Poem of the Week, by Marie Howe

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What the Living Do
– Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably
fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes
have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we
spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight
pours through.

The open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here, and
I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street,
the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying
along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my
wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called
that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to
pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss – we want more and more and
then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the
window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing
so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m
speechless:
I am living, I remember you.

—
For more information on Marie Howe, please click here: http://www.mariehowe.com/
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Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

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Father’s Voice
– William Stafford

“No need to get home early;
the car can see in the dark.”
He wanted me to be rich
the only way we could,
easy with what we had.

And always that was his gift,
given for me ever since,
easy gift, a wind
that keeps on blowing for flowers
or birds wherever I look.

World, I am your slow guest,
one of the common things
that move in the sun and have
close, reliable friends
in the earth, in the air, in the rock.


—
For more information on William Stafford, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-e-stafford
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Poem of the Week, by Jennifer Michael Hecht

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Lady Look-Alike Lazarized
– Jennifer Michael Hecht

It was many, many years ago
in this house, with this tree
that a woman lived, whom I don’t know
in a photo you can see. She baked bread
and ate with two fat men
and her picture looks much like me.

I was a child and she was a child
then neither again would be
she in nineteen-thirteen
me near two-zero, one-three.
And we loved with a love that was more
than a love, at the heads of our centuries.
Let me see less than she’ll see
because I know more than she
and, even from here, it near-blinded me.

And with virtue and reason, long ago,
In this picture that looks like me,
A bug blew out of a cough one night,
chilling the woman who looks like me;
So her muscled kinsman came
and took her away from our tree
to bake no more bread for fat men
and escape the brutality.
Yes, a wind blew out of a cloud
one night chilling and killing
who looks like me.

Microbes, heartache, and wars
do not give way to reason nor pause
at the soaring wrought-iron gate
of Brooklyn, nor at the doors of state.
She was here and some time later died,
well before I arrived here or anywhere.

But our love, she for fat men, I for my
small and tall friends, is stronger by far
than the love of those younger or richer
than we, and who could be wiser than we?
And neither the redbreasts in heaven above,
Nor the dolphins down under the sea,
Can ever quite sever my sight from the sight
Of the woman who looks like me.

For the moon rarely beams without bringing
dark dreams to the woman who looks like me;
And the stars never rise but I feel my tight eyes
on a dark dream that looks like me; And so,
all nighttime, I lie down by the side of my
searching self and my self that hides. With a
photo from nineteen-hundred, one and three,
of a woman who looks a lot like me.


—
For more information on Jennifer Michael Hecht, please click here: http://www.jennifermichaelhecht.com/

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Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

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The Best Moment of the Night
– Tony Hoagland

You had a moment with the dog,
down near the base of the butcher-block table
just as the party was getting started.

Just as the guests were bringing in
their potluck salads and vegetarian lasagna,
setting them down on the buffet,

you had an unforeseeable exchange of warmth
with this scruffy, bug-eyed creature
who let you scratch his ears.

He lives down there, among the high heels
and the cowboy boots, below the human roar
rising to its boil up above. Like his, your evening

is just beginning –but you
are lonelier than him. You think
that if you disappeared tonight,

you would not be missed for years;
yet here, the licking of the hands and face;
and here, the baring of the vulnerable belly.

You are still panting, and alive, and seeking love;
yet no one who knows you
knows, somehow,

about your wet, black nose,
or that you can wag your tail.


—
For more information on Tony Hoagland, please click here: http://www.tonyhoagland.com/
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Poem of the Week, by Anna Journey

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Diagnosis: Birds in the Blood
– Anna Journey

The hummingbird’s nervous embroidery
through beach fog by our back

patio’s potato vine
reminds me of my mother’s southern

drawl from the kitchen: She’s flying,
flying like bird! I’ve heard that

as a child I involuntarily flapped my hands
at my side during moments

of intense concentration. I’d flutter
over a drawing, a doll, a blond hamster

in a shoebox maze. There are ways
to keep from breaking

apart. My guardians. My avian
blood. I believed

birds bubbled inside me—my own
diagnosis—though the doctors called it

something else: a harmless
twitch. A body’s

crossed wires. The lost
birds of my childhood

nerves have never
returned. But when you held

my elbow as we walked the four
blocks to the boardwalk,

we saw the brief
dazzle of a black-

chinned hummingbird—the first
I’d ever seen. It sheened

and tried to sip
from my sizzled wrists’

vanilla perfume. I knew
a single one

from the magic
flock had finally found me.

—
For more about Anna Journey, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Journey
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Poem of the Week, by Philip Levine

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You Can Have It
– Philip Levine

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds,
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.


—
For more information on Philip Levine, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/philip-levine
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Poem of the Week, by W.H. Auden

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Funeral Blues
– W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.


—
For more information on W.H. Auden, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/120
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What Was Really Happening

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Late last night you drove three hours in deep darkness on the highways and then byways of a nearly-forgotten southern coast.

What was really happening was that you were thinking about another trip you took at the tail end of last summer. One of your youthful companions was with you, the middle one. Her belongings were jigsaw-puzzled into the trunk and the back seat.

She sat in the passenger seat, or rather she reclined in the passenger seat, and slept. She slept almost the entire way, over a thousand miles, as you piloted the rental car through the highways and byways of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

On the car ferry that crosses Lake Michigan the two of you made your way to the top deck and dragged lounge chairs over to the side. She reclined hers fully and fell asleep for most of the four-hour journey across that vast lake, waking up when you pressed half of a giant chocolate chip cookie into her hand.

Once in the car again, on the other side, she fell asleep again while you drove through the vast forests and hills of Michigan, a remote and, in your opinion, highly underrated state. When you crossed over into Canada –blessings on Canada, that vast and beautiful country– she fell asleep again.

She came awake when you spontaneously steered the car toward Niagara Falls –where you hadn’t been since you were a child– and the two of you got out and walked the length of the stone-walled path, cooled and softened by the ever-present mist rising from those enormous falls.

“Why am I sleeping so much on this trip?” she said.

“You’re tired,” you said. “It’s been a busy summer.”

She nodded. It had been a busy summer. Travel and socializing and working, all busy things, things that could tire a person out, but not so much when you’re her age.

One of the things that was really happening was that she had spent the summer not thinking about what was coming at the end of it, which was this long trip that was carrying her away from the city of her birth, the city she loved. That was carrying her away from the place that held her childhood.

But here she was, and here you were, getting back in the car for the final few hours of the trip which would bring her to a new place, where you would leave her. You decided to say something true.

“You’re sleeping so much because I’m driving and you feel safe because your mother’s taking care of you and it reminds you of being a little girl, so you let go and you fall asleep,” you said.

She smiled. There were only a few hours left to this trip and she didn’t fall asleep again. It was too late now not to think about what was to come, all the newness, all the unfamiliar people, all her friends back home.

All her friends weren’t back home, not really. They too were dispersing, if not to places a thousand miles distant then to places closer. But still: different. Different places. New places. New lives.

The thing that was really, truly happening was that she knew, fundamentally, that the life she had lived up until now was over. Still part of her, as it would always be, but over.

You glanced at her, gazing out the passenger window. She was the second of your three youthful companions. Her brother had two years of being the only one, before she was born. Her sister would have three years of being the only one, now that she was leaving. She was the only one who had never had a single stretch of time with just you.

For some reason this had never occurred to you before, and as you watched her looking quietly out the window at the woods and lakes of upstate New York, the knowledge smote your heart.

Something else you knew but didn’t say was that she slept so much on that trip because what was to come was inevitable. There was nothing she could do, at this point, to prevent it.

Choosing where to go to college, whether to go to college, who you’ll live with when you’re there –none of these decisions were the catalysts of the change she was facing. Time was. The simple fact of years, years that go by, that ferry a person from one stage of life to another.

Sometimes you’re aware that it’s happening, other times it just happens.

There have only been a few times when you yourself weren’t trying to influence the outcome of something in your own life. When you weren’t striving for something, urging yourself on, making lists, working on something that would not see completion for a long time, if ever.

What all this busy-ness means, ultimately, is that you count on there being a future. You count on there being days and weeks and years ahead of you. How often has it happened that you just. . . stop? Shut down the planning, the thinking?

Rarely. Almost never. Two times come to mind.

The first: you were a child, riding in the back seat of the station wagon with your sisters. Your mother was driving. It was winter in upstate New York: snow and wind and black ice on the road. The car began to slide. It was sliding sideways and you were looking out the window and you knew it was going to slide right into the ditch, right into that wall of snow on the side of the hill.

There was nothing you could do. You let go and let it happen.

The second: about an hour after that girl, the one looking out the window on the final leg of the thousand-mile journey, was born. She was a long time coming, like her brother before her, and by the time she was clean and swaddled you were so exhausted you couldn’t speak.

When everyone was gone –the nurses, her father, the silent smiling man who brought you a plate of supper– there was only one lamp lit in the room.

It was night. It was winter. She was sleeping in a plastic-walled box on wheels next to you.

You don’t know why you turned on the t.v., but you did, muting the sound. There on the screen, bombs were falling on a distant country. Your country was bombing another country. You had brought another human being into a world full of bombs and violence and terror.

For the first and only time you can remember, this didn’t matter to you. You didn’t start planning and worrying and shaking your head.

Here was a quiet room, a lamp, a sleeping baby, a plate that held baked chicken and green beans and buttered toast. You let go and let it happen.

Then you closed your eyes and went to sleep.

In the end, is this the way it is? From one life into whatever, if anything, comes next, does there come that sleep? That letting go?

Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am
by coming before me, and my child’s wishes, older than I am
by outliving me. And what’s it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.

(excerpt from “The Hammock,” by Li-Young Lee)

Poem of the Week, by Ross Gay

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Overheard
– Ross Gay

It’s a beautiful day
the small man said from behind me
and I could tell he had a slight limp
from the rasp of his boot against the sidewalk
and I was slow to look at him
because I’ve learned to close my ears
against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing
them to my own mind,
and although he said it I did not hear it
until he said it a second or third time
but he did, he said It’s a beautiful day and something
in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light, opening my hands
to the dream of the soon blooming
and never did he say forget the crick in your neck
nor your bloody dreams; he did not say forget
the multiple shades of your mother’s heartbreak,
nor the father in your city
kneeling over his bloody child,
nor the five species of bird this second become memory,
no, he said only, It’s a beautiful day,
this tiny man
limping past me
with upturned palms
shaking his head
in disbelief.

—
For more information on Ross Gay, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Gay
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