Haven’t found anyone
From the old gang.
They must be still in hiding,
Holding their breaths
And trying not to laugh.
Our street is down on its luck
With windows broken
Where on summer nights
One heard couples arguing,
Or saw them dancing to the radio.
The redhead we were
All in love with,
Who sat on the fire escape,
Smoking late into the night,
Must be in hiding too.
The skinny boy
On crutches
Who always carried a book,
May not have
Gotten very far.
Darkness comes early
This time of year
Making it hard
To recognize familiar faces
In those of strangers.
Browsing category: Place
The Air Smelled Dirty
Everyone burned coal in our neighborhood,
soft coal they called it from the mountains
of western Pennsylvania where my father
grew up and fled as soon as he could, where
my Welsh cousins dug it down in the dark.
The furnace it fed stood in the dank
basement, its many arms upraised
like Godzilla or some other monster.
It was my job to pull out clinkers
and carry them to the alley bin.
Mornings were chilly, frost on windows
etching magic landscapes. I liked
to stand over the hot air registers
the warmth blowing up my skirts.
But the basement scared me at night.
The fire glowed like a red eye through
the furnace door and the clinkers fell
loud and the shadows came at me as
mice scampered. The washing machine
was tame but the furnace was always hungry.
The Place
Once in your life you pass
Through a place so pure
It becomes tainted even
By your regard, a space
Of trees and air where
Dusk comes as perfect ripeness.
Here the only sounds are
Sighs of rain and snow,
Small rustlings of plants
As they unwrap in twilight.
This is where you will go
At last when coldness comes.
It is something you realize
When you first see it,
But instantly forget.
At the end of your life
You remember and dwell in
Its faultless light forever.
What Kind of Times are These
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
The Inner Landscape of Beauty – pdf
No conversation we’ve ever done has been more beloved than this one. The Irish poet, theologian, and philosopher insisted on beauty as a human calling. He had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with the inner landscape of our lives and with what he called “the invisible world” that is constantly intertwining what we can know and see. This was one of the last interviews he gave before his unexpected death in 2008. But John O’Donohue’s voice and writings continue to bring ancient mystical wisdom to modern confusions and longings.
The Inner Landscape of BeautyJOHN O'DONOHUE was a poet, theologian, and philosopher. He authored several books, including Anam Ċara, Beauty, and To Bless the Space Between Us, a collection of blessings published posthumously. More recently a new book of conversation with him has been published in the U.K., Walking on the Pastures of Wonder. He died on January 4, 2008.
https://cflcc.womenwriting.org/wp-content/uploads/JOHN-ODonohue-interview.pdf
Red Rover
We take our last walk.
Walls stripped of portraits,
warped mirrors, dressing tables,
and the grandfather clock
with its stoic face
and elaborate gentle fingers.
For years we struggled to break
free of the closeness of rooms,
the obligation of birth order,
the metaphysics that bind
one element to the other,
as if we were still wild girls
playing wild rover in the garden,
breaking through a chain of linked hands.
Where I Come From
We didn’t say fireflies
but lightning bugs.
We didn’t say carousel
but merry-go-round.
Not seesaw,
teeter-totter
not lollipop,
sucker.
We didn’t say pasta, but
spaghetti, macaroni, noodles:
the three kinds.
We didn’t get angry:
we got mad.
And we never felt depressed
dismayed, disappointed
disheartened, discouraged
disillusioned or anything,
even unhappy:
just sad.
Compendium of Lost Objects
Not the butterfly wing, the semiprecious stones,
the shard of mirror,
not the cabinet of curiosities built with secret drawers
to reveal and conceal its contents,
but the batture, the rope swing, the rusted barge
sunk at the water’s edge
or the park’s Live Oaks you walked through
with the forbidden man
or the pink-shuttered house on the streetcar line
where you were married
or the green shock of land off I-10, road leading
you away from home.
Not any of this
but a cot at the Superdome sunk in a dumpster
and lace valances from a Lakeview kitchen where water
rose six feet high inside
and a refrigerator wrapped in duct tape lying
in the dirt of a once-yard
and a Blue Roof and a house marked 0 and a
kitchen clock stopped at the time the hurricane hit.
Because, look, none of this fits
in a dark wood cabinet for safekeeping.
This is an installation
for dismantling
—never seen again.
Land’s End
This air,
you say, feels as if it hasn't touched land
for a thousand miles,
as surf sound washes through scrub
and eucalyptus,
whether ocean or wind in the trees
or both: the park’s big windmill
turning overhead
while joggers circle the ball field
only a few yards off
this path secreted in growth and mist,
the feel of a long narrow theater set
about it here on the park’s western edge
just in from the highway
then the moody swells of the Pacific.
The way the chill goes out of us
and the sweat comes up
as we drive back into the heat
and how I need to take you
to all the special places, or show
you where the fog rolls down
and breaks apart in these hills or where
that gorgeous little piano bridge
comes halfway through the song,
because when what has become dormant,
meager, or hardened
passes through the electric
of you, the fugitive scattered pieces
are called back to their nature—
light pouring through muslin
in a strange, bare room.
Knoxville, Tennessee
I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy’s garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
and buttermilk
and homemade ice-cream
at the church picnic
and listen to
gospel music
outside
at the church
homecoming
and go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep
Patty’s Charcoal Drive-In
First job. In tight black shorts
and a white bowling shirt, red lipstick
and bouncing ponytail, I present
each overflowing tray as if it were a banquet.
I’m sixteen and college-bound;
this job’s temporary as the summer sun,
but right now it’s the boundaries of my life.
After the first few nights of mixed orders
and missing cars, the work goes easily.
I take out the silver trays and hook them to the windows,
inhale the mingled smells of seared meat patties,
salty ketchup, rich sweet malteds.
The lure of grease drifts through the thick night air.
And it’s always summer at Patty’s Charcoal Drive-In—
carloads of blonde-and-tan girls
pull up next to red convertibles,
boys in black tee shirts and slick hair.
Everyone knows what they want.
And I wait on them, hoping for tips,
loose pieces of silver
flung carelessly as the stars.
Doo-wop music streams from the jukebox,
and each night repeats itself,
faithful as a steady date.
Towards 10 p.m., traffic dwindles.
We police the lot, pick up wrappers.
The dark pours down, sticky as Coke,
but the light from the kitchen
gleams like a beacon.
A breeze comes up, chasing papers
in the far corners of the darkened lot,
as if suddenly a cold wind had started to blow
straight at me from the future—
I read that in a Doris Lessing book—
but right now, purse fat with tips,
the moon sitting like a cheeseburger
on a flat black grill,
this is enough.
Your order please.
Moonrise, Aurora, Nebraska
No Ansel Adams
but the snapshots we captured
through the open car window
on our eight megapixel cell phones
on the side of the road off an exit ramp
as truck taillights streaked eastbound
opposite the earth’s rotation
in startling calm that evening
a mere dot-glow above dun fields
Look, life is like this, filled
with moments of meaning
paid attention to or not
but we tried we lingered
and sure enough it is here
looming in memory-mind
the fat orange ball above horizon
inching up into blank navy air
the full moon in early spring
we drove toward in silence
The Youth Group that Launched a Movement … PDF
The Youth Group that Launched a Movement at Standing Rock in the Fight Over the Dakota Access Pipeline, Native American activists achieve one of the most galvanizing environmental victories in years - and it all began with a group of teenagers.
Field Guide
Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious dement of all,
I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water
at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,
hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That's all.
I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page
in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know
where to look for the good parts.
First House
We bought a house made of mud and straw.
Thieves stole my sewing machine
and my turquoise ring.
They stole your music, and the needle
you lowered with one steady finger.
To lose these things. I learned.
We had a little girl
and I never let her out of my arms.
Summer nights we sat on a moon-striped
back porch. Later I hung out
laundry in the snow, glorious whites.
Clothespins clung to the wire,
a flock of house finches,
breasts to the sun. Like a needle
we rode the world as it spun,
working our way to the center,
song by song.
Hamburger Heaven
Tonight we find them again,
parked under the stars
(no one ever
eats inside in Heaven),
beeping the tired carhop
with her pageboy and mascara
for a paper boat of French fries
drenched in sauce,
a smashed hamburger baptized
with spices.
They’re sixteen and in love;
the night is hot,
sweet and tangy on their tongues.
Why do we stop?
They’re in Heaven, after all,
listening to the fry cook
in the kitchen
with his savory benedictions,
the AM radio playing
“Love Me Tender,” “Peggy Sue,”
unperturbed by the future with its
franchises and malls, its
conglomerates and information
highways. Is there something
we would tell them?
Here in Hamburger Heaven where
the nights go on forever,
where desire’s resurrected
and every hunger’s filled?
Wait! Do we call out?
But now they’ve seen us
close behind them with our
fervent “Thou Shalt Nots,”
our longings glaring in
the rearview mirror.
And they’ve turned on
the ignition
and they’ve floored it
and are gone.
Immigrant Blues
People have been trying to kill me since I was born,
a man tells his son, trying to explain
the wisdom of learning a second tongue.
It’s the same old story from the previous century
about my father and me.
The same old story from yesterday morning
about me and my son.
It’s called “Survival Strategies
and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.”
It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,"
called “The Child Who’d Rather Play than Study.”
Practice until you feel
the language inside you, says the man.
But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used?
And me, confused about the flesh and soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you?
You’re always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body’s finitude,
at peace with the soul’s disregard
of space and time.
Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart.
If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,
she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,
at peace with the heart’s bewilderment.
It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening
called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,"
called “Loss of the Homeplace
and the Defilement of the Beloved,"
called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”
We All Return to the Place Where We Were Born
What remains of my childhood
are the fragmentary visions
of large patios
extending
like an oceanic green mist over the afternoon.
Then, crickets would forge in the wind
their deep music of centuries
and the purple fragrances of Grandmother
always would receive without questions
our return home.
The hammock shivering in the breeze
like the trembling voice of light at dusk,
the unforeseeable future
that would never exist without Mother,
the Tall tales that filled
with their most engaging lunar weight our days
—all those unchangeable things—
were the morning constellations
that we would recognize daily without sadness.
In the tropical days we had no intuition of the winter
nor of autumn, that often returns with pain
in the shadows of this new territory
—like the cold moving through our shivering hands—
that I have learned to accept
in the same way you welcome
the uncertainty of a false and cordial smile.
Those were the days of the solstice
when the wind pushed the smoke from the clay ovens
through the zinc kitchens
and the ancient stone stoves
clearly spoke
of the secrets of our barefooted and wise Indian ancestors.
The beautiful, unformed rocks in our hands
that served as detailed toys
seemed to give us the illusion
of fantastic events
that invaded our joyful chants
with infinite color.
It was a life without seasonal pains,
a life without unredeemable time
a life without the somber dark shadows
that have intently translated my life
that slowly move today through my soul.
Peace Path
This path our people walked
one hundred two hundred endless years
since the tall grass opened for us
and we breathed the incense that sun on prairie
offers to sky
Peace offering with each breath
each footstep out of woods
to grasslands plotted with history
removal remediation restoration
Peace flag of fringed prairie orchid
green glow within white froth
calling a moth who nightly
seeks the now-rare scent invisible to us
invisible history of this place
where our great-grandfather a boy
beside two priests and 900 warriors
gaze intent in an 1870 photo
his garments white as orchids
Peace flag white banner with red cross
crowned with thorns held by a boy
at the elbow of a priest
beside Ojibwe warriors beside Dakota warriors
Peace offered after smoke and dance
and Ojibwe gifts of elaborate beaded garments
thrown back in refusal
by Dakota Warriors torn with grief
since their brother’s murder
This is the path our people ran
through white flags of prairie plants
Ojibwe calling Dakota back
to sign one last and unbroken treaty
Peace offering with each breath
each footstep out of woods
to grasslands plotted with history
removal remediation restoration
Two Dakota held up as great men
humbled themselves
to an offer of peace
before a long walk south
before our people entered the trail
walking west and north
where you walk now
where we seek the source
the now-rare scent
invisible as history
history the tall grass opens for us
Breathe the incense of sun on prairie
Offer peace to the sky
Lucky
All this time,
the life you were
supposed to live
has been rising around you
like the walls of a house
designed with warm
harmonious lines.
As if you had actually
planned it that way.
As if you had
stacked up bricks
at random,
and built by mistake
a lucky star.