The Long Marriage

 

Perhaps I know you best in the dark—
that nightly shrine
where my belly meets your spine,
where the bend of my knees
meets the bend of your knees,
where my warmth meets your warmth,
the night a vase
in which we place
the stems of our bodies,
in which I know myself
through touch.
And nothing must be said
and nothing must be done
except to meet the long familiar flesh,
this honoring of nakedness.

Perhaps I know you best in the dark—
these lightless hours when
we sit in the midst of brokenness
and my hand finds your hand,
and my silence finds your silence,
my loss finds your loss,
and together, somehow,
we find peace.
And nothing can be said.
And nothing can be done
to change the past.
We meet in the these darkened hours,
with nothing but our willingness
to meet these darkened hours,
these hours we would have pushed away,
these hours that bring us closer to each other.

 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com, December 6, 2022

Prague

The day I learned my wife was dying
I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had
a good life, I’d punch him in the nose.
How much life represents a good life?

Maybe a hundred years, which would
give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo
and take the train to Vladivostok,
learn German to read Thomas Mann

in the original. Even more baseball games,
more days at the beach and the baking
of more walnut cakes for family birthdays.
How much time is enough time? How much

is needed for all those unspent kisses,
those slow walks along cobbled streets?

 

Stephen Dobyns, The Day’s Last Light Reddens the Leaves on the Copper Beach (BOA Editions, 2016)

Hold Out Your Hand

Let’s forget the world for a while
fall back and back
into the hush and holy
of now

are you listening? This breath
invites you
to write the first word
of your new story

your new story begins with this:
You matter

you are needed—empty
and naked
willing to say yes
and yes and yes

Do you see
the sun shines, day after day
whether you have faith
or not
the sparrows continue
to sing their song
even when you forget to sing
yours

stop asking: Am I good enough?
Ask only
Am I showing up
with love?

Life is not a straight line
it’s a downpour of gifts, please—
hold out your hand

 

Julia Fehrenbacher, janicefalls.wordpress.com December 17, 2018

Hitchhikers

Walker Evans Photograph, 1930’s

Hitchhikers

(based on Evans’ photograph)

Hard times brought them out early
On this dreary stretch of road
Carrying a suitcase and a bedroll
With a frying pan tied to it,
The kind you use over a campfire
When a moss-covered log is your pillow.

He's hopeful and she's ashamed
To be asking a stranger to take them
Away from here in a cloud of flying
Gravel and dust, past leafless trees
With their snarled and pointy little twigs.
A man and a woman catching a ride
To where water tastes like cherry wine.

She'll work as a maid or a waitress,
He'll pump gas or rob banks.
They'll buy a car as big as a hearse
To make their fast getaway,
Not forgetting to stop for you, mister,
If you are down on your luck yourself.

 

Charles Simic, My Noiseless Entourage (Harcourt, 2005)

For My People

 For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

       repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

       and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

       unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

       unseen power;

 

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

       gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

       washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

       hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

       dragging along never gaining never reaping never

       knowing and never understanding;

 

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

       backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

       and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

       and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

       Miss Choomby and company;

 

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

       to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

       people who and the places where and the days when, in

       memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

       were black and poor and small and different and nobody

       cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

 

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

       be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

       play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

       marry their playmates and bear children and then die

       of consumption and anemia and lynching;

 

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox

       Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

       Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

       people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

       people's pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

       land and money and something—something all our own;

 

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

       being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

       burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

       and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

       who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

 

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

       the dark of churches and schools and clubs

       and societies, associations and councils and committees and

       conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

       devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

       preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

       false prophet and holy believer;

 

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

       from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

       trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

       all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

 

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

       bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

       generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

       loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

       healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

       in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

       be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

       rise and take control.

 

Margaret Walker, For My People (Yale University Press, 1942)

To Sara, 1969

Nearly sixteen years ago,
you made your way into this world,
calm and quiet, with none
of the fuss or emergency
of Sean and Nate.
Mom didn’t break a sweat.
When you started crawling,
you strutted, hands gaiting out
like a Tennessee Walker’s,
your head held high, eyes gleaming.
You swam at three, floating
to the pool’s surface in Fontana
and paddling away.
Tonight, fifteen, you’re boarding
a plane to Ireland by yourself
on your first flight, seven hours
in the dark across the Atlantic
to land in Shannon at dawn.
Backpack in place,
you walk the long corridor
beyond where Mom and I can go.
We stand there, grinning,
watching and waving,
as you pass through security
and emerge on the other side.

 

Bill Jones, At Sunset, Facing East (Apprentice House, 2016)

My Father Watched Westerns

He couldn’t get enough of them: those dusty
landscapes on the other side of the screen,
men on horses seeking justice or revenge.
All through my life if he was tired I would

find him in a dark room full of gunfire.
His movie titles included words like Lone
and Lonesome though mostly families
stuck together and young men learned

to risk their lives for whatever was noble
or right. I could not sit through them;
women were left behind in saloons
with hair and dresses as soft as pillows,

their possibilities perfumed by estrogen.
But it was the men my father was watching.
They had wide hats and leather boots,
masks made of betrayal. My father

remembered the dangerous people
he faced in courtrooms, his arguments
like bullets. His mind was full of places
that were not yet settled, places where

law was new. A man had a horse, a few
friends, some deep internal compass.
People relied on him; what he needed most
was courage. My father related to this.
He knew, after all, how the west was won.

 

Faith Shearin, Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2011)