Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Suzanne Cleary

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Anyways
– Suzanne Cleary (for David)

Anyone born anywhere near
my home town says it this way,
with an s on the end:
“The lake is cold but I swim in it anyways,”
“Kielbasa gives me heartburn but I eat it anyways,”
“(She/he) treats me bad, but I love (her/him) anyways.”
Even after we have left that place
and long settled elsewhere, this
is how we say it, plural.
I never once, not once, thought twice about it
until my husband, a man from far away,
leaned toward me, one day during our courtship,
his grey-green eyes, which always sparkle,
doubly sparkling over our candle-lit meal.
“Anyway,” he said. And when he saw
that I didn’t understand, he repeated the word:
“Anyway. Way, not ways.”
Corner of napkin to corner of lip, he waited.
I kept him waiting. I knew he was right,
but I kept him waiting anyways,
in league, still, with me and mine:
Slovaks homesick for the Old Country their whole lives
who dug gardens anyways,
and deep, hard-water wells.
I looked into his eyes, their smoky constellations,
and then I told him. It is anyways, plural,
because the word must be large enough
to hold all of our reasons. Anyways is our way
of saying there is more than one reason,
and there is that which is beyond reason,
that which cannot be said.
A man dies and his widow keeps his shirts.
They are big but she wears them anyways.
The shoemaker loses his life savings in the Great Depression
but gets out of bed, every day, anyways.
We are shy, my people, not given to storytelling.
We end our stories too soon, trailing off “Anyways….”
The carpenter sighs, “I didn’t need that finger anyways.”
The beauty school student sighs, “It’ll grow back anyways.”
Our faith is weak, but we go to church anyways.
The priest at St. Cyril’s says God loves us. We hear what isn’t said.
This is what he must know about me, this man, my love.
My people live in the third rainiest city in the country,
but we pack our picnic baskets as the sky darkens.
We fall in love knowing it may not last, but we fall.
This is how we know home:
someone who will look into our eyes
and say what could ruin everything, but say it,
regardless.

 

For more information on Suzanne Cleary, please click here: http://www.suzanneclearypoet.com/

Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

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When I Met My Muse, by William Stafford
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off–they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.

—

​For more information on William Stafford, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-e-stafford​

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

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Needle and Thread
– Dorianne Laux

It was the sixties, and embroidery was back in,
and if you had jeans torn at the knee, an old
denim jacket, a plain white shirt or a cloth
handbag, I might ask you what you liked
then spend hours alone in my room
with your favorite colors, woven threads
luxurious as a young girl’s hair, practicing
the chain stitch, cross stitch, running stitch,
satin stitch across your ripped skirt until
flowers and suns unfurled, a blustery field
of violet iris, a blind yellow meadow or a deep ravine
that scrolled down your back or pants seam,
red ferns blushing your blouse above
a clavicle, daisy chains circling your cuffs.
I’d return your garment on a day you had almost
forgotten about it, baggy T-shirt, ragged shorts,
laid across my arms so the crewel work
shimmered, patchwork of hearts, patina
of wings, like the riven marble draped
beneath Christ’s Pieta, folds catching the light,
offering it up as a sacrifice, asking nothing in return,
though you bowed your head over it and touched it
with your whorled fingertips, the veined leaf
or cresting wave, frothed, feathered, spiders’ webs
and fleur-de-lis, peace signs and scepters and stars,
then looked up into my face like an alien being, you
who I hardly knew.

—

​For more information on Dorianne Laux, please click here: http://doriannelaux.com/​

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Suzanne Cleary

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Pascal’s Wager
– Suzanne Cleary

Pascal’s Wager is the kind of thing
you would discuss with a beer in your hand,
but then there was always a beer

in one of your hands, or passing from one to the other,
that summer we talked on your porch,
those rainy upstate nights, hot pavement steaming

as it cooled, the steam like fog close over a river,
beginning to lift toward invisibility.
I remember the wager like this: if we believe in God,

there is at least a chance we will see Heaven,
whereas, if we do not believe, we forfeit our place
in paradise. Pascal wrote there is no harm

in believing. If it turns out there is no God,
we’ve lost, he said, nothing, and if we do not believe,
and it turns out we are right, we have gained nothing,

Pascal not the kind of person, evidently,
to take satisfaction in having been right,
damned but right. I knew you drank. I saw the bottles.

I sat in your kitchen and I saw them, beside the stove.
You set your beer down to take a pot from the cupboard,
to pour rice into boiling water. You set it down again

to briefly admire, then chop, carrots and ginger,
to rinse red grapes, place them in a bowl,
all the while the two of us talking, a feast of ideas

and easy silence, as the small kitchen filled
with the smells of earth and, for all we knew,
for all we know, Heaven. When I think of you,

years later, it is usually because there is something
I want to tell you, or there is something I wonder about,
and I am alone in my wonder. I have thought

memory both Heaven and Hell. I wonder
if it is the same for you. Pascal’s theology,
as I understand it, examines doubt

because he believes faith commodious beyond reason,
as is God, who has made earth our home,
and lets us mistake it for Heaven.



—

​For more information on Suzanne Cleary, please click here: http://www.suzanneclearypoet.com/index.htm​


—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Barbara Hamby

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How to Pray
– Barbara Hamby

Falling down on your knees is the easy part, like drinking
a glass of cold water on a hot day, the parched straw
of your throat flooded, your knees hitting the ground,
a prizefighter in the final rounds. You’re bloody,
your bones like iron ties, hands trembling in the dust. What
do you do with your hands? Clasp them together
as if you’re keeping your heart between your palms,
like their namesakes in the desert oasis,
because that’s what you’re looking for now, a place
where you can rest. It has been a dry ride for months,
sand filling your mouth, crusting your half-blind eyes,
and you need to speak to someone—though who
you don’t really know. Pardon is on your mind. Perhaps
you could talk to your mother. You are fifteen
and think her life is over. You don’t say it, but you think it,
and she’s ten years younger than you are now,
her hair still dark. How do you thank her for waking up
each morning and taking on a day that would kill you
and not just one but thousands? How do you thank her
for the way she tossed words around and made them
spin and laugh and do cartwheels on the lawn?
And your father, he’s the one who loved poetry,
bought the book that opened your world to you
like someone cutting into a birthday cake the gods
have baked just for her. Do you talk to him about not caring
and teaching you that same cool touch?
And King James, how do you thank him for all the words
his scribes took from Wycliff and Tyndall, and Keats
for his odes, and Neruda for his. But this wasn’t meant to be a prayer
of thanksgiving but a scourge with a hair shirt and whips
and bowls of gruel. But is it blood the gods need,
or should your offering be all you have—words
and too many of them to count on the fingers pressed to your lips,
or maybe not enough and never the right ones.

–​For more information about ​​Barbara Hamby, please click here: http://www.barbarahamby.com/biography/​

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Patricia Smith

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When the Burning Begins
– Patricia Smith
for Otis Douglas Smith, my father

The recipe for hot water cornbread is simple:
Cornmeal, hot water. Mix till sluggish,
then dollop in a sizzling skillet.
When you smell the burning begin, flip it.
When you smell the burning begin again,
dump it onto a plate. You’ve got to wait
for the burning and get it just right.

Before the bread cools down,
smear it with sweet salted butter
and smash it with your fingers,
crumple it up in a bowl
of collard greens or buttermilk,
forget that I’m telling you it’s the first thing
I ever cooked, that my daddy was laughing
and breathing and no bullet in his head
when he taught me.

Mix it till it looks like quicksand, he’d say.
Till it moves like a slow song sounds.

We’d sit there in the kitchen, licking our fingers
and laughing at my mother,
who was probably scrubbing something with bleach,
or watching Bonanza,
or thinking how stupid it was to be burning
that nasty old bread in that cast iron skillet.
When I told her that I’d made my first-ever pan
of hot water cornbread, and that my daddy
had branded it glorious, she sniffed and kept
mopping the floor over and over in the same place.

So here’s how you do it:

You take out a bowl, like the one
we had with blue flowers and only one crack,
you put the cornmeal in it.
Then you turn on the hot water and you let it run
while you tell the story about the boy
who kissed your cheek after school
or about how you really want to be a reporter
instead of a teacher or nurse like Mama said,
and the water keeps running while Daddy says

You will be a wonderful writer
and you will be famous someday and when
you get famous, if I wrote you a letter and
sent you some money; would you write about me?

and he is laughing and breathing and no bullet
in his head. So you let the water run into this mix
till it moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,
which is another thing Daddy said, and even though
I’d never even seen a river,
I knew exactly what he meant.
Then you turn the fire way up under the skillet,
and you pour in this mix
that moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,
like quicksand, like slow song sounds.

That stuff pops something awful when it first hits
that blazing skillet, and sometimes Daddy and I
would dance to those angry pop sounds,
he’d let me rest my feet on top of his
while we waltzed around the kitchen
and my mother huffed and puffed
on the other side of the door. When you are famous,
Daddy asks me, will you write about dancing
in the kitchen with your father?
I say everything I write will be about you,
then you will be famous too. And we dip and swirl
and spin, but then he stops.
And sniffs the air.

The thing you have to remember
about hot water cornbread
is to wait for the burning
so you know when to flip it, and then again
so you know when it’s crusty and done.
Then eat it the way we did,
with our fingers,
our feet still tingling from dancing.
But remember that sometimes the burning
takes such a long time,
and in that time,
sometimes,

poems are born.



—

​For more information on Patricia Smith, please click here: http://www.wordwoman.ws/​


—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Gary Soto

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Oranges
Gary Soto

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December.  Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge.  I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore.  We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted –
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth.  I fingered
A nickel in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickel from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter.  When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.

Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl’s hand
in mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.


—

​For more information about Gary Soto, please click here: http://www.garysoto.com/​


—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

My baby done graduated

Posted on by alisonmcghee

She was a scruffy little thing when they handed her to me. Fingers in mouth. Brushy black hair worn off in back from scrubbing her head back and forth on the crib mattress. Skinny legs kicking wildly below a little sleeveless purple-and-white striped number.

We first laid eyes on each other in a stuffy room in an office building 6,824 miles from Minneapolis. It was suffocatingly hot that summer and we were both sweaty. For one second, as I held my arms out to her and she looked at me for the first time, she screwed up her face to cry.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” I said in Chinese, desperate to soothe her. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to have so much fun. I promise you.”

She stared at me and listened, her face still twisted in fear and confusion. Then she took the fingers out of her mouth and gave me a huge smile, a smile that made her entire body wiggle.

Later that day, when we were alone in the hotel room, I laid her down on my stomach in her diaper. She stared at me with her deep dark eyes and wiggled and smiled. She took her fingers out of her mouth, stuck them back in. I played peek a boo and she laughed a throaty little chuckle of a laugh.

When I had to get up to go to the bathroom I put her in her crib and her dark, dark eyes followed me across the room.

In a restaurant a few days later, four waitresses took turns holding her. When they realized I spoke Chinese they beckoned me to a corner and, unsmiling, told me that I had to tell her something when she got older.

Tell her she was wanted, they said. Explain to her about the one-child policy. Tell her about us, here in this restaurant, and how we thought she was beautiful and funny. No matter what anyone ever says, don’t ever let her think she wasn’t wanted.

On the flight to Minneapolis she slept and stared out the window and sucked down bottle after bottle and wiggled her legs and laughed. The pilot gave her some plastic wings and she stuck them in her mouth.

6,824 miles later, at midnight, we landed.

There have been many miles since.

How many trips we have been on together, her riding shotgun, me driving. Through the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains and the White Mountains. Down south, hugging the Mississippi and then venturing east to the southern wilds of the Florida panhandle.

Driving west from Minneapolis, feeling the earth swell and rise beneath the car, all the way to Idaho and then heading north to the Canadian Rockies. Most recently down the Pacific Coast Highway in the rain and clouds, Big Sur in the mist, stopping to listen to the sea lions on the rocks.

Hundreds, thousands of miles. She is my road warrior daughter. Dozens of playlists masterminded by her: one perfect song after another. She long ago stopped sticking those two fingers in her mouth, but her dark, dark eyes are as observant as ever.

We play a game I think of as Sure. She points and asks, I answer.

Mom, can I have an elephant?

Sure.

Mom, can we live there?

Sure.

Mom, can I quit school and we’ll go on an around the world trip?

Sure.

Once, a few years ago, we flew eastward, back over those same thousands of miles to the land she was born in. We hiked the Great Wall in 106 degree heat, ate dumplings, melted into the middle of crowds to cross the terrifying streets.

She weighed almost nothing in the beginning. She couldn’t sit up by herself and her  big brother and sister liked to haul her around like a floppy stuffed animal. When she was little her main goal in life was to make them laugh, and she was very good at that task.

She didn’t walk until she was almost two but once she did, she was an unstoppable force of nature. She used to throw herself at the car windows if we passed a playground. She zipped around the block on her trike or scooter or rollerblades. She would shriek like a tiny madwoman if anyone tried to keep her off the slide or the swings.

Eighteen years went by.

Now she’s asleep upstairs, having just gotten home from the all-night high school graduation party. Her purple cap and purple gown are crumpled on the dining room table. Her dog waits patiently for her to wake up. When she does, she will pet him and then drink a mug of strong black coffee.

Come the end of August she will be living 1463 miles away from me, when in all these years since I met her she has never been farther than a few blocks.

Once she didn’t exist. Then she was born. Then I flew a long way to meet her, and we came home to a world that was new because we were new to each other, just getting to know each other, figuring each other out.

What am I trying to say here? Nothing that isn’t a cliche. A cliche about how the day you meet your baby, time slows down inside but speeds up outside. How the years whirl by until the night comes when you’re sitting in a huge auditorium while someone at a microphone is calling out name after name, and your daughter steps across the stage, smiling and shaking hand after hand.

You applaud and smile but inside you’re remembering that very first moment, when she looked at you and almost cried, but didn’t.

I still have the journal I kept about her all those years ago, tucked in a cardboard box with the tiny purple striped outfit, her original passport, the first photo I ever saw of her.

Now I look at the journal and think, She wasn’t even born yet when you began this thing. Strange. But that’s how babies begin. How parenthood begins. How works of art begin. You dream about something that doesn’t yet exist.

Miles to go before we sleep.

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Fraser

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At the Degas Exhibit
– Gregory Fraser

The docent wends us to The Dance Class
and it all flits back: the studio downtown,
few bucks an hour, ragging off the finger

grease of toe-shoed cygnets, tutu-ed swans,
who glided hardwood blind to both
of me—spray of acne, high-top Keds.

I would clatter on the local after school
(weekends once the Christmas pageant neared),
my face, at every stop, floating outside

the window by my seat—a mask
tried on by stars in movie ads, commuters
cooling heels for later cars. Then Windex,

buff, till six, waving hello, farewell,
from glass to glass, plié to pointe—my hand
emitting squeaks, eliding dainty prints and streaks.

In my knapsack: comics, Catcher, lunch
untouched. And never once did I happen on
the courage even to speak to one of those

sugarplums of Rittenhouse, Society Hill.
Degas’s girls, our guide informs, practice
attitudes, inspected by their master

(one Jules Perrot) propped on his staff.
Note the Parisian mothers dabbed
on the wall in back. Yet I see only tights

that bear the stamp Massey Dance, hear
gripes about third position, giddy talk
of boys, and search the sides and corners

for my Old World counterpart—some
sponge-and-bucket kid from a ragged edge—
undersized, nearsighted, invisible to art.

—

​For more information on Gregory Fraser, please click here: ​
​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Fraser​

—
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

From the archives, because it's graduation central around here.

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self

Dear self,

This is the only photo I could find of you. You held an instamatic out in front of you, hoping somehow to capture your own face, and pressed the little black button. I remember exactly when you took that photo. You had just gotten out of the shower. You were wearing cut-offs and that blue workshirt you wore every day back then.

You wondered if maybe you could capture something in a photo that would tell you something you didn’t know about yourself.

Now I look at that photo and I think: You were on the verge. Of so much.

You don’t think of yourself as unhappy right now. You go to high school out in the country, you have friends, you belong to a bunch of things. You don’t think of yourself as lonely.

But in retrospect, you’re waiting and you don’t even know it. You’re waiting for the doors of your life to blow open, for the sky to lift high overhead.

What can I tell you now, from this long perspective of time?

You can let up some. You think you have to push yourself every day, that you have to maintain some high rigid standard, be ultra-disciplined, but you don’t. Why are you setting your alarm every morning for 4:45? So sleepy.

Then again, that discipline will come in handy years later, when you have three little kids –yes! you do end up with three kids, just like you wanted!– and you get up at four because it’s the only time you can write in silence.

So many things that you think matter so much right now do not, in the end, matter. Or they matter, but in a way that you’re too young to understand yet.

That one night you’re thinking about, when they took off and left you there? When you get to my age, instead of blaming yourself –too ugly, too boring, all my fault– you’ll shrug and think, it’s clear that whatever I was back then, I at least wasn’t mean.

All those times on the schoolbus, in school, walking the dirt roads past broken-down trailers, when you feel helpless in the face of others’ pain, will eventually be transformed into art. Even if you feel right now as if you’ll break apart from it, it will be worth it.

Most everything that you are going to live through will, in the end, be worth it.

It’s too late to go back and re-do things, but if I could, I’d tell you a few things that you’re too young to know:

When your grandmother and your father and your mother tell you not to change your plans, that the tickets are nonrefundable, that he knew how much you loved him, don’t listen to them. Go to your grandfather’s funeral, because when you don’t, you will forever regret it.

You don’t need to wash your hair every day.

Don’t listen when people tell you that love fades, that it becomes humdrum, ordinary, that this is the way it is for everyone. It’s not.

You are not ugly the way you fear you are.

Don’t be so afraid, out of self-consciousness, of trying things that it seems as if everyone around you already knows how to do. Skiing, for example. In two years you’re going to go to a college that has its own snow bowl; learn to ski.

Four years from now, when that boy you have the massive crush on comes to your room in Hepburn Hall with a bottle of wine and a bunch of roses, invite him in. Do not stand there in dumb shyness, your heart beating like a hummingbird’s, and thank him politely and watch his face fall and say goodnight and shut the door. Because that’s something else you’re going to regret forever.

When you’re afraid of something, tell someone.

When you need help, ask for it.

When your insides are whirling around and you feel as if you’re drowning, panicking and desperate, don’t put a calm smile on your face and walk around as if you’re fine.

There are lots of people who would love to help you.

There are lots of people who love you. You don’t know that yet, but you will.

In some ways, you’re going to live your life in reverse of most people your age. Awful things are going to happen to you when you’re young, and you’re going to feel much older than your friends. For many years your interior will not match your exterior.

But guess what? Time will go by, and your friends will catch up to you. Life catches up to everyone. The older you get the happier you get, the more rebellious, the less willing to suffer fools, to put up with bad behavior. You’re going to feel so free when you get older.

You are going to be so much happier when you’re older than you can believe possible right now. Most of that happiness will come when you let go of trying to come across a certain way, when you just let people see you for who you are.

It makes me sad that this is going to take you a long time to learn, and I wish I could change it for you, but I can’t.

So many years from the day you held that camera out and hoped this photo would reveal something you couldn’t explain, something you wanted so badly to know about yourself, you will look at it and feel this big sweep of love for that young girl, her whole life stretching out before her, as if she isn’t you.

But she is.