10 Poems // June 10

back after hiatus // it's no use worrying about Time

1//

from Abundance // by Louise Glück

The moon is full. A strange sound
comes from the field—maybe the wind.

But for the mice it’s a night like any summer night.
Fruit and grain: a time of abundance.
Nobody dies, nobody goes hungry.

No sound except the roar of the wheat.

2//

EMERGENCY POSTCARD TO J.F. // by Nate Pritts

All these birds wake me up just like always though the me that they sing to is new everyday & relieved to find out a body doesn’t have to do everything. I’m trying to believe it. I’ve only ever wanted a reason to slow down, an angle to navigate that made me feel worth it. Yesterday, I drove the wrong way from you; soon I’ll jump back & try the sequence again — you & me lost together & looking for landmarks that tell you what’s right: dragonfly light, summer bees exhausted in the window, that wherever we are is okay.

3//

Animals // by Frank O’Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

4//

Mysteries, Yes // by Mary Oliver

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

5//

Meditation at Lagunitas // by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

6//

Message // by Jason Shulman

The earth is so long it glitters
like a cataract.
The earth is so long, so sweet,
wild mushrooms glow on its back: it
never had a vision, never been apart from
its eyes.
The earth is so long it’s shorter than
Christmas.
Elephant ears stick out over the tops of ideas:
weeds, tremulous grasses, everything
is quivering. If only we could give up.
The space within the chambers of the heart
is small enough to contain the night-time,
unusual enough to cancel out inequities.
White on white the earth is so long
it jumps down my throat like food:
let the heart have its house
and its own weather.
I'm gonna give it everything I have.

7//

from For Peshawar // by Fatimah Asghar

I wish them only a mundane life.
Arguments with parents. Groundings.

Chasing a budding love around the playground.
Iced mango slices in the hot summer.

Lassi dripping from their lips.
Fear of being unmarried. Hatred of the family

next door. Kheer at graduation. Fingers licked
with henna. Blisters on the back of a heel.

Pulling hair off a friend’s arm.
Loneliness in a bookstore. Fingerprints

on spine. Walking home with the sun
at their backs. Searching the street

for a missing glove. Nothing glorious.
I promise. Just, alive.

8//

Romanticism // by Raymond Carver
for Linda Gregg, after reading "Classicism"

The nights are very unclear here.
But if the moon is full, we know it.
We feel one thing one minute,
something else the next.

9//

VII. Change // by Anne Carson

Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence.

Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches.
They were two superior eels
At the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
Geryon was going into the Bus Depot
one Friday night about three a.m. to get change to call home. Herakles stepped off
the bus from New Mexico and Geryon
came fast around the corner of the platform and there it was one of those moments
that is the opposite of blindness.
The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice. Other people
wishing to disembark the bus from New Mexico
were jamming up behind Herakles who had stopped on the bottom step
with his suitcase in one hand
trying to tuck in his shirt with the other. Do you have change for a dollar?
Geryon heard Geryon say.
No. Herakles stared straight at Geryon. But I’ll give you a quarter for free.
Why would you do that?
I believe in being gracious. Some hours later they were down
at the railroad tracks
standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself.
You’re cold, said Herakles suddenly, your hands are cold. Here.
He put Geryon’s hands inside his shirt.

10//

“A little mustard, side of pickle” // by Bob Hicok

Who am I to be the one you love?
Shouldn’t I want you to have better? Taller
and more hook-shot capable? A man with a bigger wad
of cash? But I’ll make you a turkey sandwich
anyway. Not the best in the world, but the best
on this day on this plate. And kiss you
before and after. These are the practice oaths.
The small bonds that carry us like boats
until we arrive at this – I promise to love
your cancer or the way you’ll think
in twenty thirty it’s nineteen eighty six. Year
we met. Year I broke my foot. Year I tried
gymnastics in a cast. Of all the broken-footed
first-time tumblers, I was the best at being
worst. Promise to be a savant at stay. At pulling
the plug when you would have it yanked. No mere
head of lettuce, you. No slug. And very,
so very best at not wanting to live a day
without you. Decades ago, I turned pro at that.