24 Friday Jan 2020
Posted in poem
Tags
Schrödinger’s cat is dead.
Thank God.
She might have been alive once,
Or twice, or all nine times.
(We had no way of knowing.)
She’s dead by now, though—must be.
Long dead.
Thank God.
Let’s rise from our squat,
For now we may wander unworried,
No longer hunched from listening–
One ear tight against the box–
For her soft, starved meow.
17 Monday Jun 2019
Excerpts from reviews of my unpublished book
… She goes through the mill, all right. No surprise there for fans of such stuff—in Britain they call them “Misery Memoirs,” and demolished mums go mad for them. What is this trend about, anyway—all these haunted women sharing stories with women similarly haunted? When you’re dry to the bone, why crawl out to visit a neighboring desert?
… There seems some universal need for—let’s call it “paying witness.” Which Coughlin does well. She tells the story of her autistic daughter’s life and death with style and wit. It’s really not her fault that we already know the story, thank you, and don’t need to hear it again.
… To quote Ms. Coughlin, “You can’t spell ‘poignancy’ without ‘Nancy’”—and that at least seems true. This book is relentlessly poignant. Every thought this writer has seems blackened at the edges, charred by pain. Even when she’s funny—and believe it or not, she can be quite funny, often at the very moment the ground is collapsing beneath her—a subtle wince behind the prose betrays an unquellable trauma.
… This is the sort of book that should be wrapped in satin, placed in a box, tied with a bow, and cached in an attic for some curious granddaughter to reopen one day, and to recognize.
19 Wednesday Jul 2017
Posted in poem
Abbreviated
When making lists, I once wrote “He.” and “Ha.”–
instead of merely “H.”, as I do now.
This luxury of brevity
weighs heavily on me.
First to quaver, mid-list, is the pen.
Its wince shoots sirens to the hapless brain.
(I feel it first. It’s only after
that I revive my daughter.
Or she kills me, it’s either way the same.)
I see her then, in flashes—like the time
she danced out on the roof edge, or
escaped the moving car.
My husband, Henry (hence the “He.”), can’t hear
me in this place I’ve gone. I glimpse him there–
outside my gasp, inside his jar–
then grab for Hannah (hence the “Ha.”).
18 Tuesday Jul 2017
Henryland now
Waiting for Henryland now.
Piano jazz on the family iPod.
Knowing he might walk in
sometime within this very sentence.
Or this one.
…No, not yet, but soon.
Henryland: a funfair
for middle-aged war vets.
I know shortcuts to the sweetest rides,
I know the thrillingest car
on the stroller coaster.
Total access, free chili dogs,
an all-night ticket. No lines,
no crowd. Just my husband, me,
and Oscar Peterson.
Henryland: my latter-day
reward for taking all those classes.
(This thesis took me
thirty years to write.)
Henryland: my recompense.
And in the yard a gallery
of rusted iron: the broken ones.
We don’t ride those anymore.
(People kept getting killed.)
We should haul them to the dump,
I know, but we’re lazy, and, besides,
they’re cenotaphs. They’re modern art.
Someday I’ll write a poem called ‘How
to Love Someone,’ but this might do, for now.
19 Friday May 2017
Posted in found poem, poem
Tags
chocolate, comfort, cough drops, found poem, play, poem, work, zen
Pep Talks and Promises:
(an alphabetized conversation between Hall’s cough drop wrappers and Dove chocolate wrappers)
Be unstoppable. Be fearless.
Buckle down and push forth. Believe in love at first sight, just in case!
Conquer today. Break the mold, be extraordinary!
Don’t try harder. Do harder! Close your eyes and relax.
Don’t waste a precious minute. Decorate your life.
Dust off and get up. Do all things with love.
Elicit a few “wows” today. Even small celebrations deserve a dance.
Fire up those engines! Feel the sun on your face.
Flex your “can do” muscle. Forget the rules and play by your heart.
Get back in the game. Get a good night’s sleep.
Get back in there, champ! Indulge your sense of amusement.
Go for it. It’s definitely a bubble bath day.
Inspire envy. It’s OK to not do it all.
It’s yours for the taking. Laugh, laugh, and laugh some more.
Let’s hear your battle cry. Listen to your heart and dance.
March forward! Live in the present, forgive your past.
Nothing you can’t handle. Live your dreams.
Power through! Lose yourself in a moment.
Push on! Love like there is no tomorrow.
Put a little strut in it. Send your best friend flowers.
Put your game face on. Simply be, rather than do, for a moment.
Seize the day. Sing along with the elevator music.
Take charge and mean it. Someone is thinking of you right now.
Tough is your middle name. Take time out for a catnap.
Turn “can do” into “can did!” Think of every day as a Sunday.
You can do it and you know it. Think without boundaries.
You’ve survived tougher. You make everything lovely.
08 Monday May 2017
(Note: In a world that empowers mere celebrity, self-effacement becomes an act of rebellion.)
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
–Emily Dickinson
30 Sunday Apr 2017
Clearing
I’m watching her: this part of me who thinks
and writes (occasionally at once). She’s
onto something new, she thinks. And maybe
she is, I don’t know. What I like best
is the joy I feel her feeling as she races
through her trance. I don’t want to startle her
in this sudden clearing, don’t want
to make my presence known, for fear
she’ll lose her train of thought, for fear
she’ll notice me and blush bright red, like
that time her brother Jim walked in on her
pounding out the piano solo from Cat Stevens’s
“I Think I See the Light” onto her bedroom desk.
Don’t mind me, little one. Keep going. Make
mistakes, change fast and slow, follow
your thought the way I follow you. We’ll both,
we’ll all, be here to help you home again,
when time comes round for that.
02 Thursday Feb 2017
Posted in poem
Tags
Under One Small Star
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
Wislawa Szymborska
01 Thursday Dec 2016
Posted in poem, Uncategorized
In these times
I’m fifty-eight. You’d think I’d know by now
these lessons I keep having to relearn.
The latest, loudest fact: the earth sags low
beneath the weight of idiots who mourn
an age that never was. And am I one
of them? Again, my trademark insipidity:
that life is good—and people too–deep down.
I’m Anne Frank in the annex, always pre-
annihilated, trapped in reckless faith–
“in spite of everything”–that men are good.
(Her “everything,” like mine, included death
but not the grin beneath the hangman’s hood.)
I fear my hope more than I fear my dread.
I think like children think, forever caught
in fairy tale, in prayers my mother said,
in “progress,” in “my country,” in the thought
that savagery’s a glitch, a rare malfunction.
What will it take, I wonder, to dispel
my dull naivety? My own extinction?
Or is delusion requisite to hell?
13 Sunday Nov 2016
Posted in poem, Uncategorized
Roar
The furnace roar enthralls me, and the silence
that comes before–and follows–also soothes.
By turns, by force, they beg my acquiescence
to all that’s merely “being,” merely “truth.”
But the wailing mob—how ought I feel? The din
of eight billion curses and sighs. The shriek
of the shrinking world, the whisper-whine
of conquered species, conquered earth. They speak
in hurricanes that moan, in floods that spew,
in droughts that sneer at our inanity.
Yet we can’t translate, though they force us to.
(Our purest faith: Divine Cacophony.)
They’re growling to themselves alone, we think—
or speaking, yes, but saying something else—
completely else, all forms of else! (We’ll sink
while never knowing that we’ve drowned ourselves.)
It’s not our fault. We’re deaf, or worse. We’re dead
to any but our tribe’s vernacular
(which even God calls gibberish). I said,
“The furnace din enthralls me.” I don’t care
to know its source and cost, it seems. I close
my eyes to trace what paths my dreams may take,
as Silence, like a patient prince who knows
his sovereign destiny, remains awake.
07 Friday Oct 2016
Posted in poem
Fifty
Sometimes it seems I’m every age at once:
not in memory merely, but in form,
like Russian nesting dolls with just the latest
mother breathing out. Or like a tree
with fifty rings, so that even my seedling
start remains, swaddled by its future
matrioshki; comprising, still, the marvels
of its quick, brave year in the sun.
07 Friday Oct 2016
Posted in poem
I feel you now
(aan mijn imkertje)
I prayed you’d let me feel your presence here
as fiercely as I feel your absence. You,
imaginary guru, heard this plea,
condoned my wish. I feel you now, more true
than life, for even as I take my rest
in you, I’m wrested thence. I’m all at once:
so utterly aggrieved, so thickly blessed–
so blinded by your panoramic glance.
29 Monday Aug 2016
Tags
absolution, comfort, friendship, grace, home, longing, loss, love, memory, poem, revision, surrender, writing, zen
A simple, impossible thing
1
A memory that breaks my fall: the winter night we climbed
the mountain tower, and Maggie, in her scarf that matched
her lipstick, in her nimblest sneakers, hoisted her blithe
body onto a parapet, so naturally I thought why-not, began
my own uppity fumble–yes, but you agreed with gravity. You
held my shoulders, laughed and said oh no you don’t.
2
You who cage such raucous grace beneath your ribs that even
its muted, chastened flutter flies me back to the once-upon
world of my babies. Rolling together in the bay-window room,
one saggy end of baggy bed to other, goofy giggly, basking
in the sun’s noblesse oblige approval of our basking
in the sun. You make me ache (but sweetly—how??) for my two
girls. As they did, once (those days cut short by random
knife), you invite me, for a visit, back to Eden.
3
A sentence from the book they’ll write of us someday:
“From opposite sides of the crowded room, they sent each
other smiles of warm encouragement.” Note the cool
authority, dear one: third-person, omniscient. I too will bear
mere witness then. I’ll delegate our story to the crone
I’ve only glimpsed so far: the all-aware third-
woman solving crosswords near the mirror-hall exit. If only
I could catch her now, could pilfer her quintessence
prematurely… It’s a maze, you (don’t) know: this
fissure lit only by cavewoman’s torch. This life
of the unreliable narrator. (Long-standing English-major
wish: I’m Huckleberry Finn, and wise beyond my knowing.)
4
You might, moreover, note (or not) how I grow tired—or, no,
how I long to grow tired—of picking at the threads
of vagaries–my half-concocted memories and clues. Not just
the strands that lead toward you, my love (though you’ve
reason to think they all lead there), but others too,
spreading like jellyfish tendrils (let’s say) across
mandalic seas. How deep-down, how finally I want to have
already said all I’m still so dumbly bent on saying.
Then, afterward, to fall into that haven uncannily
coincident with the hollow between your chest
and collarbone, that nest we built from twigs and wine
one summer night, and have never yet flown far from. Forever
I rest there in times of near-asleep and near-awake. Forever
you’re my respite from that double-edged hope: to lose
all need to talk or write, or to trip across the miracle
of telling all, just once, and plainly, and then to let it
let me let it go, absolved at last of everything but love.
23 Tuesday Aug 2016
Posted in poem
Sea change
Diverge from paths that wreck you needlessly.
Heel sharply leeward. Plow a new lane, lit
succinctly by synaptic sparks that flit
like fireflies in a miner’s headlamp. See–
like phytoplankton woken by the wake
of midnight ships–your bioluminescence.
However faint and mythical, its blessings
enlighten every typhoon trail you take.
How desperate, how brave you must become,
then–heart lashed to the groaning helm—how free:
Re-draw your chart by plankton-light, mid-sea.
And mark in bold those routes that lead you home.
13 Wednesday Jul 2016
Posted in poem
Tags
autism, compassion, grace, grief, Hannah, helplessness, loss, love, memory, poem, rebecca gonshak, transience, words, zen
Two kids in the bath again,
me just a smaller version of you.
If you cried, I’d sing
like a miniature mother, Moonshadow
and Bye, Bye, Blackbird. No, I didn’t sing
Bye, Bye, Blackbird then. Oh well, all memory is a lie.
You used to run from wall to wall of the house,
but did I really run after you?
I’m older than you now
but I still feel like a version of you.
That’s an invention too, I can’t say what you meant
in your silence. But if I could go back to that bath
and our feet could touch, and you splashed
– I know you would splash –
I would sing and sing until I lost all words.
21 Tuesday Jun 2016
lesson learned
“darling girl”—I had them scratch
it on your stone—I’m not sure why.
I rarely called you that in life.
I always called you “pumpkin pie”—
a silly name, bereft of grave
solemnity. I must have been
too timid to be true, back then.
I’ll never be that way again.
23 Monday May 2016
Posted in poem
Tags
acceptance, apophenia, death, freedom, grief, love, memory, mom, poem, transience
With winter nearing
With winter nearing, I remember spring:
A fickle March, before my mother died.
Her bed lay flush with window. Side by side,
We watched another snowfall—wondering
At all the forms a snowflake takes: like bone
Turned ash, like milkweed floss, like feather.
Tonight they fell in tufts that clung together,
But for a few who braved the fall alone.
Heavy, wet, yet floating. It was night,
The storm lit from beneath. (My mother’s room
Was lucky, disconcerting midnight gloom
By posing, drapes pulled wide, above the light
That advertised the doors below, where hearse
And ambulance were meant to go.) We watched
The snow in halogenic awe untouched,
Unbroken now, by dietician, nurse,
Aide, hospice worker, laundress, orderly,
Their squeaking soles no longer restless hounds
That whined and sniffed at daylit doors; their rounds
Unspooled at last. And so we lay there free.
We lay there, clumped and clinging, and we felt
That we might never die, but only melt.
11 Wednesday May 2016
Posted in poem
Tags
apophenia, cats, choice, dogs, illusion, love, marriage, metaphor, poem, surrender, transience, wanda gag
The odd things we love, when we love
Henry cares only for films about humans. Except
when he’s high, when he garners delight and soft
consolation from the documentary adventures
of other mammals. Dogs, in particular, warm his
weary cockles. He loves dogs more than any lover
of dogs I’ve known before, and I don’t mind telling you,
I’ve known my share. If I had nothing else to love
him for (but really there are ninety-seven things,
which I intend to list ad nauseam in future poems–
stay tuned!), I’d love him merely for his earnest
love of dogs. And yet, if one day he went mad,
and started loving cats (against which I hold nothing,
due to allergy), I’d click my heels and spin around, and
love his love of cats. Because, you know, that’s how
we got here. That’s how it’s worked, so far. Ailuromania*,
to give but one example, becomes just the thing at hand,
the current metaphor: a pin, a peg, a cross, a stake,
a nail–a strong, convenient hook to hang our love on.
*ailuromania: a passion for cats
03 Tuesday May 2016
Posted in poem
Tags
Tributary
You want the past to end already.
But how do you expect to shake it?
The fog tonight looks dark, feels deadly.
Tomorrow, too: a tangled thicket
impervious to your machete.
How can you know what map to draw
unless you float above the earth?
How can you know, mid-Amazon,
what lies ahead? Yet you set forth,
your blindness pure, your end foregone.
You only know the path you’ve known:
Falls, rapids, doldrums, dysentery;
and years of looking back for one
who left you for a tributary
so slim, so quickly overgrown,
she had to make the trip alone.
01 Sunday May 2016
Posted in poem
Tags
acceptance, compassion, eternity, helplessness, loss, love, marriage, metaphor, now, poem, surrender, thinking out loud, transience, zen
Now
I pause to think how lonesome-long I’ve felt
that snowflakes never die but merely melt.
And so with us: this small, liquescent love.
We started–aimless, frozen flecks of fluff…
You know the rest, if either does. I’ve guessed
at reasons for our muteness: coalesced–
a lukewarm puddle, now—we know we know
already what the other knows (and more).
We pre-discern the gist of sighs. Each stone
that shocks the other, ripples as our own.
You wake so early, now. I sleep so late,
abiding time till we evaporate.
11 Monday Apr 2016
Posted in poem
Fret
I want to shake you like a criminal:
when we could be so happy happy,
oh, why why do these things you do?
Why count my every not-you syllable,
deem every time I nurse my babies
as time I could have spent with you?
You who are as motherless
as I, as longing to be rocked—
How can’t I know you? How do I
evade this empathy, suppress
lactation, hold my will intact,
once startled by your tragedy?
But, sometime, I should wash my face.
And, sometime, I should write this book.
When I go out, my dog knows I’ll
Be back. He doesn’t fret and pace
With one eye on the dawdling clock.
He lets me go. (It took a while.)
02 Wednesday Dec 2015
My latest notion
A website for Hannah,
like they put up for Santa
on Christmas Eve. We’d
track her soul’s holiday as, freed
from form, she strolls the universe.
Watch her atoms intersperse
with those of meteors!
Glimpse her changeless source!
In our old days, of course,
the web was bare. Likewise,
tools for such an enterprise—
that spectral radar—had yet
(have yet) to be invented.
24 Tuesday Nov 2015
Tags
the game is simple:
harness serendipity,
yield to randomness.
29 Thursday Oct 2015
On days you can’t remember
On days you can’t remember who she was,
you disinter the pictures (you don’t want to!),
then focus on benign peripheries,
so that the first contritenesses that haunt you
will show themselves banal: ‘whatever happened
to that armoire?’ ‘That dishwasher broke down.’
‘I miss the velvet couch.’ ‘I wish we hadn’t
let the thistle overrun the lawn.’
Entice your vision toward more pointed hints:
Salute the crib, the changing table. Welcome
a glimpse of diaper bag. Recall its scents
of disinfectant, sour milk, and talcum.
You deftly sidestep ‘what’s she thinking here?’
and ‘does she know it’s me behind the camera?’–
yet trip on ‘why such tangles in her hair?’
and ‘did we never change from our pajamas?’
Retreat beneath the quilt her grandma made.
Review the popup book, rewind the mobile.
Respin the top, recoil within the bed.
Renurse, resing, resigh, relaugh, rebabble.
And, should you need to, build a sturdy house
of quatrain stacked on quatrain. Window-free
at last, live lyrically, your mind diffuse–
all squinting rhymes and harmless frippery.
Go, dear one. Pile words one upon another.
Form thick iambic castles, if you wish.
You have the right, love—you who were her mother—
to veil what life remains in artifice.
22 Wednesday Jul 2015
Posted in poem
Tags
Thinking about Temple Grandin
To triumph over tragedy. How odd
to think of either word without a clang
of chaos in your head. As if some god
decides what sub-division you belong
to, up or down. As if there’s up or down
at all. Your tragedy remains. Or else
it never was. Or else to swim/to drown
are synonyms, as each word melts
the other. We can’t know what’s tragic. Nor
can we discern—not yet—what triumph is.
Yet both words thread their silver through your hair.
Their twin ghosts glisten through your cowgirl eyes.
26 Friday Jun 2015
Posted in poem
Groupie
I went on google images just now
and stared at your face in a thousand
poses. And every now and then among
the different yous, for reasons I still
don’t get, there’d be juxtaposed right
next to you something not-you. A girl
on a horse, say, or Clint Black, or
the periodic table. Needless to say,
this was distracting. Then suddenly I
thought, but no, it’s true! You are a
girl on a horse! You are Clint Black!
You are the periodic table! And I fell
headlong into the chasm of knowing all
your metaphors at once, was ravished
by the army of your chameleon selves.
17 Wednesday Jun 2015
Posted in poem
Tags
Mendicant
Your house is the plainest of churches. Yet
how like a nun I find home there. I tiptoe so
the wood absorbs my step, so that your ceiling,
heaven-high, won’t broadcast echoes
of my graceless gait. Rough wooden beams
arrogate all dreaming here. Logs huddle
tight against the empty hearth. Likewise,
the daylight, muffled and oblique, worms
furtively through windows fortified
by stalwart iron traceries. Your halls:
made slim by dusty breveries stacked flush
along their borders. Narrow, too: your bed.
And yet what cosseted relief I find inside
this counterworld submerged in sepia. An old
clock strikes its hollow hour, somewhere,
in a distant room I seek to leave unfound.
01 Monday Jun 2015
Posted in poem
Envy
A clock that ticks yes no, yes no, yes no,
my lucky heart finds both words meaningless,
so neither can it label, nor assess,
nor translate…nor do anything but go
from tock to tick to tock, unstoppable
as any feeble, human thing can be.
Meanwhile, I scribble, not yet capable
of yielding to ineffability.
03 Sunday May 2015
Posted in poem
26 Thursday Mar 2015
Posted in poem
Tags
The trees grow restless for the coming storm.
Or do they shake their arms in go-away?
They swoon before the wind’s relentless grace.
Or do they claw at God for waking them?
07 Saturday Mar 2015
Posted in poem
Plenary
We meet next week. First time. Your mountain nest.
A hard or happy time–we can’t know yet.
(Both, I bet.) No worry, though: I know you
either way. And you know me (the one
who’s grinned so long her face could crack).
So when, with you, the tears come, full and free—
what luxury! Let’s cry together, love, clinging
tighter as the fireplace cools, between
the flannel sheets I’ll bring you as my present.
Let’s take a day or days to soothe and witness,
cling and cry… As if we’ve never cried before? No,
hardly that. We’ve cried forever. But as if
we could believe the crazy truth of us: that
with each other we can cry, and feel known,
feel safe, feel loved–at the very same time.
17 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted in poem
Tags
apophenia, coincidence, miracle, pareidolia, poem, randomness, serendipity
Confession
The miracles that follow me all day
Draw half their breath from my imagination.
E.g., these barren branches, witch-bone gray,
Claw wildly at the wind… Each rock formation
Discloses Lincoln. Clouds find Santa Claus.
And so on: marvels of the merely here.
And once you know them, dark and light, obtuse
And vivid, each way stunning, they appear
All miracle, all–why not?–lucky. (Hint:
Some days you have to tilt your head and squint.)
10 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted in poem
Tags
A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.
–Robert Bly
05 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in poem
Are you looking for me?
I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
you will not find me in the stupas,
not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues,
nor in cathedrals:
not in masses,
nor kirtans,
not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me,
you will see me instantly —
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.
―Kabir
09 Tuesday Dec 2014
Posted in poem, Uncategorized
Tags
acceptance, balance, compassion, dust, genesis, george segal, grace, illusion, imkertje, loss, love, poetry, robert pinsky, serenity, surrender, time, transience, truth, zen
Above: “Street Crossing” (1992) by the American artist George Segal (1924-2000)
Robert Pinsky’s “Genesis According to George Segal”
The Spirit brooded on the water and made
The earth, and molded us out of earth. And then
The Spirit breathed Itself into our nostrils—
And rested. What was the Spirit waiting for?
An image of Its nature, a looking glass?
Glass also made of dust, of sand and fire.
Ordinary, enigmatic, we people waiting
In the terminal. A survivor at a wire fence,
Also waiting. Behind him, a tangle of bodies
Made out of plaster, which plasterers call mud.
The apprentice hurries with a hod of mud.
Particulate sand for glass. Milled flour for bread.
What are we waiting for? The hour glass
That measures all our time in trickling dust
Is also of dust and will return to dust—
So an old poem says. Men in a bread line
Out in the dusty street are silent, waiting
At the apportioning-place of daily bread.
At an old-fashioned radio’s wooden case
A man sits listening in a wooden chair.
A woman at a butcher block waits to cut.
What are we waiting for, in clouds of dust?
Or waiting for the past, particles of being
Settled and moist with life, then brittle again.
————————————————-
Extra cool thing: Robert Pinsky reads this poem aloud here:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/genesis-according-george-segal?mbid=social_twitter
17 Friday Oct 2014
Posted in poem
Tags
both, illusion, paradox, serenity, slice of life, thinking out loud, time, yin yang, zen
To Time, sweet illusion so helpful when wanting
to taste something new or again.
Without you who knows how I’d write my next sentence:
I’d lose me in everywhen.
22 Monday Sep 2014
Posted in haiku, poem, twitter tweets
08 Saturday Mar 2014
Posted in poem
27 Thursday Feb 2014
Posted in poem
Tags
freedom, helplessness, poem, randomness, surrender, thinking out loud, zen
The trick, as ever, is not minding. The trick: allow yourself no choice. Never/always losing/finding. Gone, the actor. Mute, the voice.
21 Thursday Nov 2013
Reminder
On my forearm, close to my wrist,
there are two white scars so faded
and tiny that you might not notice them
even if I pointed them out to you.
They’re the remnants of a bite mark
I received on Christmas Day, 2001. One
is a short white line and the other is
roughly circular–the circumference
of a molar. And of course they’re not all
that remain of my daughter–I have stacks
of pictures and videos, school art projects,
doctors’ reports, activity charts, MRI scans,
Special Olympics medals. I’ve kept five
or six pieces of her clothing, including
the sneakers I wear when I take the dog
for a walk along the rutted ATV trails
just west of town. I even, ridiculously, have
her brown velour La-Z-Boy rocker, ripped
and stained, the underlying structure so
decrepit that when you lean back into it,
the broken laths curve around to
conform to the shape of your body,
as if in capture or embrace. But it’s
the little scars that soothe me most,
because they’re always right there
with me, like pale tattoos, and they’ll
be there till the day I die.
is this anything 