Ada Limon | Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limon

The other day I recaulked my bathtub. Razored out the repulsive old caulk, chipped and dug, alcoholed and bleached. Cut the tip off the tube of new caulk but the caulk gun didn’t work and I couldn’t squeeze it out of the tube. So I razored open the tube, spooned the caulk into a little plastic bag, snipped a corner of the bag and drew a bead around the tub as if I was frosting a cake. This worked, kind of anyway, and the tub looks pretty good.

Later that afternoon I read this poem by the inimitable Ada Limon and pictured that mountain lion in envy and admiration. Her six-foot fence, my baggie of caulk. . .

The Mountain Lion, by Ada Limon

I watched the video clip over and over,
night vision cameras flickering her eyes
an unholy green, the way she looked
the six-foot fence up and down
like it was nothing but a speed bump
then cleared the man-made border
in one impressive leap. A glance
over the shoulder, an annoyance,
as As if you could keep me out, or
keep me in. I don’t know what it
was that made me press replay and
replay. Not fear, though I’d be
terrified if I was face to face with
her, or heard her prowling in the night.
It was just that I don’t think I’ve
ever made anything look so easy. Never
looked behind me and grinned or
grimaced because nothing could stop
me. I like the idea of it though, felt
like a dream you could will into being:
See a fence? Jump it.

For more information about Ada Limon, check out her website.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limón

Posted on April 16 by alisonmcghee

When I was a little kid I loved the book The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, to the extent that I memorized my favorite lines: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. Then I grew up and had children, and then my children grew up, and sometimes it feels so befuddling, like wait, stop, come back, how did this all happen so fast?

This is when I instinctively and silently recite one of my mantras – They’re people in the world before they’re your children, Alison – a line that came to me years ago and which I never fully understood until three days ago, when I read this poem by the wondrous Ada Limón.

What I Didn’t Know Before, by Ada Limón

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but a four-legged
beast hellbent on walking, scrambling after
the mother. A horse gives way to another
horse and then suddenly there are two horses,
just like that. That’s how I loved you. You,
off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

For more information about Ada Limón, whose poems are beloved to me, please visit her website.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limon

Posted on October 2, 2021 by alisonmcghee

Spots are still open in most of our one-day workshops this fall – maybe you should treat yourself to a class! Check them out here and let me know if you’re interested. I’d love to see you in one.

When I first read this poem, by the wondrous Ada Limon, it turned me still and focused the way all her poems do. I pictured my grandmother, a woman who refused to dance and was ashamed of her big body, the one time I came upon her swaying to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in the kitchen when she thought she was alone.

I pictured my other grandmother, who at the moment she died appeared to my sleeping mother flying overhead, calling her name in a voice restored to youth and happiness.

I remembered the owl in the tree above me, who tilted his head back and forth with mine, whose eyes stared direct and unblinking at my eyes. I thought about Ada Limon’s friend, and about those rare times in life when all the names and roles others give us fall away, and we are only our essential selves.

Open Water, by Ada Limòn

It does no good to trick and weave and lose
the other ghosts, to shove the buried deeper
into the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come,
my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistent
in water I cannot tell if it is a wave or you
moving through waves. A month before you died
you wrote a letter to old friends saying you swam
with a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye,
but what you told me most about was the eye.
That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish
that passed you during that last–ditch defiant swim.
On the shore, you described the fish as nothing
you’d seen before, a blue–gray behemoth moving slowly
and enduringly through its deep fathomless
North Pacific waters. That night, I heard more
about that fish and that eye than anything else.
I don’t know why it has come to me this morning.
Warm rain and landlocked, I don’t deserve the image.
But I keep thinking how something saw you, something
was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean
where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife,
but you in your original skin, right before you died,
you were beheld, and today in my kitchen with you
now ten years gone, I was so happy for you.

For more information about Ada Limòn, please check out her website.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limon

Posted on January 5, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Boston public garden ducklings My three children and I were in upstate New York. This was a long time ago, and we were making our annual summer trek around New England to visit family and friends. We had just finished touring the Utica Club Brewery, one of my favorite childhood destinations, a tour that ends with a complimentary beer or root beer in a Victorian saloon. We were all tired. I was chatting with my parents while my children wandered around, trying out various red velvet chairs.

I was sitting on one of those red chairs when my son came up to me and wordlessly sat on my lap. Reading this poem below, by the wondrous Ada Limon, brings the moment rushing back over me. He was almost twelve at the time, not much shorter than me, his tall mother, and it had been a long time since he sat on my lap. I put my arms around him the way I always used to and held him tight. Time was rushing by me, by us, by our family and the world, and I remember thinking Is this the last time? –it was–Will he ever do this again?–he didn’t. I’m sitting here now remembering that moment, and picturing my son and his sisters, grown and scattered around the country. I don’t love anything in the world the way I love them.

The Raincoat, by Ada Limon

When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say that even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

For more information on Ada Limon, please check out her website.

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limon

Posted on March 11, 2018 by alisonmcghee

The way the dark-to-light green concentric curves of artichokes, halved, look on the wooden cutting board. The way the round radishes, sliced thin, fan out on top of the slices of blood oranges in the white serving dish. The way baking powder biscuits can be a love letter if you cut them out with a heart-shaped cutter. The way the tightly-closed daffodils, $3/bunch at the grocery store, open in a few hours when set in a glass full of water. The way the hummingbirds dart in and out of the birds-of-paradise bush just outside the window. The way my little girl used to lean her head against my hands as I braided her hair. These and a thousand other little things, and only the little things, are what I’ll miss, if missing is possible in the beyond. Poem of the Week, by the magnificent Ada Limon.

The Last Thing, by Ada Limon

First there was the blue wing
of a scraggly loud jay tucked
into the shrubs. Then, the bluish
black moth drunkenly tripping
from blade to blade. Then,
the quiet that came roaring
in like the RJ Corman over
Broadway near the RV shop.
These are the last three things
that happened. Not in the universe,
but here, in the basin of my mind,
where I’m always making a list
for you, recording the day’s minor
urchins: silvery dust mote, pistachio
shell, the dog eating a sugar
snap pea. It’s going to rain soon,
close clouds bloated above us,
the air like a net about to release
all the caught fishes, a storm
siren in the distance. I know
you don’t always understand,
but let me point to the first
wet drops landing on the stones,
the noise like fingers drumming
the skin. I can’t help it. I will
never get over making everything
such a big deal.

For more information about Ada Limon, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limon

Posted on October 15, 2016 by alisonmcghee

14100516_603168419863170_3525948158388452292_n My dog is sleeping on the couch right now. We can read each other’s minds; before I get up from this table in a few minutes to go for a run, he will already have jumped down and trotted over to me, knowing I’m about to leave. When I return, he will be waiting at the door to greet me. He doesn’t wake up disturbed like me at the daily news, which even though I don’t watch television and I avoid certain headlines, I know anyway. It’s in the air, in the invisible waves that connect us to each other and the world. It’s a battle not to give in to the disgust and despair and cynicism and snark that sometimes feels omnipresent and, weirdly, more socially acceptable than hope. Hope is harder, and so is the steadfast work that makes things better. The dog in this beautiful poem reminds me of my own dog. Not everything is bad, he says, in action if not words.

The Leash
– Ada Limon

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say, Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

For more information on Ada Limon, please click here.

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