There Comes the Strangest Moment

There Comes the Strangest Moment
by Kate Light

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free--
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin's gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.

I want--my want. I love--my love. I'll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what's here to never go away.
I'll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…

Your heart's in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You'd have sworn no one knew you more than you.

How many people thought you'd never change?
But here you have. It's beautiful. It's strange.

When one has lived a long time alone

by Galway Kinnell

When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half out of water utters
the cantillations he sang in his first spring,
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and creeps away among the stones, one sees
they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind, toward these other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one's own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Autumn Day

(Japanese Maple, taken today)

Autumn Day
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenunes, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

Half Acre

(photo courtesy of simonk on flickr)

A song this time. It has enchanted me.

Half Acre
by Hem, from Rabbit Songs

I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
And folded in this scrap of paper
Is the land I grew in

Think of every town you've lived in
Every room you lay your head
And what is it that you remember?

Do you carry every sadness with you?
Every hour your heart was broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with you?

A man is walking on the highway
A woman stares out at the sea
And light is only now just breaking

So we carry every sadness with us
Every hour our hearts were broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with us

But I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
I am carrying this scrap of paper

That can crack the darkest sky wide open
Every burden taken from me
Every night my heart unfolding
My home

The Poet

The Poet
by Tom Wayman

Loses his position on worksheet or page in textbook
May speak much but makes little sense
Cannot give clear verbal instructions
Does not understand what he reads
Does not understand what he hears
Cannot handle “yes-no” questions

Has great difficulty interpreting proverbs
Has difficulty recalling what he ate for breakfast, etc.
Cannot tell a story from a picture
Cannot recognize visual absurdities

Has difficulty classifying and categorizing objects
Has difficulty retaining such things as
addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables
May recognize a word one day and not the next

After Reading Tu Fu...

And then I found my summer poem.


(photo courtesy of evissa on flickr)

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
by Charles Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.

How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.

Birds fly back and forth across the lawn

                                     looking for home

As night drifts up like a little boat.



Day after day, I become of less use to myself.

Like this mockingbird,

                   I flit from one thing to the next.

What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?

Tomorrow is dark.

              Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.



The sky dogs are whimpering.

Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening

                                       up from the damp grass.

Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,

Go quietly, quietly.

Coffee & Dolls

A poem I found while searching for the keyword "summer" on The Academy of American Poets website.


(photo courtesy of SeenyaRita on Flickr)

Coffee & Dolls
by April Bernard

It was a storefront for a small-time numbers runner,
pretending to be some sort of grocery. Coffeemakers
and Bustello cans populated the shelves, sparsely.
Who was fooled. The boxes bleached in the sun,
the old guys sat inside on summer lawn chairs,
watching tv. The applause from the talk shows and game shows
washed out the propped-open door like distant rain.

It closed for a few months. The slick sedan disappeared.
One spring day, it reopened, and this time a sign
decorated the window: COFFEE & DOLLS.
Yarn-haired, gingham-dressed floppy dolls
lolled among the coffee cans. A mastiff puppy,
the size and shape of a tipped-over fire hydrant,
guarded as the sedan and the old guys returned.

I don't know about you, but I've been looking
for a narrative in which suffering makes sense.
I mean, the high wail of the woman holding her dead child,
the wail that filled the street. I mean the sudden
fatal blooms on golden skin. I mean the crack deaths,
I mean the ice-cream truck that cruised the alphabets
and sold crack to the same deedle-dee-dee tune as fudgsicles.
I mean the raw scabs of the beaten mastiff, and many other
things.

Waking Up In The Greenhouse

Waking Up In The Greenhouse

Everyone should know what it is
to be ushered into morning
by warm sun and cool water,
clear sky and the jades and the olives
of this house of green and silver.

The birds wide awake with beating wings.
The farmers shoveling sweet feed to the cows.
The brightest flowers born in the gentle sun.
The softest sky and the fairy breeze.

All of these things ease me into wakefulness,
teaching me to take life at its own rhythm,
as slow-coming and certain-eyed as the dawn.

(c.l.)

Logos

Logos
by Mary Oliver

Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don't worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

Winds

Winds

We do not understand
the high winds on hot days.
They froth the tops of the trees into waves,
letting us drown on the stifling ocean floor,
and we glare up in righteous indignation.
The wind is conversing with the maples
and we cannot hear what they are saying.

We understand the low winds.
They were sent from heaven for our comfort.
They clothe our skin in coolness,
and we sway into them as we do
into fur coats in snowfalls.
How pleasant the weather is today, we say,
how kind of the winds to descend to us.

We understand nothing.
We do not know that the winds pay us no heed.
The high winds laugh with the forest
at the joy of the sky;
they rage at something terrible
that happened across the sea.

And when we stand in the low winds,
assuming they blow to please us,
we have no idea that we are ignorant flies
in the presence of two lovers.
For the low wind bows to greet the earth,
reminding her in the wake
of his mighty jet streams and trade winds
that he knows gentleness.
That as she spins her sphere
of jade and azure through the crystaled heavens,
he knows her dust and pebbles
as well as her seas and sky.

(c.l.)

The Cities Inside Us

The Cities Inside Us
by Alberto Rios

We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.

We speak words between us that we recognize
But which cannot be looked up.

They are our words.
They come from very far inside our mouths.

You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us

There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people

We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are

But which used to be as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.

We each take a piece
Through the eye and through the ear.

It's loud inside us, in there, and when we speak
In the outside world

We have to hope that some of that sound
Does not come out, that an arm

Not reach out
In place of the tongue.

How do I love thee?

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I don't even care if it's cliched. It is the best there is.



How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

After Years

I love this poem. It has inspired a couple of my own. I still need to buy Kooser's prize-winning book Delights and Shadows. I believe he was the U.S. poet laureate before Billy Collins.

After Years
by Ted Kooser

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

Viriditas

on our morning commute
the newborn summer air rises
from honeysuckled thickets
and the roots of trees.
it mingles with the more
domesticated scents,
garden irises and dryer steam,
freshly hung laundry
from those who still believe
in the goodness of the outdoors.

driving, i cannot help
but thank God that this
is no passing glance at his creation:
for i am going to work in it,
to put flowers in earth
and sell them to openhanded gardeners.
i go to bury my hands in the soil,
to do nothing but give life a chance,
and by so doing preserve
this morning's holy pilgrimage
for the children, who will
play in creeks and snap twigs,
only later realizing that
they tread a hallowed temple,
one that resounds
with the rhythm of redemption.

(c.l.)

*viriditas: (latin) greenness, freshness, bloom

Running to Stand Still

I want to marry someone who loves this song.

Running to Stand Still
by U2

and so she woke up
woke up from where she was lying still
said i gotta do something
about where we're going

step on a steam train
step out of the driving rain maybe
run from the darkness in the night
singing ah la la la de day
ah la la la de day
ah la la de day

sweet the sin
bitter the taste in my mouth
i see seven towers
but i only see one way out

you've got to cry without weeping
talk without speaking
scream without raising your voice

you know i took the poison
from the poison stream
then i floated out of here
singing ah la la la de day
ah la la la de day
ah la la de day

she runs through the streets
with her eyes painted red
under black belly of cloud in the rain
in through a doorway she brings me
white gold and pearls stolen from the sea
she is raging
she is raging
and the storm blows up in her eyes

she will
suffer the needle chill
she's running to stand

still

One Day a Woman

by Miller Williams

One day a woman picking peaches in Georgia
lost her hold on the earth and began to rise.
She grabbed limbs but leaves stripped off in her hands.
Some children saw her before she disappeared
into the white cloud, her limbs thrashing.
The children were disbelieved. The disappearance
was filed away with those of other women
who fell into bad hands and were soon forgotten.
Six months later a half-naked man in Kansas
working on the roof of the Methodist Church
was seen by half a dozen well-known
and highly respected citizens to move
directly upward, his tarbrush waving,
until he shrank away to a point and vanished.
Nobody who knew about the first event
knew of the second, so no connection was made.
The tarbrush fell to earth somewhere in Missouri
unnoticed among a herd of Guernsey cows.

A Line-Storm Song

It stormed today while I was at work. The gales blew in the plastic walls of the greenhouse and at times we had to yell over the roar of the rain on the thin tin roofs. I heard rumors of five inches of rain in one hour in some regions, and half inches of hail. I glory in those times when it seems as if nature is feeling something, when it is unleashing its anger, or trying to calm the earth down, or radiating ecstasy.

Dedicated to my friends, who I miss, and who I fear do not miss me.

Come over the hills and far with me...

A Line-Storm Song
by Robert Frost

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift.
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.

The birds have less to say for themselves
In the wood-world's torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,
Although they are no less there:
All song of the woods is crushed like some
Wild, earily shattered rose.
Come, be my love in the wet woods, come,
Where the boughs rain when it blows.

There is the gale to urge behind
And bruit our singing down,
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind
From which to gather your gown.
What matter if we go clear to the west,
And come not through dry-shod?
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast
The rain-fresh goldenrod.

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
But it seems like the sea's return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when after doubt
Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.

The Waking

I have my B.A. in English. I have the whole world in front of me and large pieces of my heart missing, scattered all over the nation and world. I don't know when or if they will come back to me.

I know only this:

The Waking
by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Graduation (Leaving Love)

I know some people won't understand, but I've never voluntarily done something so difficult as this. I have to turn myself into a machine to get through; my flesh and bone are far too tender.

If today was not an endless highway
If tonight was not a crooked trail
If tomorrow wasn't such a long time
Then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all

Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting
If I could hear his heart softly pounding
Yes, and only if he was lying by me
Would I lie in my bed once again

I can't see my reflection in the waters
I can't speak the sounds that show no pain
I can't hear the echo of my footsteps
Or remember the sound of my own name

Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting
If I could hear his heart softly pounding
Yes, and only if he was lying by me
Would I lie in my bed once again

There's beauty in that silver singing river
There's beauty in that sunrise in the sky
But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty
That I remember in my true love's eyes

Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting
If I could hear his heart softly pounding
Yes, and only if he was lying by me
Would I lie in my bed once again

(nickel creek)

I've Been Known

by Denise Duhamel

to spread it on thick to shoot off my mouth to get it off my chest
          to tell him where
          to get off
to stay put to face the music to cut a shine to go under to sell
          myself short to play
          myself down
to paint the town to fork over to shell out to shoot up to pull a
          fast one to go haywire
          to take a shine to
to be stuck on to glam it up to vamp it up to get her one better to
          eat a little higher
          on the hog
to win out to get away with to go to the spot to make a stake to
          make a stand to
          stand for something to stand up for
to snow under to slip up to go for it to take a stab at it to try out
          to go places to play
          up to get back at
to size up to stand off to slop over to be solid with to lose my
          shirt to get myself off
          to get myself off the hook