poetry

I’ve been turning this poem by Adrienne Rich over in my head the past few days. It does well to describe what been in my head:

Transcendental Etude
Adrienne Rich

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
—And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984

first breath:
joy, laughter, jubilance, tears
photo ops
congratulatory cards
bassinets and sleep deprivation

first love:
nervousness, sweating, jubilance, tears
and everything in between
photo ops
secret letters
stolen kisses and forever promises

first loss:
disbelief, numbness, anger, tears
no photos
just flowers
and wondering how it all went so fast
from that to this

Jody’s father passed away this morning. The expectation of a thing does not always ease the sorrow of its arrival, though. Details soon.

write
not because you can
but because you can’t not:
because the words
grind holes in your soul
finding ways to get out
especially if
you don’t want them to

your grocery lists will rhyme
and your thank-you notes
sound like poetry
and you will hear—
cadences—
coming from your brain,
incessant,
in the silences between
the beats of your heart

write
because a controlled release
forestalls the explosion
that your creativity foretells

write
because the composition of phrase
makes it plausible
that order can be drawn
from your chaos

write

Speak, my brother, of angels half-remembered,
almost forgotten; of voices whose timbres
bounce analog memories from ears
to cells and back again to memory.

Speak, so that I may remember, even though
the sharpest of my recollections will be
limited by the silences between your words.

It is easy enough to memorialize through
words and possessions, but the tangibility
of a vanished existence relies on the
remembrance of pauses between word and word;
hesitations between word and glance.

It is the spaces between that transform
recollection into memory,

A creation of something,
out of nothing,
into a self-imposed belief
of importance—
or existence.I. Reverse Sift

Between hand and fist, breath and wish,
everything shifts. Edge aligns with edge.
Points notch points. Trickles of deepest
blue slide from my palms and evaporate
in the eddying currents of the air.

Your fabrications come from lips and eyes,
dichotomies of faith and belief uttered
in glance and conversation. You define me,
wrongly, as a ‘conjurer.’ My fabrications
begin where yours meet their end.

It’s better in the winter:
mukluks, woolens, socks and scarves
unwind like so much baby bunting
to reveal the season’s surprise.

The lamb’s-fleece peels off in showers
of melting ice and snow. In summer,
the silk of a negligée is too much
clothing to be borne. In winter,

the excitement is in the discovery
of the warmth of a human body
buried in the prepositional
accoutrements of the winter season:

Under. Between. Beneath.
Inside so much snowbound gift-wrapping,
underneath the hints of lanolin,
denim, and windchill: you.