curl your toes into the grass

Happy May 1! In keeping with a year of poetry month that has been pretty off-kilter in terms of my posting schedule, I am posting my closing poem for April 30 today. It's been a weird month—and, frankly, a weird year so far—with travel and health stuff and being in a new place. I hope that by this time next year, I'll be a lot more settled in Houston (and also, like, not having daily migraines). But it's still been a good April in many ways, and the poems have certainly helped. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next year. ♥

If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden's dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.

—Ross Gay, "Thank You" from Against Which, 2006.

home

This year in particular, I can't wrap up poetry month without Mahmoud Darwish. At the beginning of the month, I think there was a part of me that hoped that by the time we got here, he might not feel quite so immediately and desperately relevant—but that's not where we are, and frankly it's not where we've been for all eighteen years that I've been posting poems (and longer). I could have done an entire month of Mahmoud Darwish at basically any point in those eighteen years, even if it feels more acute and immediate right now.

It was also a challenge to decide on a poem, but earlier in the month I committed to this one, and I stand by it—I love this one. That said, you should also (at the least) go read Think of Others and In Jerusalem.

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.

—Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), "I Belong There," from Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (2003).

break open

It's the last Sunday in April. Here's some Mary Oliver.

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

—Mary Oliver (1935-2019), "Lead" from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two, 2005.

a hundred mountains

For several years, I've wanted to post Ursula K. Le Guin's poem "For Gabriela Mistral," which is a gorgeous poem about translation and geography and language and connection across time. But as much as I love poets writing about other poets, I felt a little weird posting it without actually having read any Mistral. Then, this year for my birthday, Lucy got me a volume of Mistral poetry translated by Le Guin, and I had a different problem, which was picking a poem to post alongside the Le Guin poem. So here is Le Guin on Mistral, for today, and Mistral herself—also about connections and words—for April 20, one of my missed days.

                    En el Valle de Elqui, ceñido
                de cien montañas o de más...

Forty years beyond her mortal years
she came back to me, to our Pacific,
she came here, she
who sank the meek and blinded saint
and the grim men from Spain
in the glory of the lord of angels
and a gust of the craziest wind.
She stood on this northern shore
where gulls whirled like torn paper
and said in the language that I spoke
before I spoke words, "Come!"

"Come!" she said, standing
heavy-bodied and rough-voiced,
deep-breasted as the hills:
"I came north, but you didn't know me.
I've gone home now to the valley
encircled by a hundred mountains,
a hundred mountains, maybe more.
You must come and you must learn
my language."

    If I walk south
with the ocean always on my right
and the mountains on my left,
swimming the mouths of the rivers,
the estuaries and the great canal,
if I walk from high tide to low tide
and full moon to new moon, south,
and from the equinox to solstice, south,
across the equator in a dream of volcanoes,
if I walk through all the Tropics
past bays of amethyst and bays of jade
from April spring to April autumn, south,
and cross the deserts of niter and asbestos
with the sea silver on my right
and a hundred mountains on my left,
a hundred mountains, maybe more,
I will come to the valley.

If I walk all the way, my poet,
if I can walk all the way,
I will come to you.
And I will speak your language.

—Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), "For Gabriela Mistral," from Sixty Odd (1994-1999), and in this case from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems: 1960-1920 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

*

                A Blanca Subercaseaux

    Yo no sé si podré venir.
A ver si te cumplo, hermana.

    Llego, si vengo, en aire dulce
por no helarte la llanada
o en el filo de tu sueño
con amor, y sin palabra.

    Empínate por si me cuesta
hallémonos a media marcha,
y me llevas un poco de tierra
por que recuerde mi Posada.

    No temas si bulto no llevo
tampoco si llego mudada.
Y no llores si no te respondo
porque mi culpa fue la palabra.
Pero dame la tuya, la tuya,
que era como paloma posada.


                    For Blanca Subercaseaux

    I don't know if I can come
let's see if I can reach you, sister.

    I'll arrive, if I do, on a mild wind,
so as not to freeze your plains,
or at the edges of your dream,
with love, and without a word.

    Stand up tall, in case I find it
hard to meet halfway,
and bring me a little earth
to remember my Inn by.

    Don't worry if I don't have a shape,
or if I look different.
And don't cry if I don't answer,
for my sin was words.
But give me yours, your word
that was like a dove alighting.

—Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), "Encargo a Blanca" or "Message to Blanca," translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, from Lagar or Winepress, 1954. Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

forget the epitaph

When we were in New York, I went to see Suffs on Broadway with my mom. It was great—I have notes, of course, but overall I really enjoyed it, and I'm really glad I got to see it—and when I got home (or rather, back to the hotel) I obviously ended up reading up on the historical figures I didn't know as much about. This is how I learned that after Inez Milholland died, her husband married Edna St. Vincent Millay, who then WROTE A POEM about her husband's dead wife. Because, like, obviously. So this is the poem I would have posted on April 19, if I hadn't already been in bed and half-asleep when I learned of its existence.

                        Read in Washington, November eighteenth, 1923, at the unveiling of a statue
                        of three leaders in the cause of Equal Rights for Women

Upon this marble bust that is not I
Lay the round, formal wreath that is not fame;
But in the forum of my silenced cry
Root ye the living tree whose sap is flame.
I, that was proud and valiant, am no more;—
Save as a dream that wanders wide and late,
Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,
Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.
The stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.
Only my standard on a taken hill
Can cheat the mildew and the red-brown rust
And make immortal my adventurous will.
Even now the silk is tugging at the staff:
Take up the song; forget the epitaph.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), "To Inez Milholland," 1923. I wouldn't say it's Edna's best work, but there's still something about it that really does land.

without a word

I couldn't decide which W. S. Merwin poem to post, so here are two, one for today and one to count for April 17. They're variations on a theme (it's a little weird to be back in Texas where it very much is already summer), and I really enjoy the way Merwin just doesn't use punctuation at all.

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day's colors in the day's shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this

—W. S. Merwin (1927-2019), "Black Cherries," from Garden Time, 2016.

*

The first hay is in and all at once
in the silent evening summer has come
knowing the place wholly the green skin
of its hidden slopes where the shadows will
never reach so far again and a few
gray hairs motionless high in the late
sunlight tell of rain before morning
and of finding the daybreak under green
water with no shadows but all still the same
still known still the known faces of summer
faces of water turning into the themselves
changing without a word into the themselves

—W. S. Merwin (1927-2019), "After the Spring," published in Poetry (June 1992).

cathedrals

And for today, a poem I've been thinking about, quite possibly constantly, since the first time I read it:

There's this cathedral in my head I keep
making from cricket song and
dying but rogue-in-spirit, still,
bamboo. Not making. I keep
imagining it, as if that were the same
thing as making, and as if making might
bring it back, somehow, the real
cathedral. In anger, as in desire, it was
everything, that cathedral. As if my body
itself cathedral. I conduct my body
with a cathedral's steadiness, I
try to. I cathedral. In desire. In anger.
Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body.
Light enters a cathedral, the way persuasion fills a body.

—Carl Phillips, "And If I Fall," from Star Map with Action Figures, 2018. Between "I cathedral" and the work that comma does in the last line, I am just—this poem, my god. I guess the thing these two poems have in common is that they are both masterpieces of enjambment.

into blossom

I thought I would post two poems today that make me feel things and otherwise have nothing to do with each other. This one is for April 16, and is a poem I thought about posting while we were in Upstate New York, but then I posted the Ada Limón poem about horses instead. So here's another poem that's about horses, more or less.

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

—James Wright (1927-1980), "A Blessing" from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose (1990).

so much to be done

It's very good to be home, and I am very tired. Here's a little Jane Kenyon on that theme.

We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done—the unpacking, the mail
and papers; the grass needed mowing...
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.

—Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), "Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer," from Poetry magazine (February, 1983).

that shit fucked

On my last night in New York City (for this April, at least), here is a poem for Shakespeare day:

And another thing / the grace you brought Othello / how you forged that moor / got him talking down his eloquence as if his tongue wasn't part swan feather / part molasses / how you wrote a church of darkness steepled by Iago / and Ol' Thello its soul / beacon of honor and light / Bruh / that shit literary fire / race-theory brimstone / middle-passage gold

but /

how you played Caliban / his tongue as Othello's / and just as wronged / How you imbibed him with / emblemed him of colonized peoples / got me all riled up / imagining my ancestor's vengeance / a rough blade thrust through Prospero's proud heart / but you didn't / Play ends / Cali still enslaved / Bruh / that shit fucked

—Inua Ellams, "Fuck / Shakespeare," published in Poetry (May 2020). I read this poem for the first time today, while trying to decide what to post for Shakespeare day, and honestly I am obsessed with it now. Like, goddamn.

a kiss or a bullet

So, obviously, I haven't posted a poem in a week. I did have some of the last week already planned out on my spreadsheet, but I haven't had the wherewithal to do the posting itself—this trip has been really wonderful in a lot of ways (leaving aside the couple of days last week when I was super sick), but it's also been absolutely packed, and when I haven't been actively doing something, I have mostly been lying on my hotel bed trying to recoup my energy. We fly home tomorrow, and I might spend the last few days of the month doubling up on poems, but I may also come in a little short, this year. It happens! Sometimes life is a lot!

With all that being said, here is a poem for yesterday, April 22 (which is when I started writing this post). Later today, if I can get the internet to work a little better than it's working right now, I might post a poem in honor of Shakespeare's birth/day day; but for now, this one. Warnings for references to gun violence.

Say Stop.

Keep your lips pressed together
after you say the p:

(soon they'll try
and pry

your breath out—)

―

Whisper it
three times in a row:

Stop Stop Stop

In a hospital bed
like a curled up fish, someone's

gulping at air—

How should you apply
your breath?

—

List all of the people
you would like
to stop.

Who offers love,
who terror—

Write Stop.
Put a period at the end.

Decide if it's a kiss
or a bullet.

—Dana Levin, "Instructions for Stopping," 2017. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 6, 2017, and in Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence in the U.S. (Beacon, 2017). In the notes on the poem, Levin says, "To write this poem, I sat in a room, saying 'stop' over and over in order to hear how it sounded, to feel how it felt in my mouth. Then I wrote it down. Then I added a period, which posed the deciding question."

nothing under my skin but light

This long weekend has been so rejuvenating in so many ways, and some of the highlights have included getting to hang out with a couple of exceptionally cool kids (ages 5 and 10) and their wonderful parents. This poem was a request, and as soon as I read it tonight I knew there was no way I was going to post anything else. Billy Collins always knocks it right out of the park.

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light—
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

—Billy Collins, "On Turning Ten," from The Art of Drowning, 1995.

these fleeting temples

Today is my birthday! I turned 39, and am already kind of looking forward to 40, next year—we're having this big wedding shindig a couple months ahead of my 40th birthday, which feels like a pretty great way to celebrate. But since it's the last year of my 30s, and this year has involved a lot of really major life changes, I've been doing a lot of reflecting—about myself, but also about the world, and the passage of time, and change. You know, all those light and easy topics. Anyway, this poem makes me really happy.

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say "bless you"
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. "Don't die," we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don't want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, "Here,
have my seat," "Go ahead—you first," "I like your hat."

—Danusha Lameris, "Small Kindnesses," from Bonfire Opera and originally published in The New York Times, 9/19/2019.

creature of liminal spaces

And for today, April 13: Ada Limón. I borrowed K's copy of The Carrying to post this, since mine is back in Houston. I love this poem, and it's also one of like four or five poems on my "post this eventually" list that involves horses. We saw several horses on our drive to dinner tonight, and some of them were wearing COATS. (It's cold here.)

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That's how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn't a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

—Ada Limón, "What I Didn't Know Before," from The Carrying, 2018.

a little room in a house set aflame

The sonnet is my favorite poetic form. I can make a pretty good case for the villanelle, and in general poems that fuck with formalism often speak to me. But there's just nothing like a sonnet, and despite being a very tight form in many ways, it's so adaptable and can do so much. Here are (for April 7 and April 9) two very different sonnets.

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold
While your better selves watch from the bleachers.
I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow
You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night
In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-
Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars
Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

—Terrance Hayes, "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin ["I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison"]" from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, 2018, and originally published in Poetry magazine, 2017.

*

Amor, de grano a grano, de planeta a planeta,
la red del viento con sus países sombríos,
la guerra con sus zapatos de sangre,
o bien el día y la noche de la espiga.

Por donde fuimos, islas o puentes o banderas,
violines del fugaz otoño acribillado,
repitió la alegría los labios de la copa,
el dolor nos detuvo con su lección de llanto.

En todas las repúblicas desarrollaba el viento
su pabellón impune, su glacial cabellera,
y luego regresaba la flor a sus trabajos.

Pero en nosotros nunca se calcinó el otoño.
Y en nuestra patria inmóvil germinaba y crecía
el amor con los derechos del rocío.


Love, from seed to seed, from planet to planet,
the wind with its net through the darkening nations,
war with its bloody shoes,
or even the day, with a thorny night.

Wherever we went, islands or bridges or flags,
there were the violins of the fleeting autumn, bullet-laced;
happiness echoing at the rim of the wineglass;
sorrow detaining us, with its lesson of tears.

Through all those republics the wind whipped—
its arrogant pavillions, its glacial hair;
it would return the flowers, later, to their work.

But no withering autumn ever touched us.
In our stable place a love sprouted, grew:
as rightfully empowered as the dew.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XXVIII from Cien sonetos de amor, or One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

flowers

Today was a long travel day, and I was going to post something kind of low-key because I am pretty tired. But we're staying with my wonderful friend K, and when I mentioned that it was poetry month and I needed to post something, she sent me this one. Which, you know, well. It sticks with you.

Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

—Noor Hindi, "Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying," published in Poetry, December 2020.

you can’t plan on the heart

In many, many years (this is the eighteenth, she’s almost old enough to vote) of posting poems for National Poetry Month, I don’t think I’ve ever posted a poem FROM THE AIR. But there’s a first time for everything, I’ve been so busy and stressed that I haven’t been doing the best job of keeping up with my poetry posts, and I bought wifi for this flight. SO, from 30,000 feet or whatever, here’s some Frank O’Hara that I meant to post yesterday! I also cannot figure out how to do a cut tag on my ipad so uh, sorry.

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind, I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says “That’s
not like Frank!”, all to the good! I
don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart-
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

—Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), “My Heart,” in this case from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (University of California Press, 1995).

as we

It's been kind of a hell of a couple of days, which has included things like the power going out at 3am during a huge storm last night (we got it back eventually), my computer dying, shelling out for a new computer, not getting nearly enough sleep, several migraines, and a whole bunch of meetings with wedding vendors. I need to catch up on poetry, but I'm posting this from the new computer, which is still a work in progress (although also very shiny and beautiful), and I am very tired, so I am making my job a little easier tonight.

For a lot of reasons—including the fact that it's time-consuming and annoying to re-code in html—I don't post a lot of poetry that relies on on-the-page formatting. But every once in a while I read one that's so fucking good that I can't resist. And in this case, I am just going to link it instead of reposting it: Obligations 2 by Layli Long Soldier, from New Poets of Native Nations, 2018. It's extraordinary.

on the moon

Yesterday, Lucy and I drove to Austin and back, not to see the eclipse, but to see two wonderful friends of mine who happened to be there! They're in town for a couple of weeks, but we leave for New York and Boston on Friday and they leave Texas the same day we get back, so this was the only weekend we could manage. But we made it work, and I am so, so glad we did. Friends are so good!!

It was a long day, though, and by the time we got home I was way too tired to post a poem, even though we did go to Book People in Austin and I did buy like five new poetry books. I'll post a poem for yesterday at some point, but here is a poem for today, total solar eclipse day:

not back, let's not come back, let's go by the speed of
queer zest & stay up
there & get ourselves a little
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden

with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean
i was already moonlighting
as an online moonologist
most weekends, so this is the immensely

logical next step, are you
packing your bags yet, don't forget your
sailor moon jean jacket, let's wear
our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter,

queerer moon gravity, let's love each other
(so good) on the moon, let's love
the moon
on the moon

—Chen Chen, "i love you to the moon &," originally published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day on May 31, 2021 and just an absolute and utter delight. Is it too cloudy to see the eclipse here? Yes. Do I care? No. It's still eclipse day! Let's love each other on the moon.

and the moonbeams kiss the sea

Here's a classic for y'all tonight:

The fountains mingle with the river
    And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
    With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
    All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
    Why not I with thine?—

See the mountains kiss high heaven
    And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
    If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
    And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
    If thou kiss not me?

—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), "Love's Philosophy." I haven't posted any Shelley since "Ozymandias" in 2009, which is kind of bonkers, but it is also fundamentally true that Percy is the inferior Shelley. Mary 100% all the way.

the thing is

Since 2011, when my brother died, I've been posting poems that relate in some way to grief on April 5, which is the anniversary of his memorial service. I really love this one, which is like a punch in the gut in the absolute best way. Ellen Bass is just so, so good.

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

—Ellen Bass, "The Thing Is" from Mules of Love, 2002.

then love comes

It's definitely cheating to post the same poem today that poetryisnotaluxury posted, but I am such a sucker for sonnets, and Carol Ann Duffy is just so good. I hadn't actually read this one before, and it is really wonderful.

Thought of by you all day, I think of you.
The birds sing in the shelter of a tree.
Above the prayer of rain, unacred blue,
not paradise, goes nowhere endlessly.
How does it happen that our lives can drift
far from our selves, while we stay trapped in time,
queuing for death? It seems nothing will shift
the pattern of our days, alter the rhyme
we make with loss to assonance with bliss.
Then love comes, like a sudden flight of birds
from earth to heaven after rain. Your kiss,
recalled, unstrings, like pearls, this chain of words.
Huge skies connect us, joining here to there.
Desire and passion on the thinking air.

—Carol Ann Duffy, "Rapture," from Rapture, 2005.

one small hand

Is it perhaps a little early in the month to be throwing down Naomi Shihab Nye? Maybe. On the other hand, I sure am feeling some type of way about the world, these days, and she's an incredible poet for those feelings—including that time I accidentally went viral on tumblr with Gate A-4. So here's another Nye poem that fucks me up.

        We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
                                                                                —Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, "Making a Fist" from Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry (University of Utah Press, 1988).

the daffodils can go fuck themselves

Starting the war poems early this year.

The daffodils can go fuck themselves.
I'm tired of their crowds, yellow rantings
about the spastic sun that shines and shines
and shines. How are they any different

from me? I, too, have a big messy head
on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind.
I flower and don't apologize. There's nothing
funny about good weather. Oh, spring again,

the critics nod. They know the old joy,
that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot
of future growing things, each one
labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang.

If I died falling from a helicopter, then
this would be an important poem. Then
the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore
declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous

youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren't you
meat? But I won't be another bashful shank.
The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,
the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop

interrupting me with your boring beauty.
All the boys are in the field gnawing raw
bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who
the hell are they? This is a poem about war.

—Jennifer Chang, "Dorothy Wordsworth," 2012. I got this poem from poets.org, which tells me that it was previously published in The Nation and Best American Poetry. I really like this poem. Dorothy Wordsworth deserved better.

spring arrives regardless

Happy April, even if I do not really feel like it is April—2024 has already been kind of a year. But we're still here, so, as always, there will be one poem per day (ish) between now and April 30. 

Every time I feel close
to understanding the world
the white kettle on my stove sounds
and I rise, attending to it
with annoyance and the pleasure
of the unmade cup of tea.
This is what it's like to live in March
or perhaps always, an unconvincing word
in any context. Blue-gold on night's branches
what part do we take in the play?
Whose turn is it to perform competence
and knowledge in the absence of both?
Unable to feel anything against the wind
I know it is spring. Time tells me so.
Never (equally as unconvincing)
have I been someone with faith in order
and human law. Love is unpredictable.
Spring arrives regardless.

—Alex Dimitrov, "March," from Love and Other Poems (2021), and brought to me via the wonderful folks at the poetryisnotaluxury instagram. Yes, I do recognize that this is the second year in a row I have posted a March poem on April 1.