For My Son

I doubly don’t understand your position in life, son,

male and the baby of a family.

I hope you don’t resent me

and my weakened powers of imagination

for that.

Judging from your personality though,

your gentle joy

and playful energy,

you don’t seem like the type to hold a grudge.

I have held off on writing this to you, my child,

for far too long

and selfishly.

Second child,

wife and mother already before you,

I simply didn’t want to waste any time

I could have spent
just being with you.

Undocumented child,
you and I,

from womb to world,

always living in the busy now,

our motions constant,

our rotations cyclical,

present,

and real.

For the longest time

all I could do to coddle you

was to protect your naps

allowing you to rest

like sacred messiah

until you rose again.

Yet our busy reality has managed to maintain
the odd presence of the amazing.

Both awesome and provincial,

my love for you surprising and idyllic.

Nothing about being a parent before

prepared me for the fear and joy of loving you.

You are always new.

Old soul.

We all knew it.

Everyone said it.

From infancy your eyebrows alone

told tales of ancient tragedies, heroic epics, and comedies

in a wiggle.

I preferred to watch you first crawl
then run

in the beauty of your existence

rather than paint you in an untrue portrait.

Nevertheless, as close as I can come to the truth,

here it is, all flawed and list-like:

you, bookish and athletic,

a undeniable heartthrob by age one.

Your smiles wide,

your eyes dance
direct routes to Truth and Joy.

A hungry yet slim boy

embodying all the happiness and enlightenment associated with

a chubby Buddha

whose pants keep falling down.

Yet also, you, our Bard,

constructing babbling, rhythmic speeches,

illustrating calm, simple solutions to great problems,

pointing again and again to the humanism

and proof of "'Dis.”

Your sister and I your captive audience

and ardent admirers

floating on our backs,

eyes skyward

on your very sound.

You, your father’s breath.

We, helpless but to love you

and delight in your generous laughter.

Poetry has little place

when it is has always been so clear to us all that

you are the final word.

But know that I tried.

Know that despite our inability to give you everything we wanted,

you found all the answers anyway

and ingeniously.

Each moment with you
an everyday miracle

right here

atop the daily grind.

Each moment,

as rough currents,

both real and imagined,

knock about our flimsy shelters,

we learn from you, gentle fish,
born into the world with ease

and swimming through it still

quite effortlessly.

You, forever our baby.

You, forever our moonstone and sun.

Each moment,

my baby,

a chance to make peace

and accept good fortune.

Each moment,

le Benjamin,

an occasion to celebrate

our lives' final word

and be thankful.

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.