Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week | Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Paul Hostovsky

Posted on November 23, 2019 by alisonmcghee

A beloved friend I lost touch with many years ago has been on my mind lately, so I googled him. My guess was he’d be out there somewhere, invisibly changing the world with his brilliance at math, and I was right.

In our early twenties my friend gave me a small book titled Innumeracy, about how statistics influence every aspect of our lives. One chapter detailed how every breath we take contains a minimum of three molecules of air breathed by every person who has ever been alive.

The knowledge that we will always be part of each other changed the way I think, and live, and write. Those we love and those we don’t, those who love us and those who don’t – like it or not, we are connected forever. This beautiful poem makes me want to put my arms around the whole world and hold it tight.

History of Love, by Paul Hostovsky

Because he loves the way she has
of touching him
and because she loves the way he has
of loving her
each has learned the other’s
way and the other’s touch
so when love turns
and the world turns
and the lovers turn from each other and go
to other lovers they take
they take all they know
of love and of touch
and they give it to another
and in this way love grows rich
and wise and wide among us
and in this way we are also
loving those who will come after
and those who came before
we ever came to love

For more information about Paul Hostovsky, please check out his website.

Poem of the Week, by Tess Gallagher

Posted on November 16, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Shack, view straight up from the hammock Years ago I bought some raw land on a slope in Vermont. Hired someone to grade a tiny cleared patch in the woods. Drilled a well. Bought a one-room cabin kit off eBay and hired a carpenter to put it together. Spent many days and nights staring up from the porch and the hammock at the enormously tall pines pictured to the right.

The cabin was a seasonal place but even in summer it was always dark and cool. After some years I craved sunlight, so I asked a lumberjack friend if he would cut down a few of the pines. He said yes, if he could do it in the middle of winter. I don’t like to cut down trees, he said, even though he was a lumberjack. And I only do it in winter, when all the birds have left the nests.

When I read this poem I thought of him, my lumberjack friend who snowshoed alone up the unplowed dirt road to the cabin in February, towing his chainsaw and axe on a toboggan behind him, and went to work in the frozen stillness so he wouldn’t hurt the birds.

Choices, by Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

for Drago Štambuk

For more information on Tess Gallagher, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Orr

Posted on November 9, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Certain moments are burned into your brain and heart, moments that even as they happened you knew would haunt you forever, like the way your little boy nodded and kept nodding, that one afternoon on the couch. Looking back now, through the tunnel of time, there are passages so rough that you narrowed time down to half-hour segments in order to make it through. Had to trust that somehow the invisible ship would carry you from one invisible shore and deposit you on another. That you would find yourself again.

You do find yourself again, over and over, but you’re not the same person you were before. Each time, there has been a long season of necessary silence, and even if you look the same, you aren’t. Maybe we don’t heal so much as shift, and yield, and absorb in a way that lets us keep living with all the everythings that happen in a life.

Aftermath Sonnet, by Gregory Orr

Letting my tongue sleep,
and my heart go numb.

Sensing that speech
too soon,
after such a wound,
would only be
a different bleeding.

Even needing to leave
the page blank.
Long season
of silence—
trusting that under

its bandage of snow,
the field of me is healing.

For more information about Gregory Orr, please click here.

For more information about Gregory Orr, please https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gregory-orr.

Poem of the Week, by Wendy Chin-Tanner

Posted on November 2, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Screen Shot 2019-02-16 at 10.16.17 AM In my 1000 Words class you could write anything you wanted –poem, essay, memoir, story, children’s book–as long as it was fewer than one thousand words. Does it sound easier to write short than long? It’s not. You have to take an image, a dream, a thought, a burning wish, and hone and pare it until there’s not an extra word.

This process of distilling words is my great love and my great challenge in everything I write. When I read the poem below –twelve short words that encompass the un-beginning of an entire life–I was spellbound.

Infertility, by Wendy Chin

You end me
like a period

ends a sentence
ends a line.

For more information about Wendy Chin-Tanner, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Gerald Stern

Posted on October 26, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Last week I tucked myself behind a long black semi, far enough back so he could see me and my rattletrap moving truck in his big side mirrors. I do this sometimes on the highway when I’m tired or troubled or just want someone else to take over a little of the decision-making. Truckers (with a few exceptions) are the best drivers out there. They have to be.

After a while, the trucker realized I was following him. In construction zones, he’d slow down a little once we were through, so that I could catch up to him. I was hungry and I had to pee but I didn’t want to lose my trucker, so I kept going. More than two hundred miles in, he put on his blinker for the next exit. Damn. So sad to see him go, sad, somehow, to think I’d never see him again. But he’d gotten me within fifty miles of home. I sped up at the exit ramp to say goodbye, and there he was in the window, smiling down at me, with a thumbs-up and a wave.

Waving Good-Bye, by Gerald Stern

I wanted to know what it was like before we
had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we
had minds to move us through our actions
and tears to help us over our feelings,
so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend
and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her
as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,
walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,
and turned my head after them as an animal would,
watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,
her smiling face and her small hand just visible
over the giant pillows and coat hangers
as they made their turn into the empty highway.

For more information on Gerald Stern, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by James Baldwin

Posted on October 19, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Last week, late at night, the fire alarm in my cheap motel began to shriek. Doors opened up and down the hall and men began to emerge: huge men, small men, men in their underwear, one on crutches, one pushing a walker, one carrying a case of beer, one sweating as if just out of a sauna. This is the strangest assortment of men I’ve ever seen, I murmured to myself. One of the men leered or smiled, hard to tell.

Next morning in the breakfast room I sat tapping on my laptop while the hallway men shuffled in one by one. The leer/smile man sat next to me. I could tell he wanted to talk but I pretended to be too absorbed in my work to look up. This did not stop him.

“Hey! I like your pink hair! How’s it goin’?”

It was early. There were six hundred miles ahead of me. I didn’t want to talk. But then the last lines of this poem by James Baldwin came to me and I closed my laptop and turned to him and smiled. Had a long conversation about the fire alarm, the slim pickings at the breakfast buffet, his favorite smoking rituals back when everybody smoked, hard to believe it now, right?

He was a lonely man. He just wanted to talk. Sometimes it feels like most people are lonely, and most people just want to talk.

For Nothing Is Fixed, by James Baldwin

For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them
because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

If you’d like to read more about James Baldwin, this is an interesting profile.

Poem of the Week, by Lisel Mueller

Posted on October 12, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Screen Shot 2018-04-05 at 8.44.54 AM

It must be awful to watch TV next to me, the way I constantly put my hands over my ears, or murmur about the specifics of someone’s voice, or the strange way news anchors inflect their syllables, or oh no oh no there’s that song again, where’s the remote so I can mute it. I am the woman you see in crowds stuffing bits of wadded-up tissue into her ears. Sound is visible to me, literally – words and music and ambient noise have shape and color and texture – and it overwhelms me.

A couple of years ago when the Painter said “Here, try these,” and put his noise-canceling headphones over my ears, the relief was so great I almost cried. The world is so full of noise. Hard to imagine what it would feel like if it were more intense than it already is for intense me. What if we could hear our own cells growing? Our consciousness expanding? The earth breathing?

What the Dog Perhaps Hears, by 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.

For more information on Lisel Mueller, please read her bio at the Poetry Foundation.

Poem of the Week, by Kevin Hart

Posted on October 5, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Pete in first snow, 2011

This poem memorized itself into my body the first time I read it many years ago. Each time one of the lines drifts through my mind, like dark ice air through which we fall, all the sensations of snow settle over me. The particular, muffled quiet that only falling snow brings. The feeling of stillness and waiting. Numbness of cheeks and nose and fingers and toes after hours playing in it as a child. My dog, looking up and then around in wonder every year in the first snow.

These days my heart aches when the poem comes to me, in a please let there still be a future with winter in it way. Please let the earth go dormant, please let that dark ice air return, please let the planet keep breathing.

Snow, by Kevin Hart

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.

For more information on Kevin Hart, please click this link.

Poem of the Week, by Danusha Lameris

Posted on September 28, 2019 by alisonmcghee

At a wedding last weekend I sat near a curvy, beautiful woman with a deep voice who radiated a wild and warm confidence. She was free with opinions and didn’t care what others thought; an artist expressed admiration for a specific modern museum and she laughed outright.

She moves through the world in a way I don’t. My voice doesn’t project; I need a mic when giving a talk. A friend once described my narrow body, turned sideways, as like a piece of paper he could slip into his bookshelf. The wedding woman claims space in the world with her solid belief in herself. I claim space in the world by distilling it into stories made of all the ways it overwhelms me. Nonetheless we are alike, both of us caught inside the cathedral, singing inside the song.

Bonfire Opera, by Danusha Lameris

In those days, there was a woman in our circle
who was known, not only for her beauty,
but for taking off all her clothes and singing opera.
And sure enough, as the night wore on and the stars
emerged to stare at their reflections on the sea,
and everyone had drunk a little wine,
she began to disrobe, loose her great bosom,
and the tender belly, pale in the moonlight,
the Viking hips, and to let her torn raiment
fall to the sand as we looked up from the flames.
And then a voice lifted into the dark, high and clear
as a flock of blackbirds. And everything was very still,
the way the congregation quiets when the priest
prays over the incense, and the smoke wafts
up into the rafters. I wanted to be that free
inside the body, the doors of pleasure
opening, one after the next, an arpeggio
climbing the ladder of sky. And all the while
she was singing and wading into the water
until it rose up to her waist and then lapped
at the underside of her breasts, and the aria
drifted over us, her soprano spare and sharp
in the night air. And even though I was young,
somehow, in that moment, I heard it,
the song inside the song, and I knew then
that this was not the hymn of promise
but the body’s bright wailing against its limits.
A bird caught in a cathedral—the way it tries
to escape by throwing itself, again and again,
against the stained glass.

For more information about Danusha Lameris, please check out her website

Poem of the Week, by Darrell Bourque

Posted on September 21, 2019 by alisonmcghee

IMG_E4567 Last week I stood reading Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. Back then the mail came two or three times a day, sometimes overnight from Paris to Amsterdam or wherever Vincent was living: the yellow house in France, the room in his parents’ house where he would sometimes retreat, from behind the barred window of the asylum where he committed himself.

The great love between the brothers was clear. So was Vincent’s belief that art would save him from the anxiety and despair that overwhelmed him. In the seventy days before he shot himself, he made seventy-five paintings filled with light, and sun, and the brilliant colors he loved and made his own.

Self-portraits filled one whole room of the museum. In each, his blue eyes shone out at me. They must have shone out at him, too, in the moment he painted himself. When I walked out into the Amsterdam afternoon, I thought of this poem.

Lumina
– Darrell Bourque

We’re all extensions
of someone or another’s
golden light.

In the moment
I was made
stars filled the sky

& some parts
of the bodies
making me

were fleetingly
illuminated—
briefly luminous.

Druids see light
in wood
and worship trees.

When we wave
in recognition,
we disperse light,

set light in motion
toward
the beloved.

We string our trees
with lights
in wintertime.

We want
to see ourselves
in the dark.

For more information on Darrell Bourque, please click here.

Website