A Bouquet of Poems, Part 2
Thoughts on the many poems by the wonderful poets in the second section of a class I have been teaching.
A note: Below, you will find many wonderful poems, each written by one of the members of the second and final section of an online class (hosted by the Adirondack Center for Writers) that I have been teaching on poetry and generosity and much more. For their final assignment, students in my class are writing about a poem by one of their classmates — reflecting, wondering, connection-building-and-making, going wherever, feeling surprised, paying attention. I wanted to share — with those who gave me permission — the work of these poets with you, and to reflect, in a similar way, on their work in the space that follows.
Both sections of this class have felt illuminating and energizing and hopeful and communal; they have given me a lot of joy in a moment when such joy feels particularly precious. I hope you find some similar worth in their words. I think you will. And, well, if you do — consider leaving a comment below sharing something you appreciate about their work. Lastly, I really enjoyed teaching these classes geared around permission and generosity and anti-prescriptive-ness, and I might explore some avenues to offer some more classes around the same topic this summer, whether online or in person in New York City. I’ll leave details in future newsletters if and when I do.
Chimera
A small bird flew into the bamboo cage hanging above my bookshelf. Up and down it flew inside the tiered pagoda, its wings sweeping shadows up to the moonlit ceiling. Although the window was frosty, I opened it. Three stories below, my mother in her night clothes called and called, lobbing night sounds in my direction. I showed my face; her mouth, an orange poppy, collapsed and fell to the ground. I ran a finger over the ring of my lips, rubbed a hum from them and flung it down. It struck her breast and from the darkness she scolded tsktsktsk and wrung her hands and beat them against her lap. Nothing I’ve given her has been of any use. Does she feel the same towards me? The bright bird is beating shadows from the cage. The window is open. The little mirror fogs and clears, clears and fogs. It’s been winter and night for a long time but I’m not cold. I’m not afraid. —Susan Gillis
Comfort
The nursing home asks that each article of clothing be marked with your name. Permanent marker. Nothing that can unravel in the wash. I consider the Merino wool sweater because I want you to be wrapped in a shatter of softness. Mom says, Oh no, don’t bother. They’ll just ruin it. I buy it anyway. You aren’t speaking much at this point, but I watch you soften into white jasmine dusk, and I tell myself you’re comfortable. On the day we buried you, the sky broke open. From relentless storm to shock of sunlight. Sky, so blue. I thought I was finished writing this story but threads of that sweater, unraveling still. —Sue Ann Gleason
Horology
I have spent the afternoon time gathering
a tick of raspberry shadow here
a moment of contented chicken clucking there
summer is sliding away,
slippery as the Chinook salmon my husband
caught last week in the Imnaha river.
I search for hold points,
gills to stick my fingers into,
to pull from time's river this catch of summer air and light
I want to take it home and freeze it, thawing its bright flesh in the dark days of winter.
I smell the colors dripping from the sun-warmed fence rails
see the minutes waving in gentle cadence from the clothesline
feel the pull to preserve this day,
pick the rhythms of the day's music,
tuck it away
three quarter-notes of sage
a bar of meadowlark refrain
eight beats of hawkmoth wings
the touch of a passing thundercloud
one long deep breath of hay dust sparkling in the angled sunlight
smell and hear and see and touch and taste
until this vessel will hold no more
and I am replete
content in believing that I hold the abundances of this season safely in my gathering basket
surety against the dark timelessness
keys to wind the frozen clock of memory
in the disorienting monochrome of winter
—Mariah Blackhorse
Birdwatching on the Border
That morning we’d spotted an Altamira Oriole and Great Kiskadees and had turned east in hopes of Anhingas when we saw it, a wall of steel thrust thirty feet high from the late-summer scrub. We pulled over to look longer. We let the rusting weight of it sink in. We let the shame and stink of it settle on our shoulders. The next day we drove home. In the treetops along the borderlands, Plain Chachalacas seek food and refuge. Not built for flight, hunted on both banks, they run. But sometimes, the guide says, they burst quiet on the air. Sometimes, come evening, they scream their name. —Tina Williams
Eleven
Seeds planted at eleven books and pink shag carpet, belly down, it felt like grass tickling my mind. New fat words on paper, short skirts, long lashes the grass became a place to say no, close the chapter on girlhood. I do, but I didn’t. A gold band that squeezed my finger like sand in an hourglass that wouldn’t, couldn’t nourish propagation. Yet desire germinated in my darkness, manure created fears, tears watered withered seeds. Seedlings took me by surprise with a sudden flash of color and joy that startled us into the season of me. Now solitary roots run deep, grasping soil trucked in after your departure. New fat words danced from the blades on your tongue to the softness of my belly, revealing a rich mind overflowing with bright days, then endless nights sowing seeds planted at eleven. —Joni Youse
Doubt
I heartily admit,
I don’t know.
I don’t know
if these apple seeds on my desk will grow.
I don’t know
if moving to a new place will help.
I don’t know
if filling out the survey will work.
I don’t know.
A mayfly knows.
It knows it has only one day to live.
It doesn’t waste it
praying for another.
—Dana Merwin
June 2016
Lay me down in flowered sun-drenched sheets under a skylight filled with
stars
Help me spread eagle out across the old edge of you where there is no more
you
And feel my five-pointed star as I stretch my arms and legs wide under the
twinkling
And imagine I’m sailing to the Milky Way if only my cat would budge a little
to the right
Let me hear the wind in the deep pines and ripple of water as the wind
opposes
Current flow southward sending loons and hemlock seeds adrift on the
tandem
Movement downstream gleaning foam and leaves and momentum as the
lily pads stay
Upright their tender tendrils swaying corkscrews shaky upward spirals
fragile but
Wiry phone lines buffeted sure strong coiling from anchor of
rock and silt
Nowhere to go but up and out grab revel shoot for stars that
Embody
Arms and legs and still me in the quiet of room and still home and land and
River and stillness…
—Leanne Cooper
Summer Solstice
This morning I can see you pulling back
on the oars of our raft. The transparent
river—cutthroat trout treading the current
below. You never got over how possible
a day became with more hours of light
than you were used to. What excesses
we were for each other; a tangerine slice
grows out my windshield but I won’t
see the sun for at least an hour. I’ve come
to love this part of the day as long
as I am in motion. There hadn’t been rain
for a month. We hadn’t noticed, feeling it
one long day or an eddy where the wiser
fish wait out the heat, the wiser anything.
—Katherine Nolan
On Reading Disch
I have a feeling my best years are yet to come. Only poets mourn the future and luxuriate in the past, the demise of all that’s around– they lap up the sadnesses and savor the danger; sure it will be different for them, or if not different, more romantic. I envy them, and their easy familiarity with mortality. The afterlife and I are certainly not friends, not even acquaintances; you won’t ever find us together at a cocktail party. And yet what stops me from embracing this poet’s sense for death and the sublime? For me a little’s enough for now. To live convex and sliding ruins the view. —Hayley Barnes
Untitled
You sent flowers to your Mom on Mother’s Day –
something you made possible
despite Afghanistan.
Wind carried clouds across the solace of sky –
as a plane carried you home.
Bullets found you in that alley –
a sliver of sky as witness. (You saw it then – that sky?)
We who are left share the same sky –
the one that holds the rest of the possible.
And your flowers arrived eight days later.
—Jo Ann Beine
Darkness is a bone
Bereaving. The apple of you is blinding my eye. Q: What shall I give up first, the shrapnel or the quiet? A: Love is why, not who. Here night is a thief I depend on. You come from dove. I follow: that is the wideness of time. Since the sea is my resting bear, I stay up late like runners. I realize the truth is eyelashes to me-- curved like falling. How we are paired is the grandest of schemes- like lover, like mother, like the dust of a father in the mean dark; this fantastic fireplace of stars takes in monsters like me: the waiters (for the unbent/of love). Once, as a doorway, I was green. The moon- my splinter. I want to hammer the seam of this away, talk about the cape of leaves, the grass; I want to collapse sometimes like fur, when I know wild. It is the smaller of sorries when we wake at night having slept ourselves into a frazzle. The weariness, a shrill rippling bowing to us from the corners like an angel in my teeth. And sleep, the quiet fairy that cracks open fear with your clenched jaw. She is the cat burglar with feathers on her heels. She will hurl you out the window if she wants you to wake up the sheering wraith from love. Do I give in, loosen this thousand pound heart ripping time from my mouth, each second a sharp pearl? You return one night, pointing out Jupiter. The sneer buried somewhere behind you in sharks I don’t know, hearts of black plum hate, a film you let furl around like nightbait. But I won’t take it. I am a lovebird, my bones twined and buttered with the run of summer. This is a question, reconfigured to think about safety: It is a good idea to leave. Let’s break this down into pieces: It (the idea) is (exists) a (one, specific) good (not bad) idea (a forming imagined action) to (the gorgeous infinitive) leave (get the fuck out) I am a ghost. I meet my mother on the lake, a body of water. Her questions are teal. Why are you trying to love like that? People who don’t swim? This is your biggest mistake. For the rest of time I tell her the water loves everyone, some people need an introduction. —Micial Flyn
This is the sky
The day we took our one-month-old twins home from the hospital was grey and drizzly, but not too cold for December. They mostly kept their eyes shut, but on the walk to our car we kept saying to them: Look, this is the sky! The sky! Isn’t it so strange and wild that this has been here the whole time and you didn’t even know? This is the sky! The sky! In the spring, the twins would lay on their backs on the living room floor, looking up at their own hands. They would bend and straighten their fingers, stare at their palms and knuckles, wide-eyed and silent, slowly discovering that their hands were their own. I spent a lot of time thinking about firsts, and all the ones I wish I could remember: what sand felt like the first time I touched it, the first time I tasted an orange, waved goodbye to someone, heard a duck quack. The first time someone said my name and I realized it was my name. My daughters love zippers, the way kitchen drawers slide open and shut, how water looks and feels when it comes out of the faucet. It looks like you should be able to grab it, but you can’t, how strange is that? They pause to listen to the jingle of the dog’s collar, the sound a cup of cheerios makes when you shake it, a wooden spoon against a metal bowl, the microwave beeping, paper ripped in half, rain. They pause to watch birds, people picking out produce at the grocery store, the way a lightswitch turns on and off, how objects fall when dropped. They play with a pizza box, study my shoe laces, the empty envelope that held a bank statement, the texture of aluminum foil. Yesterday, we spent thirty minutes in the yard holding acorns, passing them to each other, putting them down, picking them up again. This morning, we sat together on the gray tile bathroom floor to watch the washer and dryer spin our clothes. Through the front-loading glass doors, we caught glimpses of our swirling socks and t-shirts. My daughters are only just beginning to speak, but I like to imagine what they would say if they could: Mama, have you ever seen a balloon? Can you believe how many colors they come in? And the way they float? Did you know ice cream would be that cold? And that it disappears if you try to hold it? Aren’t we so lucky that toothbrushes and windshield wipers exist? That when I hide behind a blanket, you’re still there when I peek out? —Emily Richardson
Twenty-nine
I’ve come to no conclusions, found no new beliefs,
prayed for the wisdom to know the difference and never heard back.
Can’t account for how I spent this year,
as if I have a spare life in my back pocket.
All the time I gave away willingly to the uptown trains, the mirror, the not-
not-girlfriends, the tiny incessant yelling from my screens.
Thought I’d have more answers by now—like how often will I be
the rehearsal to someone else’s happiness? when is it my turn? and why is it all so hard? (Because I can’t quit chasing after every possible possibility,
not burning the candle at both ends so much as setting the whole thing goddamn thing ablaze. Think moth to flame, think Icarus slingshotted straight into the sun). In any case
so few things are certain, even fewer than I thought.
But, here I am. Blowing out the candles and wishing it could always be exactly like this,
with almost everyone I’ve ever known beautiful and within arms reach.
Here I am, walking the long way home. It’s raining and I’ve never felt so lucky and
all I know for sure is that the people I love, love me.
What more could there be?
—Emma Sherry
There’s something wildly beautiful about encountering a whole bunch of poems at once and then noticing — with a kind of holy shit surprise — how they talk to each other even if they don’t seem to intend to, how they might rotate around similar centers, like different songs written in the same key. I’ve had this sensation each week while teaching this class (and the one before). Reading each class’s weekly response to prompts felt like reading these mini-anthologies, these secret books. I hold that reminder close, particularly in a world that privileges publication as the path to recognition, where we are often pushed to be read widely in order to be known widely. I like the reminder — love it, actually — that the prospect of being moved and surprised by a poem or a poet is a possibility that lives, always, just around the corner. It’s a reminder that to be read intimately is to be known intimately.
As I read these poems, I thought about how the only even remotely prescriptive writing advice I find myself repeating — and I probably repeated it in this class I taught, and in the class before, and in every class I teach — comes, allegedly, from Albert Einstein. It goes something like no worthy or true problem is ever solved on the plane of its original conception. It’s a quote I first heard in college in a scenario that had nothing to do with writing, and it’s a quote that then popped into my brain years later, when I wrote a poem that, as it ended, seemed to be springing not out of my original conception of the poem itself, that headspace I had upon beginning, but rather out of the headspace that was forming in the process of writing, as if the poem built a road I had never known before, and as if I started walking down that road the moment I started writing.
Surprise and possibility: I think of those things often.
I feel such things echoed in some of these poems today, like how Joni Youse writes:
Seedlings took me by surprise with a sudden flash of color and joy that startled us into the season of me.
Or how Sue Ann Gleason writes:
I thought I was finished writing this story but threads of that sweater, unraveling still.
Or Dana Merwin:
I heartily admit, I don’t know.
I thought I was finished is a profound way to end a poem. And I don’t know is an equally profound way to begin one. The latter lets the poem arrive as an open door to a room you haven’t been in before, and the former gives you a door to leave that room of possibility. And who knows what’s out there? A field? A room? Another door?
As Susan Gillis writes, the window is open. That’s part of what a poem is. An open window. A poem is the opposite, maybe, of what Sue Ann Gleason mentions at the start of her poem — a permanent marker. The poem opens. The poem witnesses. The poem wonders. People say we struggle with impermanence all of the time, but I’m not sure we do. I think we fight with the impossibility of permanence. Our struggle is with permanence, then, its very impossibility. A poem models, I think, a relationship with impermanence, which is — perhaps strangely, perhaps absurdly — a relationship with possibility.
(By the way, Joni Youse offers a wonderful mantra for this in her poem — I do, but I didn’t. As in: there are parts of ourselves that we can contradict on our way to reminding ourselves to what may be possible.)
But yeah, possibility, I think, means honoring not what is limitless, but instead what is limited. Think of this moment in Mariah Blackhorse’s poem:
I have spent the afternoon time gathering a tick of raspberry shadow here a moment of contented chicken clucking there
In other words, we gather what we end up losing, the way we lose shadows when the night — as Micial Flyn so wonderfully describes — “is a thief,” and steals the light away. It does this every day, which is why we can depend on in it, as Flyn writes.
We love, then, what we know we will lose. This has to be one of the most beautiful things about all of us, and also the most insane. We share it in common. You ever think about that? We share our love of impermanent things in common. All of us, loving what we know we will lose. And so our possibility, which is each life we live as a result of love, is forever bound up in our loss. Strange, right? But also beautiful. We are cigarettes worn down to the nub, forever emitting light until our last breath. Our impermanence is our light.
This is hard, though — this relationship. I love Hayley Barnes’s poem for the fact of acknowledging the difficult work of a poet’s “easy familiarity / with mortality.” And I love, too, how that poem ends:
And yet what stops me from embracing this poet’s sense for death and the sublime? For me a little’s enough for now. To live convex and sliding ruins the view.
The window, still, is open. A little is enough for now.
I’m thinking of all of this and beginning in this way, maybe, because I just finished teaching Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us to two sections of my high school students, and we closed out the unit by reading his essay “On Seatbelts and Sunsets.” It’s a beautiful essay — full of grief and light, as so much is.
In that essay, Abdurraqib writes a paragraph about driving aimlessly around the beltway of Columbus, in love with someone beside him and the fading light above:
If you were young and had little money but a full tank of gas and a person you wanted to spend time with in the golden hours when day turned to night, you might get a couple of shakes from United Dairy Farmers and circle the city with a person who looked perfect first in the sunlight and then the streetlight, and you would get to watch the city from all of its angles, in all of its light and darkness.
That paragraph reminds me of this moment from Katherine Nolan’s poem, which, if it could be, would be on the same album as Abdurraqib’s essay — an album of light and tangerine slices and milkshakes and looking out the window of moving cars:
You never got over how possible a day became with more hours of light than you were used to. What excesses we were for each other; a tangerine slice grows out my windshield but I won’t see the sun for at least an hour. I’ve come to love this part of the day as long as I am in motion.
And so yes — a poem is an open window, right? A possible day! A place from which to let the light in, and a place from which to witness the light fade, or grow, or dissipate, or land on your own forearm, or melt your milkshake, or turn the eyes of someone you love into a thousand crystals embedded in a rock just shattered by a wave of ocean water.
It’s also a window from which to look out and be reminded, as Tina Williams writes of seeing:
a wall of steel thrust thirty feet high from the late-summer scrub. We pulled over to look longer. We let the rusting weight of it sink in. We let the shame and stink of it settle on our shoulders.
Here, an open window first lets in the beauty and surprise of birds (“an Altamira Oriole / and Great Kiskadees”) before this awful and tragic reminder — so brutal in its scope — of what and who are kept out from the places of safety from which we look (don’t forget — as I sometimes do — that looking and witnessing, even if they are full of grief, are acts of privilege). The reminder in Williams’ poem comes because of the looking; it is a reminder that exists as a result of witness. A poem, if it is truly like an open window, if it is truly like an open door, cannot discriminate. When we look at the sky, we have to see the clouds. The more we stare at the stars, the more we see.
We live within something wide and forever possible, and yet we look out of the frames we measure for ourselves. I think about how there is so much sky in these poems today, and I think it makes me hopeful and joyful and so-much-more, even and perhaps because of the state of the world.
I feel joyful reading these lines from Leanne Cooper:
imagine I’m sailing to the Milky Way if only my cat would budge a little to the right
I feel myself there, reaching for the sky’s beauty with the reminder of ordinariness right beside me. I can’t help but smile. And I can’t help but feel moved to near-tears when I read these lines from Jo Ann Beine, who writes:
We who are left share the same sky – the one that holds the rest of the possible.
And then, there I am, made excited and joyous again by these lines from Emily Richardson (I love, forever, an exclamation):
Look, this is the sky! The sky! Isn’t it so strange and wild that this has been here the whole time and you didn’t even know? This is the sky! The sky!
My mom, when I was very little, wrote me a note in a book before she went off to get treatment. She was going to be away from home for months, and in that book, she wrote look up at the sky and know we are looking at the same sun and moon. I was ten years old and I thought those words were the most remarkable things someone had ever said to me or could possibly say to me. I still do. It’s one of the first things I think about anytime I see the sky — that sentence my mom wrote. I think about it anytime someone I love is suffering. Look up. Look up. We share the same sky.
There, too — a reminder that a poem is a window, right? A door? That thing you open so that you can see the sky? It’s also the head craned out of the window, the eyes peeking between the blinds, the dog with its face in the wind on a highway as the car pushes 80 and forces a smile so wide across its face, a smile you wouldn’t think possible until you see it. A poem can be that, too. Something you didn’t think possible until it was.
And in that possibility is both sorrow and joy, grief and condolence — the way that Jo Ann Beine’s reminder comes out of solace in the wake of loss. The sky is shared by those “who are left.” It reminds us that we are bound together by the fact of loss. We look up, see the same sky, remember different losses, and continue to live in the same world. We hold so much in common, despite ourselves.
I’ve got one more thing for you. In Susan Gillis’ poem, she writes:
Although the window was frosty, I opened it.
Let that one sink in, in the wake of all of this. Let it sink in now, because, even though it is springtime, I think we live in a world of frosted windows, where what is outside does not feel as safe or as kind or as warm as what is inside. Huddled up we are, even in the blooming that exists. It has been, as Gillis writes, “winter and night for a long time” in this world. There is a cruelty I cannot ignore, a cruelty on a mass scale, a cruelty that models a visceral, systematic hatred of the margins. It means something now to open the window, to refuse cruelty, to widen the frame, to include, include, and include. A poem can do that. Our politics can, too.
That begins with people, right? Our politics? And it begins — and continues — with imagining and reimagining. And our imagining, I think, is borne out of what we are grateful for; it contains, in other words, what we hope will we continue. Our imagination holds what we love and makes an effort to extend it outward into the dream of what we might come to also love.
Here’s an image, then, from Emma Sherry, that holds that truth, and holds it tightly:
But, here I am. Blowing out the candles and wishing it could always be exactly like this, with almost everyone I’ve ever known beautiful and within arms reach. Here I am, walking the long way home. It’s raining and I’ve never felt so lucky and all I know for sure is that the people I love, love me.
I’ll be thinking of that today. I’ll be thinking of so much.
Some notes:
Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.
I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here.
Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.
If you live in NYC, I have found Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor to be inspiring and empowering. You can find ways to support his campaign or get information about it here.
If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.
Permanent Marker
Now
Always.
The words leave quickly
A permanent mark in my heart.
My tears falling softly, surely
As the sky,
opens it’s tangerine slivered arms to more
Words.
Now
Always.
Permanent and illusive
Always
Now.
Gratitude for
The Blessings.
There is so much light in these beautiful poems and your reflections. I love the birds spotted, the different views of the same sky, and the sense of wonder found throughout this collection. "What more could there be?", indeed. Can't wait for your next class offering!