Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Four spots open in Memoir in Moments: Writing Your Life, next Friday, September 8, 1-4:30 CT. To register, please click and scroll down. I’d love to see you in the zoom room.

Eight years ago, on a whim, I sat down at my dining table and hand-wrote myself a letter. Dear Alison, it began, here are some things you did in 2015. Each entry, such as loved your children and wrote and rewrote that book and stayed in good shape despite plantar fasciitis, holds within it an arc of emotion and effort and accomplishment. I read it again just now. Everything I tried to do that year came rushing back over me, along with a sense of being just one of a long line of humans who are all just trying.

Which brings me to this beautiful farewell poem by Tony Hoagland, especially the ending lines, which I had to read twice to understand were not an admonition but a gentle acknowledgment to himself that he had been a good man who should have been kinder to himself.

Distant Regard, by Tony Hoagland

If I knew I would be dead by this time next year
I believe I would spend the months from now till then
writing thank-you notes to strangers and acquaintances,
telling them, “You really were a great travel agent,”
or “I never got the taste of your kisses out of my mouth.”
or “Watching you walk across the room was part of my destination.”
It would be the equivalent, I think,
of leaving a chocolate wrapped in shiny foil
on the pillow of a guest in a hotel–
“Hotel of earth, where we resided for some years together,”
I start to say, before I realize it is a terrible cliche, and stop,
and then go on, forgiving myself in a mere split second
because now that I’m dying, I just go
forward like water, flowing around obstacles
and second thoughts, not getting snagged, just continuing
with my long list of thank-yous,
which seems to naturally expand to include sunlight and wind,
and the aspen trees which gleam and shimmer in the yard
as if grateful for being soaked last night
by the irrigation system invented by an individual
to whom I am quietly grateful.
Outside it is autumn, the philosophical season,
when cold air sharpens the intellect; 
the hills are red and copper in their shaggy majesty.
The clouds blow overhead like governments and years.
It took me a long time to understand the phrase “distant regard,”
but I am grateful for it now,
and I am grateful for my heart,
that turned out to be good, after all;
and grateful for my mind,
to which, in retrospect, I can see
I have never been sufficiently kind.

Click here for more information about beloved poet Tony Hoagland.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I’d love to see you in one or both of next week’s afternoon workshops, The Intuitive Leap or Memoir in Moments. Click here and scroll for all the details. 

Photo by Stephen Kiernan

That woman sitting on the bar stool with a martini and a magazine, or alone on her couch spinning imaginary people into books, or flying solo around the world: she is me. But won’t you be lonely? is a question I’ve heard a lot in my life, and I don’t know how to answer it, because isn’t everyone, somewhere inside themselves, lonely?

It’s rare to be deeply understood. Rare to meet a kindred spirit who understands when you need to jump in your car and drive alone for thousands of miles, or go to a movie alone, or hike alone. Falling in love doesn’t change this conundrum. It took me a long time to understand that my heart’s silent, fierce response to a disappointed partner —What you want from me I cannot give you–did not mean I was at fault. Thirty years ago I might not have understood this beautiful poem below, but I do now. 

Pathways, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Understand, I’ll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream: 

You come too.

Click here for more information about Rainer Maria Rilke.

*Today’s post first appeared in 2019.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Joseph Fasano

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I’d love to see you in our Freedom of Form workshop next Thursday, August 24. Four hours, $100 or pay as you’re able. Click and scroll for all the details. 

I volunteer as a trained crisis counselor via text. Everyone who reaches out to us is in pain, much of it hard to witness. The other day I talked with a teen who’s being bullied in a particularly vicious way. In our time together I shared resources and we brainstormed ways they could find relief and build connections. The teen’s quiet, hurting resolve went straight to my heart. Over and over I told them how courageous and self-aware they were.

What I wanted to do was hold that child close and reassure them they are perfect exactly as they are. In the days following our conversation I keep sending invisible messages to them through the invisible air, tiny lamps to light their way, hoping they can somehow feel the love beaming toward them.

Urgent Message to a Friend in Pain, by Joseph Fasano

I have to tell you
a little thing about living
(I know, I know, but hear me)
a little thing I’ve carried
in the dark:
Remember when you saw the stars of childhood,
when you knelt alone and thought
that they were there for you,
lamps that something held
to prove your beauty?
They are they are they are they
are they are.

Click here for more information about Joseph Fasano.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Annie Kantar

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Our summer and fall four-hour workshops are coming right up. I’d love to see you in one! Click here and scroll down for all the details.

Last week my daughter and I were naming dreams that won’t happen because of time, because of choices, because we can only live one life at a time. Like my dream of living in Vermont, I said, and my other dream of living on an island off the coast of Maine, and my other other dream of being a forest ranger in the Adirondacks.

Sometimes other selves rattle around inside me, wanting out, wanting to live those other lives. But decades and decades into this one life, here I am, still trying to write something beautiful, still trying to learn how to live with all my imperfections.

First Thing’s, by Annie Kantar

—to make the person

            who’ll write the poems,

the poet said—and, answering

            a question I

must have asked

            but can’t recall: You learn

to live with your imperfect

            self—then went

back to her dinner,

            as if that were all.

Click here for more information on poet and translator Annie Kantar.

alisonmcghee.com.
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new book Dear Brother is in the world as of Tuesday! Click here for more info and/or to register for its launch party. 

Maybe you, like me, talk to the people you love who aren’t on the planet anymore. Maybe you look up and oh, there she is, coming toward you at the end of the block, waving…but wait, no, it’s just someone who looks like her. Maybe you see a cardinal, or an eagle, or a small red fox, and that’s the sign you and your loved one agreed upon, so you know they’re still with you.

And maybe you’re also like me in that sometimes a sign isn’t enough. Sometimes you just want them right back there in the room with you, nodding off in the big chair, or telling you a story, because you need their presence, their courage, their steady-as-a-rock-ness.


The Courage That My Mother Had, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into the grave!—
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.


Click here for more information about Edna St. Vincent Millay.

alisonmcghee.com

My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Faith Shearin

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Click here to peruse our summer and fall one-day online writing workshops. I’d love to see you in the zoom room.

There is a town in North Ontario
Dream comfort memory to spare
And in my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there

College is the place I go in my heart when I need a place to go: Maple leaves ironed between wax paper. Mountains turned to flame in the fall. My mailbox for four years: 2947. My i.d. #: 84337. Blue sky winter afternoons. A narrow bed with a blue wool blanket. A library carrel. The language lab, headphones over my ears. Dancing at the Alibi. Chinese characters written over and over and over. The boy who wore the army jacket and set up a shrine to John Prine in his dorm room. The girl who laced her hiking boots with red laces.

For me it was college, but it doesn’t have to be. A person, a place, an experience, a single moment: and suddenly the roof of your life lifts off and blows away.

Directions to Your College Dorm, by Faith Shearin

All hallways still lead to that room
with its ceiling so high it might have been

a sky, and your metal bed by the window,
and your crate of books. First,

you must walk across the deep
winter campus to find your friend

throwing snowballs that float
for years. Then, open our letters:

shelves of words. You will find
our coats, our awkwardness, the tickets

from the trains that witnessed
our confusion. Love was the place

where we became as naked
as morning; it was dangerous and

dappled and we visited its shores
with suitcases and maps from childhood.

I remember our shadows growing
on your wall while a candle

swallowed itself. You kept a single
glass of water on a desk and it trembled

whenever we danced.


Click here for more information about Faith Shearin.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter (my poetry podcast)

Poem of the Week, by Danusha Laméris

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Twin Citians, please come to my Dear Brother book party at the Red Balloon on Tuesday, August 8 at 6:30 pm. I’d love to see you there!

The other day a wave of missing my friend John Zdrazil, who died two years ago, flooded through me and I just wanted to hear his voice and that big laugh. Feel the sun of his presence shining on me. So I picked up my phone and scrolled through a few of our many years of texts. My God, he was hilarious. And soulful. And smart. And he just loved me so much, exactly as I am, which is so rare in life.

I miss you, Z’driz, I texted him, and listened to the swoosh as it sent itself to wherever he is now.

Late that night I picked up my phone again to read more of our messages to each other, but everything was gone, erased, deleted, except those four words: I miss you, Z’driz. All our conversations, all our laughter, all the books we loved and everything we said about them, invisible now. Floating somewhere in the scrim between worlds.

How Often One Death, by Danusha Laméris

How often one death carries another. Like when
my painting teacher, Eduardo, died, and the cat

he’d had for years succumbed the same month
to the same rare ailment. Or how when they buried

my friend’s grandfather in Japan, the pond-full of koi
he’d tended all his life, sickened, turned belly-up.

Who or what is in our keeping? A house, unoccupied,
quickly turns itself, sinks earthward.

Long-married couples are known to give up
the ghost within hours of each other.

Think of the hum that holds the walls together,
the roof high, keeps the rot at bay a little longer.

As surely as we, too, are pinned here by others,
whose presence urges our cells to replicate, our lives

more single than we imagine. Even the woman
I can’t see, who lives in a studio on the other side

of the wall. She washes a dish and the water runs through
the pipes between us, like blood through the arteries

of a single heart. 

Click here for more information about the wondrous Danusha Laméris.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Cecilia Woloch

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Click here for a list of our summer and fall half-day workshops. I’d love to see you in the zoom room.

When I first moved to Minneapolis, I taught Mandarin at a big city high school where many of my students were recent immigrants from South Asia. I was especially close to a boy from Laos, a boy full of laughter and jokes, intensely smart and talented, who longed for his home country. He used to tell me stories about its beauty, the colors and fruits and simplicity of his life there despite a near-total lack of money. Once he told me that when he was sick, his mother would feed him a precious egg to help him get better.

A single egg.

All these years since, I’ve thought of my student and that story. As I sit here in my kitchen, where I cook myself two eggs nearly every day, I’m thinking of him again.

Ghost Hunger, by Cecilia Woloch

Sometimes when I wipe the bowl with my bread
when I scramble one egg, two eggs, with milk
when I stir the kasha until it’s thick
when I sit at the table and bow my head
I think of how my father ate
how he bowed his head—though he didn’t pray
at least not in the usual way of grace
but always that posture over his plate
of supplication, gratitude—
the hungry shoulders of the boy
who’d stuffed his mouth with pulled grass once
who never got over that there was enough
Sometimes I wipe the bowl with my bread
Sometimes I feed his ghost this prayer

Click here for more information about Cecilia Woloch.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Jacqueline Allen Trimble

Posted on by alisonmcghee

But this was not that day, says the poet.

Today’s my birthday, and this poem goes out as a gift to all you beautiful poetry people out there, in hopes it fills you with the same happiness I feel every time I read it. Out loud, because this poem demands out loud-ness.

The Language of Joy, by Jacqueline Allen Trimble

Black woman joy is like this:
Mama said one day long before I was born
she was walking down the street,
foxes around her neck, their little heads
smiling up at her and out at the world
and she was wearing this suit she had saved up
a month’s paycheck for after it called to her so seductively
from the window of this boutique. And that suit
was wearing her, keeping all its promise
in all the right places. Indigo. Matching gloves.
Suede shoes dippity-do-dahed in blue.
With tassels! Honey gold. And, Lord, a hat
with plume de peacock, a conductor’s baton that bounced
to hip rhythm. She looked so fine she thought
Louis Armstrong might pop up out of those movies
she saw as a child, wipe his forehead and sing
ba da be bop oh do de doe de doe doe.
And he did. Mama did not sing but she was skiddly-doing that day,
and the foxes grinned, and she grinned
and she was the star of her own Hollywood musical
here with Satchmo who had called Ella over and now they were all
singing and dancing like a free people up Dexter Avenue,
and don’t think they didn’t know they were walking in the footsteps
of slaves and over auction sites and past where old Wallace
had held onto segregation like a life raft, but this
was not that day. This day was for foxes and hip rhythm
and musical perfection and folks on the street joining in the celebration
of breath and holiness. And they did too. In color-coordinated ensembles,
they kicked and turned and grinned and shouted like church
or football game, whatever their religious preference. The air
vibrated with music, arms, legs, and years of unrequited
sunshine. Somebody did a flip up Dexter Avenue.
It must have been a Nicholas Brother in a featured performance,
and Mama was Miss-Lena-Horne-Dorothy-Dandridge
high-stepping up the real estate, ready for her close-up.
That’s when Mama felt this little tickle. She thought
it might be pent-up joy, until a mouse squirmed out
from underneath that fine collar, over that fabulous fur,
jumped off her shoulder and ran down the street.
Left my mama standing there on Dexter Avenue in her blue
suit and dead foxes. And what did Mama do?
Everybody looking at her, robbed by embarrassment.
She said, “It be like that sometimes,” then she and Satchmo,
Ella, and the whole crew jammed their way home.

Click here for more information about Jacqueline Allen Trimble.


alisonmcghee.com

My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Karen Bjork Kubin

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Last week my daughter asked why there was duct tape wrapped around my foot. “To dissolve a callous,” I said, which is something I read duct tape can do (among its zillion other uses). She shook her head in a sad but familiar way, and I laughed and thought of the foot doctor who once lectured me on how I should stop wearing high heels.

Dude. You clearly do not know me at all, I thought.

These feet of mine have tromped up and down a thousand mountains and through a thousand woods and they show it. Occasionally I pick things up with my extra-long toes rather than bend down and use my fingers, and no, I’m not kidding. I always felt so sorry for Cinderella.

The Lost Shoe, by Karen Bjork Kubin

Doodle, doodle, doo,
The Princess lost her shoe:
Her highness hopped,
The fiddler stopped,
Not knowing what to do.

It had never before occurred to me
to kick it off.
And you know princesses 
don’t just lose things, right?

I have not found the courage yet
to chuck the other.
For now, the chill and bite of floor
against skin is almost more

than I can bear. Let me feast on it.
Give me earth. Give me
time, and I will bare the other,
will bare the rest,

and I do not need your music anymore.
I have my own, 
and steps to learn,
a dance to keep, and turn,
and turn.

Click here for more information about poet and violinist Karen Bjork Kubin.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter