Category: Poetry

Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I come to any conclusion?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace?

I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it.
Actually, I probably think too much.

Then I step out into the garden,
where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man, 
is tending his children, the roses.

– Mary Oliver

There was an apple tree in the yard—
this would have been
forty years ago—behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts—
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

– Louise Glück

Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

– Maxine Kumin

I am tired of having hands
she said
I want wings—

But what will you do without your hands
to be human?

I am tired of human
she said
I want to live on the sun—

Pointing to herself:

Not here.
There is not enough
warmth in this place.
Blue sky, blue ice

the blue rotunda
lifted over
the flat street—

and then, after a silence:

I want
my heart back
I want to feel everything again—

That’s what
the sun meant: it meant
scorched—

It is not finally
interesting to remember.
The damage

is not interesting.
No one who knew me then
is still alive.

My mother
was a beautiful woman—
they all said so.

I have to imagine
everything
she said

I have to act
as though there is actually
a map to that place:

when you were a child—

And then:

I’m here
because it wasn’t true; I

distorted it—

I want she said
a theory that explains
everything

in the mother’s eye
the invisible
splinter of foil

the blue ice
locked in the iris—

Then:

I want it
to be my fault
she said
so I can fix it—

Blue sky, blue ice,
street like a frozen river

you’re talking
about my life
she said

except
she said
you have to fix it

in the right order
not touching the father
until you solve the mother

a black space
showing
where the word ends

like a crossword saying
you should take a breath now

the black space meaning
when you were a child—

And then:

the ice
was there for your own protection

to teach you
not to feel—

the truth
she said

I thought it would be like
a target, you would see

the center—

Cold light filling the room.

I know where we are
she said
that’s the window
when I was a child

That’s my first home, she said
that square box—
go ahead and laugh.

Like the inside of my head:
you can see out
but you can’t go out—

Just think
the sun was there, in that bare place

the winter sun
not close enough to reach
the children’s hearts

the light saying
you can see out
but you can’t go out

Here, it says,
here is where everything belongs

– Louise Glück

Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize

“The stars are words”

and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words,
and so is this world too.

And I realize that no matter where I am,
whether in a little room full of thought,

or in this endless universe of stars and mountains,
it’s all in my mind.

– Jack Kerouac