Introduction to Poetry

by Billy Collins


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Divorce

I actually didn’t miss too much about you
after the truth came out.
The week after it ended I cleaned
and found the things you left behind:

my tank top in the middle of the floor-
a black puddle where you threw it,
a beer bottle full of urine,
a bible with a bookmark on forgiveness,
a spider web in the window sill,
your teeth in the carpet.

I told myself
that I should have cleaned this place sooner.
It had been disgusting in here.

And I didn’t care what you sought
in city parks at midnight,
whispering to suspicious looking characters,
“Dealing?”

I didn’t blame you for finding a woman
on a street corner
when she asked,
“Are you looking for somebody?”

I didn’t hate you for what you did
in the front seat of your car
in a seat I thought had been reserved for me.

I miss you when I can’t think about these things anymore.
When I wake up in the night from a dream that you were in
and every detail I forgot.

I reach out beyond consciousness
unconsciousness
subconsciousness
beyond right and wrong
trying to remember
how I would wake
in the night
while you were sleeping.
You would be holding my hand,
fingers twisted like a dug up rooted riddle.
I am a bottomless well.
I still reach to hear I love you
in the silence.

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

My Father Had a Soft Way of Viewing the World

My father had a soft way of viewing the world.
The landscape would lie gently upon his eye.
Tenderly, he rubbed the feet of newborns.
Delicately, he glued broken Christmas ornaments.
Sympathetically, he listened to Erik Satie
patiently spell out feeling, piano key by key.
He was a sensitive man, people said,
and I always knew.
But I also saw what the world did not,
the severe anger,
older than he or I,
that resided somewhere
between the ribs and the spine.

Ghost Dance

Rays of sunlight
stretch and lie
out across the grass
like children avoiding chores.

So where is Wovoka,
my father?
Teach me how to Ghost Dance
this fall before the spring.
I don’t care much for the hunt
or farming
so teach me how to dance
for peace and salvation
for when
the grass is high.
I’m old enough to learn.

The sunlight
stretches out across the grass
lying around and rolling about
like a child avoiding chores.
This winter
all the men will be buried
quiet under the new fresh soil
and next spring
the sweet grass
and streams
and trees
and dreams
and buffalo will return.

And all the children
will lie in the tall grass
and laugh
as they roll about
in circles
bellies full
avoiding chores.

And all who dance the Ghost Dance
will be taken up into the air
and suspended there
replaced by the young
lying in the sun
rolling about in the tall grass
playing with shadows
and dreaming dreams.

You As a Symbol

“Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that
we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom?” -Tench
Coxe

“Omne ignotum pro magnificao….whatever is unknown is held to be
magnificent."




I dreamed about you last night.
It wasn’t the first time,
and even when it was the first time,
I didn’t make anything of it
for its randomness made perfect sense,
or the only sense of nonsense
that I will allow my dreams to be.

But when you reappeared again
and again last night,
I now find myself having to admit
that you are a symbol
of something.
A something that feel certain I knew last night,
but seem to have chosen to forget.

I know I dream constantly in sleep
but some secret promise
I must have made to myself
is that I now blatantly refuse to recall my dreams in any wholeness
or meaning or light.
The reasons for it could be many.
First of all, dreaming proved to me how unimaginative I was –
my dreams merely became my stories;
therefore, I couldn’t take credit for anything.
Being too selfish to admit this,
I instead chose to become Unaware.
Unimaginative followed suit.

The more likely reason, though, is that
during the last few years
my dark dreams became progressively more
and too real,
too frequent to tolerate,
and then, when most raw and open,
in the most wonderful senses of the words
with the birth of my daughter,
I ironically found myself nightly plagued with the terrors of torture
about which I could do nothing
but cower and watch –
or worse,
unintentionally cause,
like slipping uncontrollably on mud in a truck
and crushing over laid out wounded soldiers.
Every night so much death,
so many mutilated men,
and everything felt like fact when I awoke.

So I suppose I made a pact with myself:
you may dream
as long as you forget.

But I do remember that I have been dreaming well lately
and, in at least a few instances,
dreaming of you -
which is further strange because we’ve never met.

Though I can’t remember you,
I feel that if I met you as a child
I would have loved you
openly,
though probably not obviously,
or at least I never would have made you aware
of the wideness of my heart.

The truth is I know somewhere inside of me
what these dreams,
what this childlike love,
is supposed to represent,
but I don’t want to remember
because, though it is simple and innocent,
it can and will
get misconstrued by me, by you, by others.

Still it is so nice knowing you intimately
without sight or touch:
knowing that you are good
and believing that you find me worthwhile
to spend time with every so often,
to share with me the things you think
without the complications of intention or strife.

I don’t know how it feels except to say
that when I wake
it feels like we are defeating the death
bad dreams are made of.

As a result, I have had fleeting moments of silly today
where I wonder who people dream of
and whether people dream of each other simultaneously.
I also have had sad moments
where I wonder if my daughter has nightmares
of frightening shadows
that she has never really seen before.
But I wonder too if she can read my mind,
and why she appears to telepathically know
when I soundlessly
watch her sitting in her crib
talking to a picture of Pinocchio
through the most microscopic crack in the door.
At these moments she will knowingly turn and smile directly at me,
as though I called to her
knowing before I do
what my next move should be.

Today I also questioned whether love in heaven -
if there is a heaven -
is even remotely close to what we make it in waking life.
And, though I don’t believe in “heaven,”
I do believe that I should teach my daughter that It exists,
even for those you’ve never met,

for,
if dreams serve to teach us anything,
I feel
that you -
as a symbol -
are certainly a symbol
of that.

Child Development

by Billy Collins


As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

Death Wish

My death was a glorious place.
It’s a shame I can’t rush to get to it any longer,
but I’ve got things to do.

My death was a home,
a nice place to curl up and read a book.
It had a fireplace, but you never had to turn it on.
It was perpetual fall outside,
and the room’s window was large,
picturesque,
and easy to open.

Sometimes I would roam outside
among you,
a whistling specter,
enjoying the fresh air
and foliage

and occasionally
I would
pat you on the ass
for fun.

The Pied Piper’s Wife, the Painter

My husband is Peter the Piper.
Finer man I could not chose.
Though most of the time
he’s off with the mice,
he’s not a man I’ll lose.

And he caught me
with the same sad tune
about a year and a half ago.
At first the song
was one I could dance to
and then it grew soft and low.

For Peter’s a man
who will play his whistles
until you follow him home.
And the time when I left
he ran from the music,
chased me
and carried me home.

The mice can’t get enough of him
with his whistles so soft and low.
But since no one but me
has heard him speak
there’s plenty they’ll never know.

I have married the musician.
He is an artist’s dream.
And this evening while he’s off with the mice
I’ll paint pictures he’ll never see.

European Vacation

Trapped in a car on the wrong hand side
with a woman he thought he knew.
She was a good woman,
though one often testy,
but on this day
his patience was through.

She had planned to drive them
from Dublin to Cork
in three hours and a half,
but realizing she’d left
their vouchers in Dublin
they had to drive all the way back.

“How long before we turn out the light?”
she asked that night at the B&B.
“Well, it doesn’t much matter
to me anyway,
in honesty,” said he.

“What do you mean?
It doesn’t matter?
Time is running out.
We have bills to pay,
meals to eat,
hundreds of miles,
thousands of feet
to cover before
we’re in it knee deep.
Now when do we wake,
and when do we sleep?”

And he said, “Sleep
when you must.
Time’s what we keep
or what we should lose
or when we should sleep.
So turn out the light
or just let it be.
For if you can’t let go now
then you won’t let go then.
So why not let us go
back off to bed?
And if the thorn of a rose
is the thorn in your side,
then you’re better off dead,
if you haven’t yet died.”

And then he suddenly
started to cry,
and she held him there,
and she turned out the light.

Thank You Letter to My Employer

You have always been such a patient employer.
I could never complain that you paid nothing.
No other job has ever made me feel so useful.
You never told me
I was too old for the position
or not old enough.
I was not hired or fired
for my education
or the length of my skirt.

Even when I began working for you
cliché with daggers through my bleeding heart
and red all around,
you told me it perfect
because it was real for the time.

You told me that my best ideas come
when lying down
just about to sleep
or on vacation
or sitting around
mulling over the stars.
And like me
you distrusted dress codes
and cubicles.
We were a perfect fit.

Then amazingly
you didn’t punish me
or even mind
when I just didn’t show up for work
for 5 years
too busy with another job
or my education
or a boyfriend
or children.
In fact, you offered me a raise,
celebrating these events
as experiences to be used
for career advancement,
should I ever choose
to return to work for you.

And I did.
I had to, of course.
There wasn’t much else that compared
or, truth be known, much else I could do.
You spoiled me.

The Paper Nautilus

by Marianne Moore

For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by
commuters' comforts? Not for these
the paper nautilus
constructs her thin glass shell.

Giving her perishable
souvenir of hope, a dull
white outside and smooth-
edged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
maker of it guards it
day and night; she scarcely

eats until the eggs are hatched.
Buried eight-fold in her eight
arms, for she is in
a sense a devil-
fish, her glass ram'shorn-cradled freight
is hid but is not crushed;
as Hercules, bitten

by a crab loyal to the hydra,
was hindered to succeed,
the intensively
watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed,--
leaving its wasp-nest flaws
of white on white, and close-

laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
a Parthenon horse,
round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
is the only fortress
strong enough to trust to.

Fishing in the Sea

You remember the night.
I was dressed up in the costume
with the fishnets.
I might have settled for crabs,
but instead
I caught you,
another fish in the sea.

I really didn’t plan it out.
Didn’t mean for it to turn out this way.
And I don’t mean to sound unromantic,
but I have no idea why we’re still together.

Still I must admit, it was a cheap beginning.
As a young girl I probably didn’t imagine
meeting my future husband that way.
But maybe there was something about my lopsided cap
or the run in my stockings
or maybe you just felt some softer skin
that made you think
you’d struck human.

Anyway, while I was fishing
for crabs
I instead found an oyster.
Painfully shy, you stuck around.
I was never sure why.
And you would crack open your shell
every now and again
for a moment or two
and in spite of me
you saw our future
and the world
as open and as perfect and smooth
as sand
and you gulped it in
and let the residue of everything
sit in your stomach for six years.

And then one day
for no particular reason
you opened wide
and popped out a pearl
and it landed in the hollow in my neck
between my collarbones.

I believe that ignorance is bliss.
I don’t believe that bliss is in your kiss
or in you
or even me
but in how we keep shifting
and growing
with the universe
and accepting that
there is really no reason
for us to have met
or to have stayed together.
And that there is really no answer
for why we’re here at all
unless we make one.

And we did
one night
when I wasn’t doing
much of anything
except fishing
in the sea.

Mythology

Before science tells me why it really is,
I feel the need to create a myth
to explain the red branches of the tree
outside my bedroom window
on this, a clear blue day---
not a burning bush, but a burning tree.

My husband has cracked the window
to refresh the home
and my mood.

And the wind carries the crisp smell
of a Canadian lake
and the mulched leaves
that were once on the red branches
of the tree.

I believe that this Canadian air once
stole the leafy jewels of color
from the hair of the now bare tree.

On beautiful days,
she feels so angry,
she just turns red.

Hermit the Frog

The day is bright
and unappealing buildings of dull sand
surround you endlessly.

It is too cold to dive in today,
and even if you tried
you'd hit your head on the bottom
way sooner than you'd expect
and question whether Einstein and Hawking,
Newton and Galileo,
ever really got through to you at all.

The universe has mathematical laws,
but you don't look for them
or pay them any mind.
Your lack of curiosity
is staggering.
So why dive in?
You're a big-breasted girl.
There's a stroke for you
that is utterly tiring and froglike.

You're waiting for Salvation to come and bug you
so you can fling out your big fat stretchy tongue,
stick it, and swallow it whole
without so much as blinking.

Letting Go

My soul swells
and searches for meaning,
the contents of my life
perfumed and poisoned
and contained in old glass bottles
of bright diaphanous colors
that I carry over the precarious
violence of a Tuscan
tiled floor.

I live in the daily anxiety
of breaking one.

But should I drop one bottle
I might find that
it contains nothing any longer.
The past dies
like all else.

Even the bottle sealed with glue
to capture the sage’s final dying breath
contains the memory of a hope
and nothing more.
Even the breath has dissipated.

And should I drop the bottle
once housing the most potently noxious
of truths, I may find that they too
turned from blood
to water
and then air.

You might as well
let go.
Life does not wait
for anyone.

Mad Amazon

I'm digging trenches
in the backyard in the snow.
I'm eating frozen worms.

A winter solstice approaches.

Half-naked and muscular,
I bind just one breast
and throw spears at the sky.

I carry a Rambo knife
and play with it in the light.
I sharpen it every night by moonlight
and set your horses free.

I can't hunt.

In the past I would sometimes
take it out and show it to people
to make them go away.

Now natives line up to watch me.
I want them to leave.
They should see that I've gone mad,
but instead they want to befriend me.

I don't know why.
I can't save anyone
from anything.

I'm just digging.

My Daughter's Hair

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow



If I could change for just one day
I’d want to be my daughter’s hair.
Hair that can change your opinion
depending upon weather or light.
Hair that responds favorably to
rain.

It’s a hair that is brown in the living room,
chestnut red on the swings
golden auburn in the sunlight
black in the tub.

A hair that expresses itself freely,
defiant curls well defined,
as it stands up
in question to naps, cleaning messes, and sharing toys.
A hair that stands out
when she stomps and screams and jumps up and down
in a two-year old tantrum
ringlets curled in a rage
bounce in echo
driving the point
directly home
to my heart.

Or, other times, the curl mellows and loosens
relaxed and thoughtful
as when she tries to smell a dandelion puff
delicately one a fine day
her hair a golden frizz of illumination,
a soft feathered cloud of halo
highlighting her experience.

Either way it is a hair
that is sure of exactly who it is
and what it is doing.

Just one day
I’d like to be that hair
the shape and body
of those orphaned Annie tresses,
so full of heart and hope,
so full of spunk and warmth.
That irresistible mane
of curious wildness
that insists
subtly as a corkscrew
its feelings as unabashed fact:
I too shall be loose with love
and contain a confidence
that to know me
is to love me.

The Dead

by Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room, Random House, 2001.


The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

On Adam's Pond in Bridgton Maine

Black ripples
and tricks of mind
appear monster
lurking under water.
Slithering fast
prehistoric fins
may drip tatters
while the sinister body darts
through algae slime
straight toward
the mud-drenched and rocky shore
just outside my cabin.

Perhaps Thoreau’s Walden Pond
was the perfect metaphor
for his subconscious,
the water’s surface
like a mirror
looking deep
and deeper
into the self.
But on Adam’s Pond
there is no stillness this afternoon.
There are pockmarks
on a surface slapped with rain.
There are clouds filling on the pond
and rising mist.

The clouds,
indistinguishable from one another
are a melding of pale brown smoke,
gray soot and light.
The loneliest looking fog,
it hangs low and
brushes shoulders
with the rising air.

All is silent
and, as it often does,
nature has led to introspection.

Perhaps my troubles
might not seem so heavy
if like this fog
they saturated back down over pine
and deeper down to pond.
A pond which,
from this cabin’s window,
I don’t believe I own
but fool myself native of.

Or perhaps my thoughts might be
less daunting
if only they would
wrap around me and my cabin
like this dim thick sky,
the fog looking
patient,
lazy,
and sightless
enough
for me to dare
to bumble my way through.
Then, later, I too
could burn away
in the light of the sun.

The fog is an old woman
weaving baskets
out on the deck.
She jumps up
agitated
to avoid
the slightest hint
of provocation
or breath.

One bold rain shower breeze
convinces me of a hope
which seems to promise height
no matter where I am.

Facing the fog I realize
I may be just close enough
to touch it.

Love Song

If you were a rug, I’d beat you for sure,
knock you senseless, and wash my hands.
If you were a rope, I’d cut the cord
because the quicker you hit bottom is the quicker you land.

If you were a lady’s pump, I’d melt the glue,
it’s hard to run when you’ve got one heel.
If you were a finger, I’d light a match for you
and hold it right below until you feel.

If you were Vicks, I’d spread you on my chest
so I could breathe more easily, humidified and free.
And if you were a towel, I’d wrap you round my neck
and hold your healing power in me.

Yes, if you loved anything more than rum
I sure would be feeling pretty guilty.
And if you had the depth to love anyone
how I wish that someone was me.

Eating Plums

Watching my 6 month old son
eat pureed plums for the first time
is a study in how someone
can like and dislike something
simultaneously.

Unlike applesauce
each time I spoon plum
he holds his mouth open
willing to try a taste
again and again.
Then
the one-eyed Popeye squint.
And then
the wonder of the aftertaste.

I suppose I have a lot to learn from my son
about trying new things.
Maybe it’s a bit like
eating plums for the first time,
hanging in there when you taste tart
but waiting for the sweetness
that you seem to recall
occasionally has the tendency
to kick in.

Rainy Day Friend

Perhaps I am looking for a lazy
rainy day friend.
A friend who doesn’t want much asked of her.
A friend languid enough to ask nothing great
of me.
A friend who indifferently
suspends sweeping judgments.
Who would rather trust her intuition
than tax her brain.
A friend who sees no great need
to analyze the forecast
or understand where every piece need fit.

Perhaps I'm looking for a friend
who speaks for no real purpose
but the moment.
A friend who chooses to be neither conscience
nor accomplice.
A friend who works
and feels
and experiences occasional exhaustion.

I'd like to meet a friend who,
when I speak of pain,
would rather not carry it
but is contented to lighten the load
and just listen.
A friend too forgetful to keep score.
Too lazy to cater.
A friend who really likes
to slowly sip warm drinks.

I am also fond of friends
who like to talk about the weather.
I enjoy friends
who complain about the rain.
Perhaps some even see
the gray cloud’s silver lining
and make me smile
at the storm as it approaches
despite my better nature.

Writing

Because it is 11:10 pm
and you know where your children are.
Because it is 11:10 pm
and now you could be writing,
but you look at your children while they sleep
and after that
you look at pictures of your children while they sleep
for theirs is a beauty that leaves you mute,
nearly unable to do anything but labor
and perform silent declarations of love and fear,
left hand caressing the softest cheek,
right hand repeatedly checking
the breathing motion of the sleeping back.

It takes sacrifice and courage to raise them.
It takes selfishness and courage to write.
How does one find a way to balance these juxtaposed twigs---
specifically when the one that is the truer love
is the stronger and more balanced,
but the one that is calling
needs to be held forever perpendicular
like a perpetual crucifix to the other
lest, hiding alone,
you trip on it
like a crooked snake in the grass
all the days of your life?

It is the hissing sound
and not the sight of it
that drives a mind to madness.

Because it is 11:20 pm
and it wasn’t as hard as it seemed.
Now a mother again checks on her sleeping children.
Left hand poised again in love over downy cheeks.
Right hand poised again in fear over sleeping backs
for a few moments before
heading off to bed herself,
satisfied and quieter of mind
with a slightly emptier head.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning Re-Donne

When I first read John Donne as a young girl
I thought him largely a creative reprobate
with that poem about a flea
as his plea
for pre-marital sex.

And in his Valediction Forbidding Mourning,
when he compared two souls
to twin stiff compasses,
one growing erect as the other came home,
I just couldn’t get past my adolescent hormones
to apply much of a deeper reading.

But now, in truth, I see I missed the larger meaning of Donne,
and, honestly, a compass now seems
the perfect symbol for us,
but not Donne’s compass of mathematical angles.
No, a compass of a different sort seems more fitting.
Instead, you are my magnetic compass of direction,
and I, the chronic wanderer.

Often, I shake the needle
to point in all different directions.
I never seem to keep my bearings straight.
My eyes are frequently unfocused on what is ahead.
I change course and mind a thousand times a day.

But I always feel like I am
going somewhere with you
and when lost, you remind me
of where I am
and gently pull me the direction
I want to go.
Even if that destination frightens me
all the more because of you.
Even if that direction makes me sometimes mourn.

The North Star is where the arrow always points,
and the journey always points to the same end.
And, yes, we should forbid mourning.
And, yes, we should forbid fear.
Loving you makes me need to believe.
It is as simple and complex as that.

So, I say, may we forbid sadness.
May we end where we began.
An end, not a breach, but an expansion,
an end, not a loss, but a gain.

Yet, then again, why not
work for it?
Why not
like gold
be we
to airy thinness
beat?

Attention Deficit Disorder (with a Touch of Hyperactivity)

I had something so important to tell you,
but I didn’t have a notepad or a pen handy.
Fortunately, I was in a bookstore
so I spent $6 on an empty journal,
and I didn’t look for anything cheaper
although I should have since I have
a dozen just like this one at home,
but I bought the journal, and I begged
the lady at the register
for just 10 minutes with her pen.

And at this point, the
important thing I wanted to tell you
was still just barely in my grasp
and lacking much of its passion,
which sometimes is a good thing
and more believable,
or so I told myself
so that I didn’t get discouraged
with the situation
or angry with myself
for being, as usual,
unprepared in life.

I needed to find a place to write,
and I had to move quickly,
like the criminal that I was-
the imposter.

But then the beautiful
people on the magazine covers
smiled at me, and I got confused
because I wanted to know
what they were smiling at.
And I raced by the café counter a second time
trying to find a seat in a hidden corner where I could write
without drawing attention to myself,
not wanting to pretend to be a real writer
and then dealing with the rejection.

But I couldn’t find a seat
because everyone was busy doing actual important work
on laptops with textbooks,
and then the wedding section caught my eye
and made me remember my wedding
and relive it second by second.
And it made me want to become a wedding planner.
Then the literary journals I passed
made me want to be an interviewer.
And the cookbooks made me want to be a chef.
And then I wanted to be a photographer.
And I forgot completely about wanting to be a writer.
And the tender poem about sex in The Paris Review
made me want to make love to you.

But I had something so important to tell you,
and I never do
because I’ve always had such trouble keeping my focus.
But I once wanted to be someone important,
and I want to make you feel important.
Yet it is impossible to write a poem about you
because words won’t do you justice,
and I never have the paper or pen to write anyway.
And I’m far too unwitty and slow-minded
to remember to say how I feel in person.

But there was something I wanted to tell you
about the terra cotta tiles
and the thin stream of people lined up
in front of the magazine racks
seated on mahogany chairs and benches
reading about their interests.
Their faces looked so colorful and peaceful,
and the magazines and journals were
brightened in the overhead lights,
and the people’s clothes and styles faded away,
but they didn’t really seem naked at all.
They were just so real and warm.
And that’s somewhat like how I feel
when you look at me.

The warm glow of the lights
on the magazine racks
made me want to sit around the section
like the lit shelves were the hearth
and the books, the warm fire.
Like it was Christmas time in Mexico,
and we customers were the family,
happily huddled around,
studying the flames
and receiving warmth from the cold
that other people felt
in other places,
so happily lost
in thought and feeling.

And I want to tell you that
I believe
you are the reason
for these kind places
I now find myself
wherever I go.

Intention

I knew a woman
who used to say
certain things
often,
on a loop,
a broken record reminding
that the road to hell was paved
with good intentions,
but she was always dramatic like that.

I never could quite get on board
with her general reasoning
about the boat on water’s likelihood to sink,
the glass of fresh milk being half empty,
the danger of putting all one’s eggs
into one basket
and having them crack.

But over the years I realized that
her perspective was no act.
Life had happened to her
and daily living had, indeed,
grown into a hell
where she believed
her boat was always sincerely sinking,
where she had a permanent intolerance to milk
(and it was sour by now anyway),
where she had accidentally ruined
one of her most precious eggs
with best intentions.

Still, even in knowing better,
I found her incessant negativity,
antagonism and anger
as difficult to tolerate as ever.
Perhaps even more so
because I don’t like
watching someone suffer needlessly
and being unable to do anything about it.
(Also because I loved her,
and I knew that she was good.)

Nevertheless, neither I
nor God
nor the Devil himself
was going to convince her to move
from her now permanent address
situated squarely
in a leaky boathouse
on the swampy fifth ring
of the river Styx.

No, not even I could convince her to move:
Fellow fallen angels
her only chosen neighbors,
an outcome she clung to
like an intention.

Angeline

Before you were born
I spent a few minutes,
not many,
imagining what you’d be like,
what strange things heredity
might pass on to you.

I wondered if you’d have
my nervous energy.
Would you be self destructive?
Glad for simple pleasures?
Thoughtful?
Or patient to a fault?

I didn’t give these musings more than a moment
or two.
We shared two brains back then.
I was in your utero fog:
I left these things to fate.

I thought perhaps the easier,
though much less significant
predictions I could make
would be imagining you physically.
Not even so much as a newborn,
but as a young woman,
in your twenties.
(Don’t ask me why,
I always imagined you this age.)

And I felt slightly guilty that the only thing
that I dared to dream about you
was something as shallow as looks.
But it’s true. I just couldn’t dive below that surface.
Or perhaps my preoccupation with your looks
had to do with my own
warped relationship with my own.
Nevertheless, let me be clear:
I never imagined this determining my love for you.
I never imagined disappointment
or that I could love you less because of it.
I just wanted to know you.

And I lacked imagination.
My brain was all pregnancy.
And that, for that matter, is what made pregnancy
all the more wonderful
since in those months I came to love
what I had once been ashamed of.

Round belly, soft hips, pudgy face, slower mind.
You were softening all my edges.
The whole pregnancy was all physicality
and in stages.
First nausea and tender breasts.
Then swells of blood and heartbeats.
Then flesh and bone and features.

Pigments arrive.

Imagining you with our dark hair,
our thinnish lips,
our noses.
But the eyes?
Would they perhaps be like my own?
Yes, I conceded.
They might be.
(I had been complimented on them
so I foolishly imagined you
with what I thought to be my only best inheritance.)
I imagined you,
an individual,
your own you, of course,
but with my eyes.
Two tiny reminders
that you were mine.
That you came from me.

And then you were born
in the heat and light.
Then you were born
and the sun rose in the evening
and the world turned upside down
to see you at the right angle,
to get a better look,
and then she paused.
And then she sighed.

You looked up with your new baby eyes
seeming to see all,
seeming to know us,
and your eyes,
as sure as you yourself seemed,
were not the indecisiveness of slate.
No, much unlike my own,
they appeared very old and dark.
And though in need of rest from your passage,
your eyes were calm,
purposeful and perceptive,
seeming to know everything about the world,
about the Before
and the After.
Knowing everything of Truth and Beauty,
of sadness that cannot be helped,
of fear that should be no more than fleeting.
Just waiting patiently
to pass the message on to all of us
while you yourself still remembered it,
as Wordsworth said,
our birth but a sleep and a forgetting.

One of the angels, certainly,
you’d already traveled hard to communicate,
but in due time.

And yet from that first night I held you to my breast
I realized that if anyone remembered
the old, almost lost language you spoke,
they would have understood immediately.
Sometimes I thought the divine was upon me,
and I swear I could hear you speak.
Your requests were simple,
voiced clearly and audibly:
Love.

You, my dark-eyed daughter,
now the present.
You, the new hope of promise and possibility,
reminding also of all that is good and familiar.
There this one's dimpled chin,
there that one's apple cheeks;
the miracle of you surely being
this blending of all known and unknown old,
into the all new and beautiful you.

Herald seraph,
harbinger of warmth to that which is still dark,
to that which is so much older than we are,
your eyes pastoral
are full moon and mystical.
Smoky granite,
they are honey and amber,
autumn and hearth and red firelight.
All darkness and depth,
all earth, all light, all sun.

To see them is to gladly pass
on those predictions
and misunderstandings of my youth.

To see them is to know
the only true
voice of God.

Art

Oftentimes I have found
that what I am told I am supposed to like
in this sky is the limit age
of shock jocks, advertising, entertainment, and art
seems to me to saunter underwhelmingly slim and sardonic,
like a pickled housewife in tight black skinny jeans,
straddling between what is good and what is not good:
Television, newspapers, poetry, spiders.
It smells like a perfume
I would never wear let alone bottle.

This idea of art and expression
seems to smirk at me
having a laugh at my expense
as I sit with my now unchaste thoughts
unsure of myself for the experience,
more so than I already am
if that’s even possible.

But I seem to be reaching the age
where I have accepted that what I choose to like
in movies, television, magazines, poetry
is wide and round and smooth,
like an eggplant or a baby’s cheeks.
Quiet or noisy, it smells like home
filled and spilling over the brim,
a warm and sloppy housewife
pouring coffee at the wrong time of day
to her surprise guests
with overwhelming amounts of love.

It is a place where
soft and billowy cobwebs
are artwork spilled like milk
in the corners of a home
where walls meet ceilings.

Heartburn

The truth is I have always seen the attraction
in being a chef.
And when people ask me, What’s cooking?
I want to spill the contents of my heart
out on the table
like a pudding.

Yes, a chef’s life
sounds like the life for me,
where people trust you when you’re fat,
where life’s problems can be solved with a stick of butter
and some brown sugar.
There’s something so
comforting and sensuous about it all
that I can see why so many have seen the link
between sex and food.
And speaking of links
I should have learned sooner that sausages
belong in everything,
from eggs to pasta, peppers and pizza.

Of course, the hours being what they are
and that smell in your hair and clothes
that you can’t even wash out after an 18 hour workday,
the sweat and unflattering outfits,
my desire to occasionally see my family on the weekend
or take a walk
or have time to slowly eat an apple
will probably make this unrealistic ambition of mine
nothing more than a dream,
another non-pursuable life path
like an ice cream sundae
dribbled with hot fudge
melted at the perfect temperature
and an endless offering of maraschino cherries
to top it all off
as I stuff my dreams
just like my fears
down deep inside of me
at record breaking speed
so fast
it makes your head just freeze
and your heart ache.