kiss the apocalypse goodbye

Three days late for April 26, a poem that makes me feel things about a lot of things, but maybe especially the wildness of the English language. I just really love poetry, is the thing.

Never fear. I know the difference between
arteries and ardor, arbor and treed,
my bower and a weak-kneed need, a harbor
where one might moor tonight and a port worth
the oars’ effort to come ashore for, a bit
part and the serpent’s gravid apple. I won’t
flatter myself first or lasting, or
presume to fast and feint a martyr, making
mockery of sacrifice, fatten
for some sweet slaughter. I must believe that I’m
not on your mind. On your body? Sure.
That said, your body has a few ideas
so bright that we might meet some night and render
a dark room light as the last day before
the world ends, that doom that was supposed to dawn
today, but by now, hours worn on and in,
we know there’s no such luxury as fine
as that finality for now. For now,
at least, I’ll have to kiss apocalypse
goodbye, resign myself to this more mundane
pain, the solace of the solstice, year’s
earliest sunset and its longest night.
I try to catch that fade of color with,
without a flash. Both tries prove terrible.
The horizon smudges up against the sky’s blur
like a child’s heavy-handed landscape
and inept erasure. They’ll have to do.
The pictures that I have of you will never
do you justice, either, neither a camera’s
snap nor some synaptic crackle long
elapsed can come remotely close to holding
you. How else would you have it? You need
never fear. I need you, but I only need you
where you are: there, never far, never near.

—Dora Malech, "To the You of Ten Years Ago, Now," from The New Yorker, April 29, 2013.

you cannot make a keepsake of this season

HELLO FRIENDS. Today is April 1, which means that it is, once again, National Poetry Month in the U.S., i.e. the best month of the year. I began posting poetry for National Poetry Month in 2007, which makes this the TENTH YEAR I have done this—not the 10-year anniversary, but the tenth year—and I still have not run out of poetry. I don’t anticipate running out of poetry any time soon. National Poetry Month has been with me through a lot of major life changes and big events, through living in two different countries and four different cities, through highs and lows and a whole lot of graduate school; it’s one of my great constants, and I’m thrilled to be doing it again this year. 

In honor of the ten years, and the changing spaces of the internet, I have made this new dedicated poetry blog, here at The Cruelest Month. I am using this blog both to archive all my years of National Poetry Month past (still a work in progress, as is the tagging system, but it will get there), and to post new poems going forward. I will be doing some cross-posting this year (it’s a hard habit to break), but mostly linking to this blog; I encourage those of you who enjoy National Poetry Month to read (and comment, if you want to) here.

To start us off, this year, a poem that is about spring, and feelings, and time: 

                  I snap the twig to try to trap

the springing and I relearn the same lesson.

You cannot make a keepsake of this season. 

Your heart’s not the source of that sort of sap,

lacks what it takes to fuel, rejects the graft,

though for a moment it’s your guilty fist 

that’s flowering. You’re no good host to this

extremity that points now, broken, back at

the dirt as if to ask are we there yet.

You flatter this small turn tip of a larger 

book of matches that can’t refuse its end,

re-fuse itself, un-flare. Sure. Now forget

again. Here’s a new green vein, another

clutch to take, give, a handful of seconds.

—Dora Malech (b. 1981), "Each Year," 2010. I just discovered Dora Malech, and I kind of love her. Check out her website: here.