernourished kids.

They understood what it meant
to have your hands manacled,
your feet tied,
to be put in a straightjacket
then in a box
and sunk.
They knew what it was like to have no way out.

It was the way the world made love to them.

So he showed them, without a word,
that one could have no way out,
not a single, possible way out,

and get out.

John J. Bruegaletta, Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2019)

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
     How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
      sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift to the world
      than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
      for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
      new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
      reading or hearing this, keep it for life --

What can anyone give you greater than now,
      starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

William Stafford, The Way It Is (Graywolf Press, 1998)

High School Boyfriend

You are hometown.
You are all my favorite places
the summer I grew up.
Every once in a while
I write you
in my head
to ask how Vietnam
and a big name college
came between us.
We tried to stay in touch
through the long distance,
the hum and fleck of phone calls.

It was inevitable
that I should return
to the small prairie town
and find you
pumping gas, driving a truck, measuring lumber,
and we would exchange
weather-talk,
never able to break through words
and time to say simply:
"Are you as happy
as I wanted you to be?"

And still I am stirred
by musky cigarette smoke
on a man's brown suede jacket.
Never having admitted the tenderness
of your hands, I feel them now
through my skin.
Parking on breezy nights,
in cars, floating passageways,
we are tongue and tongue like warm cucumbers.
I would walk backwards
along far country roads
through late evenings cool as moving water,
heavy as red beer,
to climb into that August.

In the dark lovers' lanes
you touched my face
and found me here.

Margaret Hasse, Stars Above, Stars Below (Nodin Press, 2018)

Swan

Did you too see it, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air --
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music -- like the rain pelting the trees,
like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds --
a white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light
of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Beacon Press, 2010)