Yours is the name the leaves chatter

Dear One Absent this Long While

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.

I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,

you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,

the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.
In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.

June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall

so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.

I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk

with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.

Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.

Lisa Olstein

The Vastness

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."

Carl Sagan in 'Contact'

The mornings, despairing

"..It’s not that I forget
the cat outside. She just wants to stay out
all night. And it’s her cry,
plaintive and despairing: forgotten, forgotten
each morning that wakes me.
And each morning, I open the door
to her joy at finally being remembered.
This is her nature, the nightly melodrama
and relief of morning. If dogs look like
their owners, basset hounded,
beagled, then cats are our hearts:
the purring, the nine lives. The mornings
despairing, plaintive: forgotten, forgotten."

Sue Goyette

Too often

“I felt like crying but nothing came out. It was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. But I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”

Charles Bukowski, 'Tales of Ordinary Madness'

The terror

Our educational system tell us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.

Charles Bukowski, 'The Crunch'

On the Term of Exile

No need to drive a nail into the wall
To hang your hat on;
When you come in, just drop it on the chair
No guest has sat on.

Don’t worry about watering the flowers—
In fact, don’t plant them.
You will have gone back home before they bloom,
And who will want them?

If mastering the language is too hard,
Only be patient;
The telegram imploring your return
Won’t need translation.

Remember, when the ceiling sheds itself
In flakes of plaster,
The wall that keeps you out is crumbling too,
As fast or faster.

Bertolt Brecht
(20th c. Tr. Adam Kirsch)

After the Sea

As it leaves
the sea inscribes
the sand
with a zen riddle
written in Japanese
characters of seaweed.

Above
the white selves
of seagulls
mesh in repetitions
of desire

John O’Donohue, 'Echoes of Memory'

​Just Now

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever
believe

simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while

with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them

not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks.

W.S. Merwin

The Room

It is an old story, the way it happens
sometimes in winter, sometimes not.
The listener falls to sleep,
the doors to the closets of his unhappiness open

and into his room the misfortunes come --
death by daybreak, death by nightfall,
their wooden wings bruising the air,
their shadows the spilled milk the world cries over.

There is a need for surprise endings;
the green field where cows burn like newsprint,
where the farmer sits and stares,
where nothing, when it happens, is never terrible enough.

Mark Strand

The Time

Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.

A fish drifting upside down.
Slow accordians sweeten the breeze.

The Sanitary Mattress Factory says,
"Sleep is Life."
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?

Yesterday someone said, "It gets late so early."
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.

Naomi Shihab Nye

In the same country as you

Love in the Dark Country
Kapka Kassabova

Tomorrow for twenty-four hours
I’ll be in the same country as you.

The sky will be constantly shifting,
the morning will be green, a single morning
for my single bed. And in the night

as the dark country goes to sleep
a church bell will measure
the jet-lag of my heart.

I’ll open my suitcase and unfold my life
like a blanket. In the dark country I will lie
all night and wonder how this came to be:

the one light left in the world
is your window, somewhere in the land

of thin rain and expensive trains.
And instead of maps, I have an onward ticket.

Abandoned Farmhouse

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm--a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

Ted Kooser

Running along the egde of madness

You’ve got to burn
straight up and down
and then maybe sideways
for a while
and have your guts
scrambled by a
bully
and the demonic
ladies,
you’ve got to run
along the edge of
madness,
teetering,
you’ve got to drink a
river of booze,
you’ve got to starve
like a winter
alleycat,
you’ve got to live
with the imbecility
of at least a dozen
cities,
then maybe
maybe
maybe
you might know
where you are
for a tiny
blinking
moment.

Charles Bukowski, 'Bone Palace Ballet'

I have no notion of loving people by halves

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

Jane Austen, 'Northanger Abbey'

Palais d’Hiver

Wind:
dry whispers
in a house
where I
no longer
live.

Justine Nicholas