December 2010
34 posts
Be Mine
I love mankind most when no one’s around. On New Year’s Day for instance, when everything’s closed and I’m driving home on the highway alone for hours in the narrating rain, with no exact change, the collector’s booth glowing ahead in the tumbling dark like a little lit temple with an angel inside and a radio which as I open my window, a little embarrassed...
IV. Those Who Are Surpassed
“Their eyes are always bigger than their stomachs,” my father said, “that’s how you can tell them: big eyes, little thin stomachs. “At the table of life they always heap too much and never finish.” Not him. His plate was always cleared, he always kept just a little room left over for dessert: Bavarian creme pies, deep dark chocolate cakes, syrup...
Voyage
I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage: sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on in a novel without a moral but one in which all the characters who died in the middle chapters make the sunsets near the book’s end more beautiful. —And someone is spreading a map...
Noël
When snow is shaken From the balsam trees And they’re cut down And brought into our houses When clustered sparks Of many-colored fire Appear at night In ordinary windows We hear and sing The customary carols They bring us ragged miracles And hay and candles And flowering weeds of poetry That are loved all the more Because they are so common But there are carols That carry...
Weekends, Sleeping In
No jump-starting the day, no bare feet slapping the floor to bath and breakfast. Dozing instead in the nest like, I suppose, a pair of gophers underground in fuzz and wood shavings. One jostles the other in closed-eye luxury. We are at last perhaps what we are: uncombed, unclothed, mortal. Pulse and breath and dream.
—Marjorie Saiser
Here I am, Lord
The ribbed black of the umbrella is an argument for the existence of God, that little shelter we carry with us and may forget beside a chair in a committee meeting we did not especially want to attend. What a beautiful word, “umbrella.” A shade to be opened. Like a bat’s wing, scalloped. It shivers. A drum head beaten by the silver sticks of rain, and I do not have...
Walking Beside a Creek
Walking beside a creek in December, the black ice windy with leaves, you can feel the great joy of the trees, their coats thrown open like drunken men, the lifeblood thudding in their tight, wet boots.
—Ted Kooser
Sex Advice from Poets
Q: I have trouble speaking to women in bars. A simple “hello” always feels abrupt, and yet most “lines” are cheesy. Any advice for how to get things started?
A: Memorize Keats’s sonnet beginning with the line, “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” Practice reading it aloud until you can speak the lines naturally and have committed them to memory. Once you have successfully done this, move...
The Hyacinth Garden in Brooklyn
A year ago friends took me walking on the esplanade in Brooklyn. I’ve no idea where it was, I could never find it on my own. And as we walked, looking out over the water, a sweet aroma came to us, heavy and rich, of a hyacinth garden set on the landward side among apartment houses, a quite large garden with flowers of every size and color, and...
I started Early - Took my Dog -
And visited the Sea - The Mermaids in the Basement Came out to look at me - And Frigates - in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen Hands - Presuming Me to be a Mouse - Aground - opon the Sands - But no Man moved Me - till the Tide Went past my simple Shoe - And past my Apron - and my Belt And past my Boddice - too - And made as He would eat me up - As wholly as a Dew Opon a...
The Ninth Elegy
Why, when this short span of being could be spent like the laurel, a little darker than all the other green, the edge of each leaf fluted with small waves (like the wind’s smile) — why, then, do we have to be human and, avoiding fate, long for fate?
Oh, not because of happiness, that quick profit of impending loss, really exists. Not out of curiosity, not just to...
Vie En Rose, Pamplamoose
Manna
Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down, a world becoming white, no more sounds, no longer possible to find the heart of the day, the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all I wanted in life – so be it – whatever it is that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms, palms up, I know it is...
