10 Poems // March 10

4 days late, because: I am not saying that patience is virtuous, Love like anybody else, comes to those who wait actively and leave their windows open.

1//

Credulity // Tracy K. Smith

We believe we are giving ourselves away,
And so it feels good, 
Our bodies swimming together
In afternoon light, the music
That enters our window as far
From the voices that made it
As our own minds are from reason.

There are whole doctrines on loving.
A science. I would like to know everything
About convincing love to give me
What it does not possess to give. And then
I would like to know how to live with nothing.
Not memory. Nor the taste of the words
I have willed you whisper into my mouth. 

2//

Abeyance // by Rebecca Foust

                               letter to my transgender daughter

I made soup tonight, with cabbage, chard
and thyme picked outside our back door. 
For this moment the room is warm and light,
and I can presume you safe somewhere.
I know the night lives inside you. I know grave,
sad errors were made, dividing you, and hiding
you from you inside. I know a girl like you
was knifed last week, another set aflame.
I know I lack the words, or all the words I say
are wrong. I know I’ll call and you won’t answer,
and still I’ll call. I want to tell you 
you were loved with all I had, recklessly,
and with abandon, loved the way the cabbage
in my garden near-inverts itself, splayed
to catch each last ray of sun. And how
the feeling furling-in only makes the heart
more dense and green. Tonight it seems like
something one could bear.

Guess what, Dad and I finally figured out Pandora,
and after all those years of silence, our old music
fills the air. It fills the air, and somehow, here,
at this instant and for this instant only
—perhaps three bars—what I recall
equals all I feel, and I remember all the words.

3//

In Winter // by Michael Ryan

At four o’clock it’s dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
their steps left and right and back
like some quick folk dance of kindness,
I remembered the winter we spent
crying in each other’s laps.
What could you be thinking at this moment?
How lovely and strange the gangly spines
of trees against a thickening sky
as you drive from the library
humming off-key? Or are you smiling
at an idea met in a book
the way you smiled with your whole body
the first night we talked?
I was so sure my love of you was perfect,
and the light today
reminded me of the winter you drove home
each day in the dark at four o’clock
and would come into my study to kiss me
despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

4//

from Last Will & Testament // by Ilya Kaminsky

I, a person exhausted by his own happiness—
                                                      I have so much love this morning, I
cannot control myself
In these last eight minutes
from a park bench
I want to step again and again on the cement of life
I, in this my forty-first year of trespass on earth,
watch death:
in a body 
that stands on a platform
watches death, like a lone cross-country train, transport a spark.

Snow has eaten one-fourth of me
yet I believe
against all evidence
these snowflakes 
are my letters of recommendation
here is a man worth falling on.

5//

Billie Holiday // by E. Ethelbert Miller

sometimes the deaf
hear better than the blind

some men
when they first
heard her sing

were only attracted
to the flower in her hair

6// 

The Solitude of Night // by Li Bai, transl. by Shigeyoshi Obata

It was at a wine party—
I lay in a drowse, knowing it not.
The blown flowers fell and filled my lap.
When I arose, still drunken,
The birds had all gone to their nests,
And there remained but few of my comrades.
I went along the river—alone in the moonlight.

7//

The Past Is Still There // by Deborah Garrison

I've forgotten so much.
What it felt like back then,
what we said to each other.

But sometimes when I'm standing
at the kitchen counter after dinner
and I look out the window at the dark

thinking of nothing,
something swims up.
Tonight this:

your laughing into my mouth
as you were trying
to kiss me.

8//

Love rode 1500 miles // by Judy Grahn

Love rode 1500 miles on a grey
hound bus & climbed in my window
one night to surprise
both of us.
the pleasure of that sleepy
shock has lasted a decade
now or more because she is
always still doing it and I am
always still pleased. I do indeed like
aggressive women
who come half a continent
just for me; I am not saying that patience
is virtuous, Love
like anybody else, comes to those who
wait actively
and leave their windows open.

9//

The Sun, Mad Envious, Just Wants the Moon // by Patricia Smith

out of the way. It knows that I tend to cling
to potential in the dark, that I am myself only
as I am beguiled by the moon’s lunatic luster,
when the streets are so bare they grow voices.
The sun has lost patience with my craving
for the night’s mass-produced romance, that
dog-eared story where every angle is exquisite,
and ghostly suitors, their sleek smells exploding,
queue up to ravish my waning. Bursting with
bluster, the sun backslaps the moon to reveal
me, splintered, kissing the boulevard face first,
clutching change for a jukebox that long ago
lost its hunger for quarters. It wounds the sun
to know how utterly I have slipped its gilded
clutch to become its most mapless lost cause.
Her eye bulging, she besieges me with bright.
So I remind her that everything dies. All the
brilliant bitch can do for me then is spit light
on the path while I search for a place to sleep.

10//

from I Had a Mane Once // by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

I was my own
economy. You could see me coming
from miles around. And yes,

I could break your last best thing in half.
And yes, I was every inch an animal.
But most days I was merciful:

I'd pretend I was sleeping. I'd take all my danger
and lay it at the river's edge.