Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Wendell Berry

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There is No Going Back
– Wendell Berry

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

For more information on Wendell Berry, please click here: http://www.wendellberrybooks.com/

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There is a sparkling choir

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Snow fell yesterday in the city in which you live, and like all new snow after weeks of no-snow, it transformed the ugly into the beautiful. Goodbye, brownish clots of street-worn slush. Hello, soft white velvet.

At night, when the snow that has fallen all day ceases to fall and the streetlights come on and the moon rises, the snow sparkles. The dark air sparkles, too.

There were endless warnings last night about bad driving conditions, freezing rain and sleet earlier in the day now overlaid with a deceptive four inches of new snow, and you would have stayed home except that you had to teach an evening workshop just outside the city borders.

So out you went in your giant men’s boots and the mittens your mother gave you for Christmas last year, the ones that everyone covets because they’re fleece-lined wool and so pretty and so warm. You checked the trunk to make sure that the miniature shovel and jumper cables and extra blanket were in there, because

even though there was no chance you would possibly get stuck anywhere you couldn’t walk a few yards and be at someone’s warm house, you like to pretend you’re a pioneer.

You got to the house where the workshop was being held, but you were early, so you kept driving. Around and around unfamiliar streets you drove, slowly, so that you could take it all in.

The lamplit windows and the snow-laden pines in front of them.

The dark cat trotting through the snow at the side of the road.

The streetlights that gave off that yellowish glow that they always do at night in fresh snow.

The unplowed side streets with the single set of tire ruts that every car, no matter what direction it was going, followed.

The couple holding hands and laughing as they broke a path through a small field.

Dog Forest, where you sometimes take your dog so he can run up and down hills and you can tromp through the woods and where neither of you has to pause at the end of blocks to watch for cars.

You taught the workshop and then walked outside into the sparkling air. This was the first time you had worn your giant men’s snowboots since you broke your leg a couple of months ago. They felt great. Your leg felt great too. Almost great, anyway. Good. Pretty good. Good enough to shovel, anyway, which you were secretly longing to do.

You got in the car and meandered quietly back home, hoping that your youthful companion had stayed put while you were teaching and had decided against hauling herself out, shovel in hand. You hoped that when you got home you would find her where you’d left her, sitting on the couch and catching up on one of the several shows she’s addicted to, every episode of which features a gruesome murder and the quirky-but-dedicated team of investigators who solves it.

Sure enough, nothing had changed about either the snow or the youthful companion. This made you so happy. For the first time since the broken leg, you could go out and shovel.

Everyone has a method for shoveling snow. You like to begin with the front steps and sidewalk. If the snow’s not too deep you push the shovel –a bright yellow spring steel snow shovel, thanks– straight ahead of you down the middle of the walkway and sidewalk. Then, from the cleared middle, you shovel short perpendicular sweeps all the way to either side.

You get into a rhythm and don’t break it except to lean on the shovel every once in a while and look up at the dark sparkling night. You love the ache in your back and the ache in your legs and the way your heart beats hard when you shovel.

There’s an etiquette to city shoveling.

You need to clear every bit of your own property, but it’s good form to shovel beyond that into your neighbors’ territory, too. Not too far. Maybe a few feet. Enough so that they know you’re not being selfish and trying to get away with as little shoveling as possible.

With neighbors much older than you, though, neighbors like your 90-year-old neighbor, it’s a little more complicated. Good manners demand that you shovel a few feet beyond your own border, but should you continue on and shovel her entire sidewalk? Her steps?

This is a tricky question. At first it seems obvious: of course you should shovel your neighbor’s entire sidewalk. She’s 90 years old, for God’s sake! But your neighbor is deeply independent and likes to take care of her own house and yard. You’ve often seen her out shoveling her driveway and weeding her lawn.

And there was that one day last summer when you went bursting out your back door to investigate the intensely annoying thock, thock, thock sound you kept hearing, only to find her, at 90, hatcheting down some of the buckthorn on her side of the fence because it was starting to intrude on your side of the fence and she “didn’t want to annoy you.”

Back to the snow. You can tell that the hired shoveling crew who clears her sidewalks has already been by, so you settle for the token-good-manners additional three feet.

A tall man turns the corner at the end of the block and comes walking toward you. You’re shoveling your steps now. Damn, it feels good to be out shoveling. To be doing physical work, the kind of work you love, as opposed to the kind of work that exists all in your head and exhausts you from the inside out.

You give the tall man a big smile when he passes by and he gives you one back and says hello in what you decide is a Middle Eastern accent of some sort.

You’re both happy to be the only ones out, late at night, in the sparkling air of the sparkling snow.

Some days
the snow has taken me in
to know the time of snow, to live
inside a world so quiet

its music
is all a shimmering. Some evenings
when quite alone
I turn off every light

and watch the snow
enjoy the dark, moving lushly
through spiky air,
finding more time

in time
than when I stretch myself
and am
my father’s father. Oh yes,

there is
a sparkling choir, there surely is,
and dark ice air
through which we fall.

(Snow, by Kevin Hart)

Poem of the Week, by Moya Cannon

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Viola D’Amore
– Moya Cannon

Sometimes, love does die,
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill
and, like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why the hill sings,
wonder why they find wells.


—
For more information on Moya Cannon, please click here: http://www.californiapoetics.org/interviews/3818/an-interview-with-moya-cannon
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Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

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Dark Charms
– Dorianne Laux

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

 

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

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Poem of the Week, by Maureen Micus Crisick

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Suppose
– Maureen Micus Crisick

the ghetto stars pinned to cloth
could lift from history
like angels soaring to the sky.
The air which holds cinders
of Buddhist robes, burned hair
of ones who doused themselves, set fire,
suppose the plume of smoke
becomes clear and white.

What did I say?
I said: what if Sarajevo is not burning
and no city is burning
and in the market square
no human head is impaled on a stick
or mute limbs strewn on the streets,
and no fingers exist without hands.

Suppose grenades side with sunlight.
Bullets in boxes become
chocolate wrapped in gold foil,
and in Guatemala, the men come back
from their disappearance,
and in the morning, wake in their own beds
because love is the white moon
and light moves in us like blood.

Yes
there will be holes left in clothes
but not from ripped stars,
only from wear,
to let the darkness out.


—
I found Maureen Micus Crisick’s poem in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Companion-Pleasures-Writing-Poetry/dp/0393316548/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358000383&sr=1-1&keywords=Maureen+Micus+Crisick
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Poem of the Week, by Alden Nowlan

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Great Things Have Happened
– Alden Nowlan

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

“Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.


—
For more information on Alden Nowlan, please click here: http://www.poemhunter.com/alden-nowlan/biography/
—
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Two one-day workshops, March 23 and April 20

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Greetings, writers!

Are you looking to kickstart a particular writing project, rejuvenate your writing, or simply experience a one-afternoon writing adventure?

I’m teaching two one-day workshops, “The Order in Which It’s Told” and “Tense and Point of View,” at the fabulous Loft in the fabulous Open Book building, March 23 and April 20.

These are brief-but-intense four-hour workshops, I love teaching them, and I’d love to see you there. Click here for info.

"Though your life felt arduous/ new and unmapped and strange. . ."

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I’m talking to you, 2012. You were a long and hard year for so many of those I love. You felt helpless and horrifying at times. And you are almost over.

I’m thinking about the smallness of human life. The smallness of my life. Of this year. The smallnesses are what I remember.

Like the sound of my sister’s laugh on the other end of the phone that night when she called me back after I left her that long message.

Like the night I was playing dirty word Bananagrams with my daughter and an old friend and they both called PEEL at the same time for the same dirty word.

There was a morning in February that I ran on a deserted beach while dolphins kept pace with me fifty feet from shore.

There was a night in May that I spent sitting on the couch with someone I adore, drinking limoncello and youtubing classic songs from our youth.

There’s the fact that I can send out a smoke signal to my other sister and she will call within an hour, saying Got your smoke signal. What’s up?

There was the day I found those beautiful, vintage, handmade boots at Experienced Goods in Brattleboro and I tried them on and couldn’t take them off even long enough to fork over the $8 at the cash register.

There was the night last summer when I danced late one night to every single song –yes, even the Hokey Pokey, thanks Stinky– from that crowd-sourced dance mix.

There was that night at the open-air restaurant by a faraway sea with my daughters, candles flickering on the wooden tables. There was that perfect Greek salad and seafood from the sea a few feet away.

And that maitre d’ who kept smiling at the three of us and sending over treats: little glasses of ouzo, stuffed grape leaves, a plate of chocolate cake.

There was a pillar at an airport, a pillar I leaned against while waiting for someone, and there was that familiar and enormous swell of love when the someone I was waiting for got off the plane.

There were nine circuits around the dog park on a 2 degree day because the dog was so happy to be out there, and how could I let him down?

There was the night I stood in line for pie at a community play in my hometown and felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see my high school friend, unglimpsed in over thirty years, and I flashed back to slow-dancing with him late one night when we were 17, and the Denny’s breakfast that followed, and I remembered thinking, that long-ago night, What a great guy he is, and there he was, and I could see right away that he was still a great guy, and we hugged each other and smiled and smiled.

There was the afternoon I sat down and wrote a thank-you note, an actual thank-you note, to my brother because he is so damn funny and he makes me laugh so hard.

There were the tiny blue and yellow Italian pottery cups that came with that bottle of limoncello.

There is the ongoing fact that even though my grandmother has been gone for so many years now, I still talk to her every day. I still feel her presence, like the electricity inside the walls of my house. Invisible, and everywhere.

There is the handleless handmade coffee mug that I have to keep circling in my hands so that my fingers don’t burn but which I use every morning anyway because there’s something about it that feels exactly right.

There was Big Fat Bacon on a Stick at the state fair with my friends Stinky and J.O.

There was the day I sat down to write a blog about my best friend and I didn’t know where to start, because she is threaded throughout my entire life, and where do you begin?

There was the gratitude –what would I do without her?– and the panic –what would I do without her?

There was that day out on a run, stopping at a bridge to look down, far down at the river below, and all those bright kayaks lined up in a row on the dark water, and I couldn’t stop looking at them, remembering my living-with-cancer-for-many-years-now friend’s comment on how she can hardly stand going to the Farmer’s Market anymore, because “the colors knock my socks off,” and I knew exactly how she felt.

There was the afternoon that my quiet student, after reading aloud his strange, unearthly and beautiful-in-an-ugly way piece of writing to the class, looked over and met my eyes while everyone else’s head was still bent, and there was me nodding so that he would feel the Yes that I was trying to send to him, and there was the relief in his eyes when he got my silent Yes.

There was the night I went to see my father pretending to be crazy King George in a community play and I watched him, in his long white ruffled shirt and his rolled-up and safety-pinned black pants and his moth-eaten velvet robe, and I was so glad that sometimes in life, you get to live long enough so that everything gets worked through, gets left behind, gets washed away, so that there’s only one thing left, and that one thing is this: love.

Yup, I’m talking to you, 2012, here on the last day of a long hard year in the still-young years of a century whose end I won’t be here to see. Those moments above are a few of the millions of moments that I remember from you.

I’m marking you, 2012, acknowledging you, so that tonight, at 12:01 a.m., the world will be new again.

And we will all have yet another chance.

What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other’s despair into hope? –
You yourself must change it. –
what would it feel like to know your country was changing? –
You yourself must change it. –
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?

Poem of the Week, by Yehuda Amichai (tr. by Chana Bloch)

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A Quiet Joy
– Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch)

I’m standing in a place where I once loved.
The rain is falling. The rain is my home.
I think words of longing: a landscape
out to the very edge of what’s possible.
I remember you waving your hand
as if wiping mist from the windowpane,
and your face, as if enlarged
from an old blurred photo.
Once I committed a terrible wrong
to myself and others.
But the world is beautifully made for doing good
and for resting, like a park bench.
And late in life I discovered
a quiet joy
like a serious disease that’s discovered too late:
just a little time left now for quiet joy.

—
For more information on Yehuda Amichai, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/yehuda-amichai

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Poem of the Week, by Gary Johnson

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December
– Gary Johnson

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here—and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels singing overhead? Hark.


—
For more information on Gary Johnson, please click here: http://www.amazon.com/Head-Trauma-Sonnets-Other-Poems/dp/0595403387
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