Poem for the Day: Good Friday, with thanks to Richard Hugo

It's a bad Good Friday
snow and mud
and mongrels in the road
Is that how it went?
But I'm not in a dive bar,
my life's not a decaying
shed along some lonely road.
I've got a glass of red wine
and a bowl of tortilla chip crumbs
The towel wrapping my head makes
my mouth a place of intimate
conversation, crunching
and jaw, and that's nice.
Who cares if the baby vomited
all over my clothes, her mouth
a passive conduit of this morning's
oatmeal? I've seen worse.
My glass is half-full
of boxed wine, but at least
it's not the cheapest,
and the water's hot,
my feet are clean,
it's raining only outside.
Not flippant, but grateful
for words that forecast
what images cannot:
My Lord will live again
day-after-tomorrow,
baby will mend.
I gladly jump through a window
from a room of suffering,
I duck my head and slip away
from Good Friday,
just for a few moments,
hoping, as all flesh hopes,
that escape from pain is forever.
Contentment is in knowing
the endings of things,
and when the endings are good,
contentment is easy
as picking strawberries,
warmed by late summer--
and though that's only half the wine
in the glass, I'm happy enough
this Friday, at this table,
my baby sipping honeyed water
not far from me, her moon cheek,
close by my hands.

Poem by Rilke: Und doch, obwohl ein jeder von sich strebt

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal each other?

Is it flower
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?

Is it the animals, warmly moving,
or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it, then? God, are you the one
who is living life?

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours
II, 12

translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Poem for the Day: Maundy Thursday

I rub my thumb up each arch,
over the delicate bones of the toes.
Do I love this person, whose feet I wash?
Can I lift my head from this basin?

That's the hard part.
Kneeling is easy--
there's satisfaction in rubbing dirt from skin,
weighing a heel in my palm.

In the supplicant bend of my head
I find myself holy.
Bowing to the towel,
I wait for more feet.

I could wash all night,
light from white candles
crowning me. But washing
without seeing is blasphemy--

There is blood in the water,
mud from a road,
caked in the creases
of the person I love.

My feet, I do not love,
I dread the touch of water,
the music of your fingers.
And yet--

wash my hands,
my head, my mouth.
Where else can I go?
Your basin is full of fire,

full of blood,
winged things,
a stone from the first day,
formed in minutes.

Poem for the Day: Other Dreams

The small ones I fold,
slip into envelopes,
crisp, garlic-leaf paper.
If I hold them to the window
I see their patterns glowing
like the veins of leaves.
They trace my longings
when I am weak and dull:
deep bathtubs,
a bright kitchen window,
flowers on the table every day.

I lick the envelopes, drop
them into the box, flip the arm
signalling the postal carrier
to take and deliver
but they return to me,
addressed in my own hand
to my own address,
and the slips of paper
are whiter and thinner,
fall to ashes in my fingers.

The other dreams are different.
There are no envelopes
to contain moving water,
the wind that catches me empty,
boned, a whistle in ear tunnel.
When do they leave me?
Do they come back,
pearls in the stomachs of pigs,
breadcrumbs salting the creek,
the creek so swollen with rain
that the birds open beaks,
balance on twig-feet,
welcome the riches of teeming grass,
the land that is suddenly river.

Poem for the Day: Linda's Tulips

Red tulips
splayed wide like carcasses
black spill
backlit by furious sun

Poem for the Day: High Heels

Walking with extra height,
she is now twice as high
as her friends,
she casts a long shadow
on bus steps,
birds, teachers,
window washers wonder
tower or girl?
(She suffers from vertigo)
In speech class, she hisses
her eses with confidence,
knowing what trees, women,
giraffe feel like as they
eat upright,
turn their heads to sun,
languidly sip contrails,
And the sun is closer,
the universe almost within reach.

The first two lines of this poem is taken from a brief interview I held with Merry about wearing her new high heeled shoes to school (for the record and my reputation, they are not true high heels).

Poem for the Day: A Package from Grandma

removed for submission purposes

(this is not a poem)
Guess who just sang in her first big real concert? MEEEEE! "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down," "Leaving Lousiana," and a new one from songwriter/singer Amy. Tonight our band was called "The Unreliable Sallys" and we had a fantastic bass player, mandolin player, and an electric guitar player. . .and though I felt like a bit of an outsider with such talented musicians, I managed to remember the words and not put my sweaty foot in my mouth.

This is the only picture I have, though the concert was taped. . .our dear friend Kevin snapped it on his cell phone. That's Martin next to me (I'm the white blob in the middle wearing the lucky scarf my mother gave me for my birthday). Special thanks to Kevin and Sally for adopting our daughters all afternoon, bathing them, and making them (and us) feel oh, so loved.

Poem for the Day: Bear About Town

I'm jealous of the big brown bear in my daughter's board book. I long for his tall, European townhouse, where every room sings in plum purples and cherry reds. The rooms are so pretty you want to eat them like hard candy.

Too, I want Bear's town, where everyone waves with innocuous paws that could crush a child in a minute but instead accomplish dainty tasks, like pouring tea, tying tiny apron strings, holding petite packages containing yellow clocks and iced cakes with cherries perched on top.

Fat bumblebees never sting but hover and buzz in the ears of the bears who love them, who love their park with the empty bench and the bunches of balloons held by small bears and grinned upon by old bears.

The bakery, jam-packed with baguettes and impossible chocolate cakes and confections, does not demand money, only a toothy smile, and all the teeth in bear's town are for tearing crusty bread and biting into pies made from plums from Grandma's orchard, studded with candles for a small bear's birthday as his drum-playing cousin bears beat a syncopated racket.

Rabbits, who are just rabbits, live in bushes at the foot of creamy green, teardrop trees, on top of a hill packed with clean Holland-like streets with tulips sprouting from windowsills and a playground that still has a merry-go-round because little bears never break arms or legs or smash their furry heads but play and play until dark under the chimneys of their town that spout nontoxic smoke into a darkening sky full of goodwill and bear acceptance and three striped birds that my daughter counts:

one, two, three,
before we close the book.

Poem for the Day: Sally in the Street

We found the woman in the road,
ironing board waist-level
cutting the pavement in two.
Her eyes reflected our headlights
as she lifted a finger, tested for heat,
fell to the cuff of a blue pinstripe,
hummed as she finished the first sleeve,
nosing the iron under the collar.

Sensing my father's impatience,
my mother scolded, Let her finish.
Let her finish, you hear?
It's hard enough to press a shirt,
let alone in the middle of the night,
in the middle of the road, blinded
like a possum by headlights.
Put the car in park.
My father shut off the engine,
and we sat in sudden silence as the woman
steamed and smoothed, taking her time
with two tucks in the back, skirting
around buttons and snapping
the shirt at last, and the noise was like
a sail catching wind. When we saw her slip
over the curb and into nowhere,
board tucked under her arm,
the shirt lingered stark
against the darkness, and we smelled
starch and heat, heard hiss and shudder,
longed for warm sleeves, for crisp cotton
over stomach and under chin.

Poem for the Day: Motherhood

Startling awake in the morning,
I wonder that my life is this one all around me,
the smells in the kitchen, my body marked and mapped
by babies and garden work and sitting too long to write.
I notice more every day, how nothing is shadowed
but whole and solid, how the frozen lilac branches
soften, bud, embarrass us with fragrance.
Faces are precious things I pick up and hold,
feeling their contours against the bones of my chest,
releasing them into deep sky.
Will they be the clouds I see when I am very old,
will they return to me in the glitter of dew,
in the clear waters of Jackson Run,
swollen with snowmelt and rain, warming in late afternoon
when the children run down with their nets,
hoping for whales, treasure, a wriggling minnow,
something that they can touch and call their own.

for Kara, on her thirty-third birthday

My dear Kara, childhood friend, soulmate and delight of my heart,
I just wrote you a poem for your birthday, and if that's not enough
here are two of your nieces, including your godchild, offering you
a perfect daffodil, plucked in early spring in your honor.

Cleveland Pear on an April Evening

Tonight we stopped the car,
opened the windows, drew in breath
at the world of white lace
cut through by ebony bark.
With the windows down
it was all as real as we'd hoped.

and one more. . .

!

Okay, I know I'm a bit late, but I'm thinking of trying to write one poem a day for National Poetry Month. I've still got most of April. . .I wrote mine for today, about Old Henry's ashes, and I'm thinking about continuing with the burial/cremation theme. How cheery for spring!
Anyone want to join me? It can be super-short and crazy-bad. But you'll be supporting Poetry. I'd make a more compelling case but Old Henry burned up all my time, and now I'm being summoned to find a very specific book. Must tear off.

wishing

Tonight, down the hill at the picnic table: smoke from a dying fire, the voices of adults sitting on camp chairs, shouts from the children having a last swing before bedtime. I look up into a warm dark sky. Through the bare branches of the black walnut, the moon curves and the stars come out. A child's voice: "Star light, star bright. . ." And later, walking up the stairs to the house, laden with empty cups and leftovers, Elspeth and Bea and I look up at the stars again. I try to think of what to wish for, and the first thing that comes to my mind is a vague wish for ever more successes in my writing, but then Elspeth says, "For sweet dreams!" and my perspective shifts from my exhausted wishing for more to a gentler hope for lasting, good things, for the happiness of those I love and yes, for a sweet sleep this night.