Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Lisel Mueller

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What the Dog Perhaps Hears
– Lisel Mueller

If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn’t a shudder
too high for us to hear.

What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.


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For more information on Lisel Mueller, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lisel-mueller
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Poem of the Week, by Sharon Olds

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Little Things
– Sharon Olds

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night. I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have –
as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.


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For more information about Sharon Olds, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sharon-olds/
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Poem of the Week, by Bob Hicok

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In Michael Robins’s class minus one
– Bob Hicok

At the desk where the boy sat, he sees the Chicago River.
It raises its hand.
It asks if metaphor should burn.
He says fire is the basis for all forms of the mouth.
He asks, why did you fill the boy with your going?
I didn’t know a boy had been added to me, the river says.
Would you have given him back if you knew?
I think so, the river says, I have so many boys in me,
I’m worn out stroking eyes looking up at the day.
Have you written a poem for us? he asks the river,
and the river reads its poem,
and the other students tell the river
it sounds like a poem the boy would have written,
that they smell the boy’s cigarettes
in the poem, they feel his teeth
biting the page.
And the river asks, did this boy dream of horses?
because I suddenly dream of horses, I suddenly dream.
They’re in a circle and the river says, I’ve never understood
round things, why would leaving come back
to itself?
And a girl makes a kiss with her mouth and leans it
against the river, and the kiss flows away
but the river wants it back, the river makes sounds
to go after the kiss.
And they all make sounds for the river to carry to the boy.
And the river promises to never surrender the boy’s shape
to the ocean.

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For more information about Bob Hicok, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/bob-hicok
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Poem of the Week, by Mary Karr

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A Blessing from My Sixteen Years’ Son
– Mary Karr

I have this son who assembled inside me
during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,
in a heartbeat. Outside, pines toppled.

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.
Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.
Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes.
Sixteen years and not a bone broken,
not a single stitch. By his age,

I was marked more ways, and small.
He’s a slouching six foot three,
with implausible blue eyes, which settle

on the pages of Emerson’s “Self Reliance”
with profound belligerence.
A girl with a navel ring

could make his cell phone go brr,
or an Afro’d boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell —
creatures strange as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel
arcane as any oracle’s. Bruce claims school
is harshing my mellow. Case longs to date

a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman
willing to do stuff she’ll regret.
They’ve come to lead my son

into his broadening spiral.
Someday soon, the tether
will snap. I birthed my own mom

into oblivion. The night my son smashed
the car fender, then rode home
in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you

and Dad screw up so much?
He’d let me tuck him in,
my grandmother’s wedding quilt

from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t
blame us, I said. You’re your own
idiot now. At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy
took it hard. He’d found my son
awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he’d draped his own coat
over her shaking shoulders. My fault,
he’d confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.


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For more information on Mary Karr, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-karr
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In my father's house there are many mansions

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There’s a one-room shop in New York City that features dozens of cubbies, like dioramas, of perfect miniature rooms, complete to the last detail. Doll house furnishings unlike any you’ve ever seen before – a rolled-up newspaper, headlines and print readable, measuring half an inch. A wooden tray, the size of your pinky nail, containing a folded napkin, half a dozen chocolate chip cookies and a pitcher of milk.

It’s easy to spend an hour wandering around that quiet little store admiring its precisely wrought wares. Tiny houses charm you and always have. Airstreams. Houseboats. Vintage, single-wide trailers like the kind your grandmother lived in when you were growing up. One-room studio apartments with miniature appliances, a miniature fireplace, like one you once lived in.

You’ve always wanted a miniature house for yourself. Once you once spent a couple of hours at a marina on the Mississippi, pretending to be in the market for a houseboat so you could check out the ones that were for sale. So perfect, all of them, with their built-in drawers and appliances and cupboards and beds and tables and chairs.

When you were little, you and your sisters used to make elaborate houses out of big cardboard boxes, hay bales, an abandoned chicken coop, a blanket thrown over a card table. Every square inch counted in those houses, and no space went to waste.

Why, then, given this love of miniaturization, do you keep having one particular dream?

In this dream, you’re in a house, a house that you live in. You like the house but you don’t love it, maybe because there’s somehow not quite enough room in it.

Then, in the dream, you suddenly discover that there’s a whole part of the house that you never knew about. The new part is usually circular, built in a ring around the outside of the house you’ve been living in. It’s made of wood, and very dusty, and the furniture in it –it comes fully furnished– is covered with white sheets. It’s been closed up for a long time.

You walk around opening door after door, peering into room after room. Balconies and hallways. Windows. High ceilings. So much room!

Whenever you have this dream, you wake up restless, half happy and half frustrated. Where is all that room? Where is the whole hidden enormous house that’s somewhere, somehow, part of the house you already live in?

When you were a kid you wanted a house like the one Batman lived in, with secret compartments and bookcases that revolved at a touch of a button to reveal a whole new wing of the mansion, including the Bat Cave where the Bat Car waited.

Last week you were at your shack in the Green Mountains with a big list of things to do, tasks involving a shovel, a spade, a pitchfork, a hatchet, an axe, a scythe and a wheelbarrow.

At under 200 square feet, the shack is tiny. It began life as a pile of labeled wood with instructions that you bought off eBay, kind of like a giant Lincoln Log kit. Over four days, one sunny November years ago, you and your friends framed it up on a smoothed and leveled patch of gravel.

The shack sits in a small clearing surrounded by towering pines, next to a sunny slope set amongst ravines and bluffs and woods and creeks. That’s it up there at the top of this page. It’s more faded now. If you don’t do something to the wood soon it will keep fading more and more until it’s a silvery color.

Inside it smells like pine and earth, like concentration of woods.

You built the shack thinking that it was the beginning of a future real house. The first step in a long dream of life in Vermont.

Last week you constructed an indoor sink out of a jug and a bucket and a  cart, and the whole arrangement was so pleasing that you ended up washing your hands and brushing your teeth much more than usual, just to use the new sink.

In the tiny pitched-roof sleeping loft, an air mattress spread with a quilt is a bed. At night you can turn out the light and lie by the window sipping whiskey and looking out at the stars through the pine branches.

There’s a heater at the shack, and a couch, and many books. There’s a miniature refrigerator and a toaster and a well with a pump. There’s an outhouse. There’s a tent for guests, not that you’ve had any. There’s peanut butter and Jim Beam. There’s soap and a toothbrush and towels. There’s a table with a pen and paper.

There’s a hammock hung between two pines. It’s possible to spend half an hour watching an inchworm make its way across the entire, enormous-to-an-inchworm width of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is the inchworm brave? Dumb? Is it acting purely on instinct and, if so, is it braver or dumber than a human being who tries to plot out its life from start to finish? Does it know where it’s going? Does it  know it’s going anywhere? Is it going somewhere, or is movement itself the biological destiny of an inchworm? Does an inchworm stop inching to sleep, or rest, or take a short nap?

These are some of the questions you wondered about as you sat in the hammock last week, watching the inchworm. Early on in the watching you decided that no matter what, you wouldn’t interfere with the inchworm. Neither by helping nor hindering would you influence the outcome of this journey, whatever that journey was.

The entire time you watched the inchworm, it never stopped moving, or trying to move, even when it reached a particularly deep fold in the fabric of the hammock. When that happened, it stretched itself out as far as possible and then flung as much of its body as it could over the abyss.

When you returned to the city you showed your youthful companion a tiny video you took of the inchworm, inching, and before three seconds went by she said, “Honestly? I’ve always really admired inchworms,” and you had to agree.

At some point you lay back in the hammock and looked straight up, into the crowns of the white pines and the blue sky beyond. You heard nothing but birds and crickets and bees and the faint drone of an invisible airplane.

Suddenly you realized that the shack isn’t a shack. It isn’t the beginning of a much bigger future house. It’s not the start of a dream; it’s a miniature house, complete in itself.

Why did this never occur to you before?

All you had to do, in order to turn the shack into the miniature house you’ve always wanted, was see it in a new way. Your whole life you’ve dreamed of a miniature house, and all this time you already had one.

It comes to you then, looking up at those trees, that there’s so much space in your miniature house. And on the hammock. So much space in the trees, arching toward the sky, and so much space in the sky.

So many rooms in everything, and everyone.

Poem of the Week, by Seamus Heaney

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Postscript
– Seamus Heaney
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open


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For more information about Seamus Heaney, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/seamus-heaney
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Poem of the Week, by Ellen Bass

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GATE C 22
– Ellen Bass

At gate C 22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after

the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like satin ribbons tying up a gift. And kissing.

Like she’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
she kept saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning

of a calm day at Big Sur, the way it gathers
and swells, taking each rock slowly
in its mouth, sucking it under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—

the passengers waiting for the delayed flight to San Jose,
the stewardesses, the pilots, the aproned woman icing
Cinnabons, the guy selling sunglasses. We couldn’t
look away. We could taste the kisses, crushed

in our mouths like the liquid centers of chocolate cordials.
But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still

opened from giving birth, like your mother
must have looked at you,
no matter what happened after—
if she beat you, or left you, or you’re lonely now—

you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off and someone gazing at you
like you were the first sunrise seen from the earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,

each of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse,
little gold hoop earrings, glasses,
all of us, tilting our heads up.

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For more information about Ellen Bass, please click here: http://www.ellenbass.com/index.php
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Thing One

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If your house was burning to the ground but you were magically granted one thing from it to save –this doesn’t include the people you love, because they’re already safe and sound and draped in blankets and watching from the neighbors’ yard– what would that one thing be?

This is an easy question to answer: fifty-six journals (hello, since when does fifty-six old journals equal “one thing”? Since right now), one for each year of each of your youthful companions’ lives.

There they are up there, a bunch of them anyway. You’re missing one, the very first one, which you started when the oldest of your youthful companions was born. That was the guinea pig journal. It began life as an 18-month Batman wall calendar. It was big, with a square for each day of each month. You can still see it perfectly in your mind, although it disappeared fifteen years ago and you have no idea where it might be or if it still exists.

You filled in a day here and a day there on that giant Batman wall calendar, using a calligraphy marker because the letters were bigger and it took you less time to fill in a day. Still, that Batman calendar was a reminder of constant failure, so many more white unwritten-on days than the few haphazardly filled in with green and blue and red calligraphy marker.

In the beginning you had the best of intentions. Every day of your children’s lives would be recorded, every milestone written down for posterity. What the hell were you thinking? Obviously you didn’t know that it would be all you could do to get from one day to the other.

Over many years the ritual evolved into what it still is: every few days, or weeks even, you sit at the dining table at dawn, listening to music and writing in one of the journals, about one of the youthful companions. What she was doing, or what she said, or the way you glimpsed her on the street the other day, or the way her voice sounded when she called you that one breathless day.

You might write down something secret, something that she doesn’t know, such as the fact that every night before you go to bed you open up her closed bedroom door and take a deep breath, because it still smells exactly like her even though she lives so far away now.

Were it not for your cell phone camera you would have no photos. You have no organized photo books of your youthful companions, no filled-in baby books. No scrapbooks. In the basement are three enormous plastic bins shoved full of haphazard mementoes: a tiny stuffed panda bear, tickets to performances, old report cards, History Day projects, birthday cards. Someday you’ll go through them all. Or maybe you won’t.

But the house is burning down and you can save only one thing. That’s the rule, right? Fifty-six journals it is, then, all of which equal only one thing.

Teaching, part one: And when the world falls to decline –

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This was a long time ago, when in the wake of something awful you upheaved your entire life in a matter of weeks: you left the city you loved, you left your friends, you left your family, you bought a crappy car and you took a job teaching a crappy class in speed reading and mnemonics, a job that moved you from southern college to southern prep school every four weeks. You traveled alone, lived alone, did everything alone except when you were standing in front of the students whose parents had signed them up to take the crappy class.

You have no idea why you’re thinking about that year these days, those colleges and prep schools, these days, but you are. You still feel guilty at the thought of that stupid class you taught, and the money the students’ parents paid for it.

Speed reading? Why should anyone speed read? What’s the point? And mnemonics too. Mnemonics are kind of cool, in a way –to this day you can memorize an extremely long number in 30 seconds flat– but do they have any real use for a person’s education? No.

But the job was there and you took it for one reason only: to get out of the life you knew, because that life was shredded beyond recognition. The only problem was that once you were out of that life and speeding down I-95 in your new crappy car, you realized that you were still inside yourself, and so was the shredded life.

Too late. You had left everything behind. Your sister had a new roommate. There was no place for a car in the city. The dotted line had been signed. A whole year of four weeks here, four weeks there stretched before you, and you had to make it through.

Once a month a slender wad of twenties arrived at whatever school you happened to be at, wrapped in folds of paper and sent through the U.S. mail. The slender wad of twenties didn’t cover lodging, gas and food, so one of the three had to go, and it was usually lodging.

Sometimes you slept in your car. Sometimes you camped in state parks, you and your pup tent and sleeping bag and Apple IIc, which you lugged to whatever electrical outlet you could find, usually attached to a primitive shower/outhouse building.

Once a ranger came to check on you. You and he were the only ones in the entire park. This was somewhere in Tennessee, you’re pretty sure.

“Miss? You going to be all right out here?” he said in his soft southern accent. “It’s pretty cold at night now.”

“Oh sure,” you said, putting on your fake tough-northerner voice.

He was right. It was cold. You used to stay in places like Wendy’s until it was close to closing. You ate a lot of Wendy’s baked potatoes with various toppings. Sometimes you ordered chili and took as many of the cellophane-wrapped crackers as you could back to the tent.

You could not get away from yourself no matter what you tried. You called your friends from pay phones but they were all still in their lives and you missed them. You missed your life. You had to figure out a new one but you didn’t know how.This was supposed to be a new life but it wasn’t.

You rummaged around for anything that would lift you out of yourself. Reading worked, for a while. Sink into a big fat book. Driving, fast and for hours on end, worked. Walking, fast and for hours on end, worked. Dancing worked. At one college –in Louisiana, maybe?– they let you stay in the infirmary, which was empty.

The little infirmary room was tiny, with a narrow vinyl bed, a sink, cinderblock walls. This infirmary had a long hallway with polished tile floors. Late at night it was dark in there and you blasted music from your boombox and danced up and down the dark hallway.

This infirmary dancing is the most distinct memory you have from that entire year. Hugely loud music filled up your ears and drove everything else away. What were you listening to? Warren Zevon. Joan Armatrading. Annie Lennox. The driving beat of some of those songs, and Annie Lennox’s enormous soaring voice, was perfect for the way you felt. That was a year of loud, loud music.

And I’ll be (the ticking of your clock)
And I’ll be (the numbers on your watch)
And I’ll be (your hands to stop the time)
I’ll even be your danger sign.

What else lifted you out of yourself? Teaching.

Teaching was something you didn’t even think about when you took the job. Your only goal was to get the hell out. Teaching had nothing to do with anything; it was a means to an end.

Until you stood in front of the first class on the first day, looking out at those students sitting there with their notebooks and pens, and opened your mouth and started to talk. And rolled a piece of chalk around in your hands and turned and wrote on the board, and turned back and talked some more, and watched as hands went up and young faces asked questions, and you answered.

You can do this, you remember thinking. It was as if you were standing outside your body, that poor body, so exhausted and skeletal from loss and confusion, and watching yourself do something that you were born knowing how to do.

Despite being descended from a line of teachers, teaching was not something you had ever considered. Here you were, though. It was a crappy class, and probably useless to those who had paid to take it. But the act itself –teaching– transcended the stupidity of the subject matter.

And it lifted you out of yourself. Those hours that you stood in front of the students, you were finally, finally outside of yourself. Escape.

The girls in the classes you taught were southern girls with southern names, many of them with two first names. You loved saying those names. Some of them you can still remember: Mary-Perron.  Cassie Sue. Helen-Mary.

Every day it felt as if you couldn’t bear going into the class and standing up there and talking, and every day, once you were actually in there and doing it, it lifted you out of yourself. Some of your friends loathe the phrase Fake it till you make it, but not you. You love it and you trust it.

Back then you were young and you thought that your suffering was greater than others’. You shake your head at your young self now. You would get angry at her, for such self-centeredness, but that would do no good. Now, when you’re suffering, you don’t try to shove it away. You let yourself be, and you picture everyone else out there who, at this exact moment, is hurting. And paradoxically, the hurting eases.

It would take you many years to see that those times you thought you were standing outside yourself, outside your life, watching yourself, you weren’t.

It’s all the same self, the same body, the same life.

If you could reach back in time to your 24-year-old self you would tell her, in the wake of awful things, not to leave behind everything she loved and everyone who loved her. You would tell her to do nothing, to stay put, to wake up every morning and make it through each day until it gets better. You would tell her that it will get better.

You would also tell her that even if she does everything wrong –even if she upheaves her life, sets herself adrift, plows on without knowing what the hell she’s doing– it will still, eventually, be okay.

Because everything changes. In time, everything becomes something else. Even unbearable things become bearable. Wait long enough and they fade and fade and fade until poof, days and weeks go by and you wake up one day and realize you haven’t felt the stab of that particular pain in months. That’s a hurt of a different kind.

One of your students, a southern girl with one of those beautiful hyphenated two-first-names, said to you, on the last day of the three-week class in Virginia, “Alison, you know what? Someday, a long time from now, I’m going to be in an airport, and I’ll see you walking by me, and I’ll call out your name. And we’ll have us a reunion.”

Every time you’re in an airport, surrounded by travelers rushing this way and that with their wheelies, you think of her. You can’t remember what she looks like, or what her voice sounds like. The day might still come, though, when you’re wandering past a Cinnabon or a Hudson News in some anonymous terminal, and you hear her call your name.

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world
And the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something.

Poem of the Week, by Li-Young Lee

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Nativity
– Li-Young Lee

In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.

How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night’s darling?

Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,

this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,

just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,

each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.


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For more information on Li-Young Lee, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/li-young-lee
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