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.