Half Changed World

Landscapes

On Monday, T and I drove back from Rhode Island to Virginia.  Rather than spending the whole day in the car, we took a small detour and stopped for a few hours at Storm King Art Center.  It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed walking around the site looking at the sculptures.  (We had the place almost to ourselves, with most guests staying on the trams that will take you around.) 

The featured installation this year is Maya Lin's Wavefield, where she has shaped the earth to make waves of grass.  Because of the heavy rains of the past month, we weren't allowed to walk over and through them, but only observe them from the outside.  I have to admit that I was underwhelmed by the effect, surrounded as we were by the swooping curve of the mountains around us.  It did make me think about the degree to which the other shapes of the park are man-made, which was interesting.

As it happens, the Corcoran's Maya Lin exhibit is closing this week, so I went after work on Thursday.  This also features her visions of landcape, with three large pieces that each mimic topographical lines in different ways.  My favorite of them was the 2x4 landscape, a gigantic hill made up of 2x4 boards cut to different heights.  It creates a pixellated effect that is odd to see in real life.  Before they disassemble it, they're letting small groups walk on it -- I wish I had known about it in time to register.

Write to Marry

This post is part of the Write to Marry blog carnival, organized by Dana at Mombian and Mike at PageOneQ.

I've been listening to the podcast of the Writer's Almanac on my way to and from work and today I heard that last Thursday was the 7th anniversary of the iPod.  It made me gape, because they've become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that it seems unimaginable that they didn't exist that recently.

Five years ago, the idea that same-sex marriages would be be legally recognized in the United States would have seemed unimaginable to me, such a far off possibility that it didn't seem like a fight that was worth taking on.  And then Massachusetts opened the doors, and San Francisco followed and I couldn't stop looking at the pictures of all the happy couples.  And the world shifted.

There's been some bumps in the road since then.  Four years ago, I was worrying about the referenda against same sex marriage and their impacts on the presidential election, and trying to remember that February warmth.  Two years ago, I was knocking on doors trying (unsuccessfully) to stop a hateful amendment to Virginia's constitution.  This blog carnival is focused on stopping California's Proposition 8 which would take away same-sex couples right to marry.

But I truly think the world has changed.  People have seen the couples lining up to marry in California and Massachusetts.  And they've seen that the sky hasn't fallen down.

I've posted this poem before, but it seems appropriate again:

Why marry at all?

By Marge Piercy, from My Mother's Body

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magneta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth's curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

That's America to me

Because I felt needed to wash my ears out (and maybe my brain) after listening to Michelle Bachmanns ranting about "anti-Americans" in Congress, let me offer another vision of America, Paul Robeson singing "The House I Live In."

(Also available at Remix America, which has some other interesting stuff.)

Here's a link to donate to El Tinklenberg, who is running against Bachmann.

And I join with Cecily in saying: "Do you hear me? I am a pro-choice East Coast liberal elitist and I am PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. Stop saying I'm not. "

update:  My mother asked me whether my readers know who Paul Robeson was.  I said I'd ask.  Do you?

A poem for tonight

Summons by Robert Francis

Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded.


So here I am banging on your door to tell you to go outside right now and check out the eclipse tonight.

Spending more time with the family

"I wanted to spend more time with my family" is the standard cliche of the day for explaining why you quit a high powered job when the real reason is that you were going to be fired if you didn't get your behind in gear.  Occasionally, it's actually true.

Matthew Yglesias doesn't believe that Patti Solis Doyle really quit because of family obligations.  I agree that it would be incredibly unprofessional for her to quit at this stage of the race, and the idea that she'd do it because her six year old said he wanted Daddy is pretty ludicrous.  (Just in case it is true, here's some unsolicited parenting advice: get over it.  Kids are good at yanking chains, and it doesn't mean a thing.  T's been the at-home parent since D was 4 months old, and there are times when the boys demand him and there are times when he might as well be chopped liver.)

The comment thread over there raises some interesting questions.  Is it anti-feminist for her to use this excuse?  Does it make it harder for other woman professionals with small children to be hired into positions of responsibility?  Is it an attempt to play for sympathy with working mothers?  Why go into this level of detail when no one is going to believe you anyway?

***

Today's poem on The Writer's Almanac is "Sestina for the Working Mother" by Deborah Garrison.

Sestina for the Working Mother

No time for a sestina for the working mother.
Who has so much to do, from first thing in the morning
When she has to get herself dressed and the children
Too, when they tumble in the pillow pile rather than listening
To her exhortations about brushing teeth, making ready for the day;
They clamor with "up" hugs when she struggles out the door.

Every time, as if shot from a cannon when she shuts the door.
She stomps down the street in her city boots, slipping from mother
Mode into commuter trance, trees swaying at the corner of a new day
Nearly turned, her familiar bus stop cool and welcoming in the morning.
She hears her own heart here, though no one else is listening,
And if the bus is late she hears down the block the voices of her children

Bobbing under their oversized backpacks to greet other children
At their own bus stop. They too have come flying from the door,
Brave for the journey, and everyone is talking and no one is listening
As they head off to school. The noisy children of the working mother,
Waiting with their sitter for the bus, are healthy and happy this morning.
And that's the best way, the mother knows, for a day

To begin. The apprehension of what kind of day
It will be in the world of work, blissful without children,
Trembles in the anxious and pleasurable pulse of the morning;
It has tamped her down tight and lit her out the door
And away from what she might have been as a mother
At home, perhaps drinking coffee and listening

To NPR, what rapt and intelligent listening
She'd do at home. And volunteering, she thinks, for part of the day
At their school-she'd be a playground monitor, a PTA mother!
She'd see them straggle into the sunshine, her children
Bright in the slipstream, and she a gracious shadow at the school door;
She would not be separated from them for long by the morning.

But she has chosen her flight from them, on this and every morning.
She's now so far away she trusts someone else is listening
To their raised voices, applying a Band-Aid, opening the door
For them when the sunshine calls them out into the day.
At certain moments, head bent at her desk, she can see her children,
And feels a quick stab. She hasn't forgotten that she is their mother.

Every weekday morning, every working day,
She listens to her heart and the voices of her children.
Goodbye! they shout, and the door closes behind the working mother.

Thanksgiving poems

I've discovered that if you google "thanksgiving poems" you get a bunch of truly awful poetry. So here's my attempt to rectify the matter.

• My favorite remains Raymond Carver's Gravy, which I posted two years ago.
• I also like Marge Piercy's The Art of Blessing the Day.
• Here's a very non-traditional choice for a Thanksgiving poem, by Louise Gluck, chosen by Annik Stahl.

May you have a Thanksgiving day full of warm thoughts and good smells.

Tashlich

Tashlich is a ceremony where you symbolically cast your sins (in the form of bread crumbs) into the water so that they can be washed away. 

In looking for something to read at our informal tashlich this evening (the fish thought our sins were very tasty), I found this poem:

Tashlich, poem by Rafael Jesús González

   

These are the days of awe —

time of inventory

         and a new beginning

when harvest of what we sowed

         comes in.

(What have we sown

         of discord &
terror?

Two years later

Two years ago today, like pretty much everyone else with access to a computer, I was blogging about Katrina.

Two years ago tomorrow, I was "sad and angry" about the f*cked up state of health care coverage in this country.  And the uninsurance figures have only gotten worse.  And, as I noted two years ago, having health insurance doesn't mean that you're not screwed anyway.  I got this video from the Edwards campaign in my inbox today -- if you listen carefully, you'll note that the woman asking the question says that she has health insurance, but still has had to borrow $50,000 to pay for her treatment.

Two years ago yesterday, I was blogging about the man who invented the word "genocide" and remembering the anniversary of the Beslan massacre.  At that time, I wrote "I suppose there's not a date on the calendar where there hasn't been pain and bloodshed, somewhere, somewhen."

This morning I was listening to NPR on the radio, and Cokie Roberts was talking about New Orleans.  She said that the areas that haven't been rebuilt are strangely beautiful, because the ground there is so fertile that marsh grasses have sprung up already where there used to be buildings.  It made me think of the Carl Sandburg poem, Grass.

 Grass

                                 

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
                            I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
                            What place is this?
                            Where are we now?

                            I am the grass.
                            Let me work

America

America
by Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
   murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
   from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility.  Businessmen are serious.  Movie
   producers are serious.  Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
   an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
   twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
   my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
   automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
   sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
   speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
   workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
   was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
   Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain.  Everybody must have
   been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.  And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive.  The Russia's power mad.  She wants to take
   our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago.  Her needs a Red Reader's Digest.  her wants our
   auto plants in Siberia.  Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good.  Ugh.  Him makes Indians learn read.  Him need big black niggers.
   Hah.  Her make us all work sixteen hours a day.  Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
   factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/america.html

This seems like an appropriate poem for the Fourth of July in the mood I'm in right now.

You can also listen to a recording of Ginsberg reading an early version of this poem.  (Check out the rest of the site as well -- it's got both modern and historical readings, including some for children.)

When I was in high school, I had a chance to hear Ginsberg reading his poetry.  He read this one very differently than he does on this recording -- softly, and as if he thought the whole thing was a bit of a joke.  And of course, we were sitting there listening very seriously.  Here he reads it with lots of energy, and the crowd cracks up with almost every line.

Ithaka

At the library tonight, I noticed on the new book shelf a new translation of C. P. Cavafy's poetry (by Aliki Barnstone).  The only Cavafy poem I've read is Ithaka, so I brought the volume home.

I read Ithaka when I was 15 or 16.  The trip leader for my summer program gave it to me at the end of the trip, and I was incredibly flattered.  (I don't remember her name.  The only person whose name I can remember from the trip is the really annoying girl who always wanted to be my buddy, probably because I was one of the only people in the group who wasn't overtly mean to her.)  So the poem is inextricably linked for me to that summer.

Ithaka

As you set out on the journey to Ithaka,
wish that the way be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.
Don't be afraid of Laistrygonians, the Cyclops.
angry Poseidon, you'll never find them on your way
if your thought stays exalted, if a rare
emotion touches your spirit and body.
You won't meet the Laistrygonians
and the Cyclops and wild Poseidon
if you don't bear them along in your soul,
if your soul doesn't raise them before you.

Wish that the way be long.
May there be many summer mornings
when with such pleasure, such joy
you enter ports seen for the first time;
may you stop in Phoenician emporia
to buy fine merchandise,
mother-of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and every kind of sensual perfume,
buy abundand sensual perfumes, as many as you can.
Travel to many Egyptian cities
to learn and learn from their scholars.

Always keep Ithaka in your mind.
Arriving there is your destination.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts many years,
andy you moor on the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained along the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the beautiful journey.
Without her you would not have set out on your way.
She has no more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka did not betray you.
With all your wisdom, all your experience,
you understand by now what Ithakas mean.

--C.P. Cavafy, translated by Aliki Barnstone

(No book review this week -- I'm in the middle of several different things.)

5 years

It was grey and drizzling in DC today.  I told one of my colleagues that I was glad it was overcast and, without hesitation, she said "not another perfect blue sky."   Moxie says the sky was bright blue in New York, just like five years ago.

Some links:

• Photos at Vanity Fair, via Bitch PhD
• Kristie at The Dish on what it was like to work at 2 World Trade.
• Fred at Stone Court on the politics of 9/11 observations.
• RJ at Procrastinet on his September 11.
• The Onion: NYC Unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole.

I hope no one is offended by the inclusion of the Onion piece.  After September 11, for a long time I had this poem taped to my office door.

A Man Doesn't Have Time In His Life

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

 	-- Yehuda Amichai

The Place Where We Are Right

Someone shared this poem with me recently, and it resonated on a lot of levels.  Because of the author, the immediate connection is with the middle east, but it applies just as well to person-to-person relationships.

The Place Where We Are Right


From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

--  Yehuda Amichai

Passover Links

I'm not the only one for whom "For we were strangers in the land of Egypt" is resonating particularly loudly this year.

• Jews for Racial and Economic Justice
• Passover in Spanish -- in the Streets of America

Jews in America are not as solidly left as they once were, but most are pro-immigration, both because many of us are not that many generations removed from the immigrant experience (both my grandmothers came to this country as children), and because we know that thousands -- maybe tens of thousands, maybe more -- of the six million might have survived if America and other countries had been willing to let them in.

Or as Marge Piercy writes in a poem that was read at many seders tonight:

"We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes
under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours
raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed
tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage,

who walked into the strange and became strangers
and gave birth to children who could look down
on them standing on their shoulders for having
been slaves. We honor those who let go of everything
but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought,
who became other by saving themselves."

Shel Silverstein on marriage

Tomorrow, I'll have a serious post responding to the widespread blog discussion of this post about post-marriage weight gain and tying it to Jen's post about wifestyles.  But for tonight, I just want to share this poem by Shel Silverstein.

My Rules

If you want to marry me, here's what you'll have to do:
You must learn how to make a perfect chicken-dumpling stew.
And you must sew my holey socks,
And soothe my troubled mind,
And develop the knack for scratching my back,
And keep my shoes spotlessly shined.
And while I rest you must rake up the leaves,
And when it is hailing and snowing
You must shovel the walk... and be still when I talk,
And -- hey -- where are you going?

From Where The Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein.

Your cats are your children

To go with the Barbara Crooker poem that we were discussing earlier in the week, I want to share this one by Marge Piercy.

Your cats are your children

Certain friends come in, they say
Your cats are your children.
hey smile from a great height on down.
Clouds roll in around their hair.
have real children, they mean,
while you have imitation.

My cats are not my children.
I gave Morgaine away yesterday
to a little boy she liked.
I'm not saving to send them to Harvard.
When they stay out overnight, I don't call the police.

I like the way they don't talk
The way they do, eyes shining
or narrowed, tails bannering,
paws kneading, cats with private
lives and passions sharp as their claws,
hunters, lovers, great sulkers.

No, my children are my friends,
my lover, my dependents on whom
I depend, those few for whom
I will rise in the middle of the night to give
comfort, massage, medicine
whose calls I always take.

My children are my books
that I gestate for years,
a slow-witted elephant
eternally pregnant, books
that I sit on for eras like the great
auk on a vast marble egg.

I raise them with loving care,
I groom and educate them,
I chastise, reward and adore.
I exercise them lean and fatten them up.
I roll them about my mind all night
and fuss over them in the mornings.

Then they march off into the world
to be misunderstood, mistreated, stolen,
to be loved for the wrong reasons,
to be fondled, beaten, lost.
Now and then I get a postcard
from Topeka Kansas, doing just fine.

People take them in and devour them.
People marry them for love.
People write me letters and tell me
how they are my children too.
I have children whose languages
rattle dumbly in my ears like gravel,

children born of the wind that blows
through me from the graves of the poor
and brave who struggled all their short
throttled lives to free people
whose faces they could not imagine.
Such are the children of my words.

Marge Piercy, from My Mother's Body

I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm charmed by Piercy's imagining of her books as children, growing up to have lives of their own, but am slightly alarmed by Crooker's vision of her child as a poem, something she created.

Obedience

My clock radio is set to 90.9, so if I set my alarm for 6:30 am, I wake up to the purring voice of Garrison Keillor and The Writer's Almanac.  Every weekday, he talks about a few writers who were born on that day, and reads a poem.  Today's poem was Casabianca, by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, better known by its first line "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck."

It's a very 19th century poem, lauding the obedience and courage of the young son of an admiral, burning to death rather than leave without permission:

The flames rolled on - he would not go
Without his father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.

My understanding is that schoolchildren used to memorize this poem and recite it.  (I know I read a children's book in which the main character recites it.  One of the Little House books?  The Great Brain?  Anyone have a guess?)

Over the weekend, while my parents were visiting, at one point my mother praised N for his obedience, and my father commented that probably wasn't something he was especially proud of.  I see obedience in children as mostly an instrumental virtue -- if I can trust my son to stop when I shout stop, I can let him go further than an arm's length away.  I find the glorification of obedience for its own sake in Casabianca pointless and more than a little horrifying. 

Annette Lareau has suggested that obedience has become largely a value of the poor and working-class in the US.  She argues that middle-class families in the US typically place higher value on independence of thought, reasoning, and self-confidence rather than obedience.  I was reminded of this reading Cecily's post today, in which she writes "I will, most likely, never ask my kids to call me “Ma’am.” " as a marker of the cultural differences between her and her siblings.

Any thoughts?  Is it possible to raise kids to be both obedient and to trust their own judgement?  Do you find yourself saying "Because I'm the mother, that's why"?

Gravy

This is my favorite poem about giving thanks:

Gravy
Raymond Carver

No other word will do.  For that's what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman.  Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going.  And he was going
nowhere but down.  So he changed his ways
somehow.  He quit drinking!  And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head.  "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends.  "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected.  Pure Gravy.  And don't forget it."

Happy Thanksgiving.

A poem for Yom Kippur

How Divine is Forgiving?

by Marge Piercy

It's a nice concept
but what's under the sculptured draperies?
We forgive when we don't really care
because what was done to us brought unexpected
harvest, as I always try to explain
to the peach trees as I prune them hard,
to the cats when I shove pills against
the Gothic vaults of their mouths


We forgive those who betrayed us
years later because memory has rotted
through like something left out in the weather
battered clean then littered dirty
in the rain, chewed by mice and beetles,
frozen and baked and stripped by the wind
til it is unrecognizable, corpse
or broken machine, something long useless.


We forgive those whom their own machinations
have sufficiently tangled, enshrouded,
the fly who bit us to draw blood and who
hangs now a gutted trophy in a spider's
airy larder; more exactly, the friend
whose habit of lying has immobilized him
at last like a dog trapped in a cocoon
of fishing line and barbed hooks.


We forgive those we firmly love
because anger hurts, a coal that burns
and smolders still scorching the tissues
inside, blistering wherever it touches
so that we bury the hot clinkers in a mound
of caring, suffocate the sparks with promises,
drown them in tears, reconciling.


We forgive mostly not from strength
but through imperfections, for memory
wears transparent as a glass with the pattern
washed off, till we stare past what injured us,
We forgive because we too have done
the same to others easy as a mudslide;
or because anger is a fire that must be fed
and we are too tired to rise and haul a log.

From Available Light

Two poems

I've been enjoying all the poems that people have been sharing as part of National Poetry Month.  I've run across some old favorites, as well as some ones that are new to me.

A friend shared with me this poem from Alfred E. Knopf's poem a day email:

A Brief for the Defense, by Jack Gilbert, from his new collection, REFUSING HEAVEN.

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

This poem reminded me of a poem by Yehuda Amechai that I tacked onto my wall after September 11.

A man doesn't have time in his life

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

From The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translations by Chana
Bloch and Stephen Mitchell.

Hummingbird

For Tess

Suppose I say summer,
write the word "hummingbird,"
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.

Raymond Carver, All of Us.

Veterans' Day

For most of today, I wasn't focused on November 11th being Veterans' Day.  It was my birthday, and a day off from work.  I went for a run, ran some errands, had lunch with a friend, went to see the Incredibles with my family.

And then, washing dishes, I heard this NPR story talking with the producer of HBO's Last Letters Home.  And hearing people reading out loud from their loved ones' final letters, I started to cry.  We don't get HBO, so I probably won't get to see the documentary, but that little sample was enough to remind me to be grateful for every night that I get to put my sons to bed, even if they sometimes make me crazy in the process.

Veterans' Day is November 11 because it was Armistice Day after WWI.  A friend told me that in Canada some people still wear poppies -- I've never seen anyone marking the day that way.   I was inspired to look up the "Flanders Field" poem, which I had never read in its entirety before:

In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
      In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
      In Flanders fields."

I was struck by how martial a memorial it is, especially that line "take up our quarrel with the foe."  Not for McCrae is the ambiguity of Archibald MacLeish's offering: "Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them."

My thanks to all those who serve and served in our name, and to their families who share the burden.

Why marry at all?

Why marry at all?

By Marge Piercy, from My Mother's Body

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magneta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth's curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

We included this poem in the program at our wedding, and it's been on my mind a lot these days.  I don't have the energy for original writing tonight, so I thought I'd share it.