going where I'm going

We're flying home today after a pretty great week of theatre and friends and birthdays (I am very tired but also very happy), so I'm posting this one from the airport. Too on the nose, or just on theme? Either way, Ada Limón never misses.

Every time I'm in an airport
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I'd be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe in
the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups—we're small and
flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I'm going, all over again.

—Ada Limón, "The Problem With Travel," from Bright Dead Things, 2015.

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.

doing what she can to survive

For K, who loves Ada Limón just as much as I do, and also for the raccoon I saw sneaking behind a car in the parking lot next to my building yesterday.

I thought it was the neighbor's cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning's shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

—Ada Limón, "Give Me This," from The Hurting Kind, 2022, but originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2020.

whatever winter did to us

I thought I would kick us off this year with Ada Limón on spring.

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

—Ada Limón, "Instructions on Not Giving Up," originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, May 15, 2017.

we can walk together

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,

the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How canaaaa
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

—Ada Limón, "The Leash" from The Carrying, 2018.

that would be enough

I got to this poem via poets.org's Shelter in Poems. It made me feel some feelings, and not just because I started singing Hamilton to myself and then maybe cried a little.

Say tomorrow doesn't come.

Say the moon becomes an icy pit.

Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.

Say the sun's a foul black tire fire.

Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks.

Say the raccoon's a hot tar stain.

Say the shirt's plastic ditch-litter.

Say the kitchen's a cow's corpse.

Say we never get to see it: bright

future, stuck like a bum star, never

coming close, never dazzling.

Say we never meet her. Never him.

Say we spend our last moments staring

at each other, hands knotted together,

clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.

Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be

enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive,

right here, feeling lucky.

—Ada Limón (b. 1976), "The Conditional," 2013.