I have heard about the civilized,
the marriages run on talk, elegant and
honest, rational. But you and I are
savages. You come in with a bag,
hold it out to me in silence.
I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it
and understand the message: I have
pleased you greatly last night. We sit
quietly, side by side, to eat
the long pancakes dangling and spilling,
fragrant sauce dripping out,
and glance at each other askance, wordless,
the corners of our eyes clear as spear points
laid along the sill to show
a friend sits with a friend here.
Browsing category: Relationship
Instructions for Stopping
Say Stop.
Keep your lips pressed together
after you say the p:
(soon they’ll try
and pry
your breath out—)
―
Whisper it
three times in a row:
Stop Stop Stop
In a hospital bed
like a curled up fish, someone’s
gulping at air—
How should you apply
your breath?
—
List all of the people
you would like
to stop.
Who offers love,
who terror—
Write Stop.
Put a period at the end.
Decide if it’s a kiss
or a bullet.
The Guardians
All day we packed boxes.
We read birth and death certificates.
The yellowed telegrams that announced
our births, the cards of congratulations
and condolences, the deeds and debts,
love letters, valentines with a heart
ripped out, the obituaries.
We opened the divorce decree,
a terrible document of division and subtraction.
We leafed through scrapbooks:
corsages, matchbooks, programs to the ballet,
racetrack, theatre—joy and frivolity
parceled in one volume—
painstakingly arranged, preserved
and pasted with crusted glue.
We sat in the room in which the beloved
had departed. We remembered her yellow hair
and her mind free of paradox.
We sat together side by side
on the empty floor and did not speak.
There were no words
between us other than the essence
of the words from the correspondences,
our inheritance—plain speak,
bereft of poetry.
Falling
I’ve fallen many times:
the usual stumbles
over secret schoolgirl crushes,
head-over-heels for teen heartthrobs.
I loved them all.
I’ve fallen so many times:
tripped down the aisle
over husband, daughter, son.
Madly and deeply,
I love them all.
I’ve fallen again and again:
new friends, a mentor, a muse,
numerous books, a few authors,
four dear pups and a stranger, or two.
I loved them all.
I’ve fallen farther,
fallen faster,
now captivated, I tumble—
enthralled with my grandchildren.
I love them each, ever and all.
\
After the Wedding
After the white balloons were swept away
on the wind that had swallowed
most of our vows, after the embraces
and tears, the flung rose petals,
after new friends and old friends and aunts
from all over, after you tossed
the bouquet, and the cries of the children
raised coyote cries on the rim,
after chicken grilled on juniper coals,
cold beer from the cattle trough
and hours of hot dancing to Beatles and Stones,
the last of us swaying arms on shoulders,
singing ourselves hoarse,
how good it is
to find you now beyond all
the loud joy, driving north in rain
and the lovely ease of our silence.
Milkweed
I tell myself softly, this is how love begins—
the air alive with something inconceivable,
seeds of every imaginable possibility
floating across the wet grasses, under
the thin arms of ferns. It drifts like snow
or old ash, settling on the dust of the roadways
as you and I descend into thickets, flanked
by the fragrance of honeysuckle and white
primrose.
I recall how my grandmother imagined
these wanderers were living beings,
some tiny phylum yet to be classified as life.
She would say they reminded her of maidens
decked in white dresses, waltzing through air.
Even after I showed her the pods from which
they sprang, blossoming like tiny spiders,
she refused to believe.
Now, standing beside you in the crowded
autumn haze, I watch them flock, emerge from
brittle stalks, bursting upon the world as
young lovers do—trysting in the tall grasses,
resting fingers lightly in tousled hair.
Listen, and you can hear them whisper
in the rushes, gazing out at us, wondering—
what lives are these?
Candlelight
Crossing the porch in the hazy dusk
to worship the moon rising
like a yellow filling-station sign
on the black horizon,
you feel the faint grit
of ants beneath your shoes,
but keep on walking
because in this world
you have to decide what
you’re willing to kill.
Saving your marriage might mean
dinner for two
by candlelight on steak
raised on pasture
chopped out of rain forest
whose absence might mean
an atmospheric thinness
fifty years from now
above the vulnerable head
of your bald grandson on vacation
as the cells of his scalp
sautéed by solar radiation
break down like suspects
under questioning.
Still you slice
the sirloin into pieces
and feed each other
on silver forks
under the approving gaze
of a waiter
whose purchased attention
and French name
are a kind of candlelight themselves,
while in the background
the fingertips of the pianist
float over the tusks
of the slaughtered elephant
without a care,
as if the elephant
had granted its permission.
Directions to Your College Dorm
All hallways still lead to that room
with its ceiling so high it might have been
a sky, and your metal bed by the window,
and your crate of books. First,
you must walk across the deep
winter campus to find your friend
throwing snowballs that float
for years. Then, open our letters:
shelves of words. You will find
our coats, our awkwardness, the tickets
from the trains that witnessed
our confusion. Love was the place
where we became as naked
as morning; it was dangerous and
dappled and we visited its shores
with suitcases and maps from childhood.
I remember our shadows growing
on your wall while a candle
swallowed itself. You kept a single
glass of water on a desk and it trembled
whenever we danced.
Hemispheres
Our bodies, lucent under the bedclothes,
fit tightly like the pieces of a broken
terra-cotta vase now newly mended,
smooth surfaces, no jagged edges visible.
I’ve read that countries were so interlocked
before tectonic heavings, when the ocean
parted Mexico and Mauritania.
Brazil’s shoulder was hoisted to Nigeria,
Italy pressed Libya, Alaska
lay so close to Russia that fingers touched.
Our tremulous hands held fast in sleep at dawn;
legs, arms entwined, one continent, one mass.
Bowling in Heaven
Like newlyweds,
my parents slip out of their clothes.
He puts aside the sweater I chose
for him, she undoes her pearls.
They rise up from their old ailments,
their fears of falling, broken hips
and other bad news.
Now they dance
barefoot in their living room,
go bowling on a whim.
They garden all day without pain,
calling out like songbirds,
come see the hollyhocks,
they have grown so tall!
Nights, they lie down
like dolls and their sleepless eyes
glide closed. They seem so eager
for morning, I pray they will find each other
again and again.
Everything that Happens can be Called Aging
I have more love than ever.
Our kids have kids soon to have kids.
I need them. I need everyone
to come over to the house,
sleep on the floor, on the couches
in the front room. I need noise,
too many people in too small a space,
I need dancing, the spilling of drinks,
the loud pronouncements
over music, the verbal sparring,
the broken dishes, the wealth.
I need it all flying apart.
My friends to slam against me,
to hold me, to say they love me.
I need mornings to ask for favors
and forgiveness. I need to give,
have all my emotions rattled,
my family to be greedy,
to keep coming, to keep asking
and taking. I need no resolution,
just the constant turmoil of living.
Give me the bottom of the river,
all the unadorned, unfinished,
unpraised moments, one good turn
on the luxuriant wheel.
[Art] is the process by which …
[Art] is the process by which, in imagining itself and the relation of individuals to one another and to it, a society comes to understand itself, and by understanding, discover its possibilities of growth.
Mankind is interdependent …
Mankind is interdependent, and the happiness of each depends upon the happiness of all, and it is this lesson that humanity has to learn ...
No human relation gives one possession …
No human relation gives one possession in another — every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone.
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious …
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
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.
Renaming the Planets
Backs on pier’s cool planks, fingers
intertwined, my girlfriend and I
gaze into forever as comets
tear open the sky, bright streaks
winking like distant fireflies.
Beyond them, a dwarf planet sulks
in its orbit. Einstein said nothing
could outrun physics’ laws;
even time must bend to fit its rules.
Yet scientists once declared Earth
center of our universe;
earlier still, that it was flat.
Evolution of what is certain
proves nothing is absolute,
not even a Rockwell scene
of young lovers beside
a lake, waiting for the future
to arrive from heaven.
Waves and Wet Kisses
I had only seen my parents kiss twice.
The first time after my father’s ear surgery.
I was seven or so, don’t recall the nature of the kiss
but only that his hearing was bad
from his youthful years of lifeguarding.
Or was it after he tore the cartilage around his ribs
from lifting heavy glass bottles of milk?
I don’t recall.
The second time was after my mother’s mastectomy.
They rolled her out of recovery.
She looked sad without her glasses —
eyes, small and watery.
He bent over and touched his lips to hers
then turned away and shook his head.
So that is it; that is all.
Two small kisses
for me to coast on like a wave.
Sunday Morning Early
My daughter and I paddle red kayaks
across the lake. Pulling hard,
we slip easily through the water.
Far from either shore, it hits me
that my daughter is a young woman
and suddenly everything is a metaphor
for how short a time we are granted:
the red boats on the blue-black water,
the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses,
the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness.
I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are
in the church of the out of doors,”
then wish I’d kept quiet. That’s the trick in life—
learning to leave well enough alone.
Our boats drift to where the chirring
of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills.
A clap of thunder. I want to say something truer
than I love you. I want my daughter to know that,
through her, I live a life that was closed to me.
I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand.
I start to speak then stop.
Plentitude
Even near the very end
the frail cat of many years
came to sit with me
among the glitter of bulb and glow
tried to the very last to drink water
and love her small world
would not give up on her curious self.
And though she staggered — shriveled and weak
still she poked her nose through ribbon and wrap
and her peace and her sweetness were of such
that when I held my ear to her heart
I could hear the sea.