Stay

Come to me

We will play king of the island

And eat meatball subs

Unless, of course, you are vegetarian now

And remember Lafayette, Whiteface

Where you showed me your world

Will you come, stay with me

Here.

I can’t ask you to come

But will you?

We will play king of the island

And eat meatball subs

Unless, of course, you are vegetarian now

We will sit in the the maroon Honda

At low tide

And remember

So stay,

With me

http://www.newwest.net/city/article/the_favorite_poem_project_mark_sherouse/C8/L8/

http://www.newwest.net/city/article/the_favorite_poem_project_mayor_john_engen/C8/L8/

http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/the_favorite_poem_project_amber_greymorning/C39/L39/

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,

Its white flag waving over everything,

I just discovered the poet Billy Collins. I read an article about him in Poets & Writer’s Magazine and he seemed interesting. As I am looking through the shelves in the Granby Library (always the 800 section) I see his name on a thin book of poetry, Sailing Alone Around the Room. I check it out and read it the minute I return home. My favorite poem is Dharma about his dog that “trots out the front door/every morning/without a hat or an umbrella,/without any money/or the keys to her doghouse”.

Now, I’m reading Nine Horses. His poems speak to me in a way poetry never has up to this point in my 37 years. I’m reading the poem Velocity. The poet is drawing a motorcyclist who rides up next to the bus he is on. In the portrait of this motorcyclist, he draws “lines to indicate speed”.

We would all

Appear to have speed lines trailing behind us

As we rush down the long tunnel of time

And I say aloud, hmph, to myself; no one is here. I just imagine and feel his poetry like nothing before it. It’s so much fun to discover something new; a new poet, a new book, a new trail in the woods.  

One of my favorite Artists - Alison Krauss singing Gravity

I left home when I was seventeen, I just grew tired of falling down, And I’m sure I was told, the allure of the road, Would be all I found. And all the answers that I started with turned out questions in the end, So years roll on by, And just like the sky, The road never ends.

And the people who love me still ask me, When are you coming back to town, And I answer quite frankly, When they stop building roads, And all God needs is gravity to hold me down.

Mountain Winds

-*

It,Aeos windy again and I feel less vibrant

As I drive over the flats and up to the pass

The snow drifts over the black top

In twirls of snowy whiteness

At times the twirls are slow motion

And times it is a whirling dervish

-*

Occasionally I can see the homes on the hills

A headlight approaches and I ease to the right

I can,Aeot see anyone in front of me

And there are no lights behind me

-*

I listen to a Kenny Chesney

And there is something about his music that reminds me

Of summer, high schools friends

And a much simpler time

I love him for his music and memories

Snow,
blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
…

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it.

Loss and Gain

When I compare
What I have lost with what I have gained,
What I have missed with what attained,
Little room do I find for pride.

I am aware
How many days have been idly spent;
How like an arrow the good intent
Has fallen short or been turned aside.

But who shall dare
To measure loss and gain in this wise?
Defeat may be victory in disguise;
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

In November-* by Lisa Mueller

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must some how take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

A really interesting poem from Mary Oliver -

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting o over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

**** (from a letter by Emily Dickinson)

When you wrote
you would come in November
it would please me
it was November then-but the time
has moved. You went
with the coming of the birds-they will go
with your coming,
but to see you is so much sweeter than birds,
I could excuse the spring. . .
Will you come in November, and will November
come, or is this the hope that opens
and shuts like the eyes of the wax doll?

The Summer Day *

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I meanthe one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The simplest of bridges, a promise
that you will go forward,

that you can come back.
So you cross over.

It says you can come back.
So you go forward.

But even if you come back
then you must go forward.

I am always either going back
or coming forward. There is always

something I have to carry,
something I leave behind.

I am a figure in a logic problem,
standing on one shore

with the things I cannot leave,
looking across at what I cannot have.

Another great poem this week from Writer’s Almanac

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.
Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

They sit around the house
not doing much of anything: the boxed set
of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread:

The French-cut silk shirts
which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
and make me look exactly
like the kind of middle-aged man
who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:

The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
the mysteries of the heavens
but which I only used once or twice
to try to find something heavenly
in the windows of the high-rise down the road,
and which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
when it could be examining the Crab Nebula:

The 30-day course in Spanish
whose text I never opened,
whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,

save for Tape One, where I never learned
whether the suave American
conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
at a Madrid hotel about the possibility
of obtaining a room
actually managed to check in.

I like to think
that one thing led to another between them
and that by Tape Six or so
they’re happily married
and raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.

But I’ll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
for a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,

and I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
there lives a woman with, say,
a fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
drying in their tubes

on the table where the violin
she bought on a whim
lies entombed in the permanent darkness
of its locked case
next to the abandoned chess set,

a woman who has always dreamed of becoming
the kind of woman the man I’ve always dreamed of becoming
has always dreamed of meeting.

And while the two of them discuss star clusters
and CEzanne, while they fence delicately
in Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,

she and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
fixing up a little risotto,
enjoying a modest cabernet,
while talking over a day so ordinary
as to seem miraculous.

[this is an amazing poem]
Oe.. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light: Oe.
And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and CEzanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth … a broken bottle.
And now, I’d like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,