poetryshoebox

[poetryshoebox]

A Hunger So Honed

Driving home late through town He woke me for a deer in the road, The light smudge of it fragile in the distance, Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh– His hand on my hand, even the weight Of our voices not speaking. I watched a long time And a long time after we were too far to see, Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs, All phantom and shadow, so silent It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened, But passed into a deeper, more cogent state of dream– The mind a dark city, a disappearing, A handkerchief Swallowed by a fist. I thought of the animal’s mouth And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger So honed the green leaves merely maintain it. We want so much, When perhaps we live best In the spaces between loves, That unconscious roving, The heart its own rough animal. Unfettered. The second time, There were two that faced us a moment The way deer will in their Greek perfection, As though we were just some offering The night had delivered. They disappeared between two houses, And we drove on, our own limbs Sloppy after that, our need for one another Greedy, weak

—Tracy K. Smith

#tracy k. smith

[poetryshoebox]

[Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling]

Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling so I check my phone or squint at the window with a serious look, like someone in a movie or a mother thinking about how time passes. Sometimes I’m not sure how to feel so I think about a lot of things until I get an allergy attack. I take my antihistamine with beer, thank you very much, sleep like a cut under a band aid, wake up on the stairs having missed the entire party. It was a real blast, I can tell, for all the vases are broken, the flowers twisted into crowns for the young, drunk, and beautiful. I put one on and salute the moon, the lone face over me shining through the grates on the front door window. You have seen me like this before, such a strange version of the person you thought you knew. Guess what, I’m strange to us both. It’s like I’m not even me sometimes. Who am I? A question for the Lord only to decide as She looks over my résumé. Everything is different sometimes. Sometimes there is no hand on my shoulder but my room, my apartment, my body are containers and I am thusly contained. How easy to forget the obvious. The walls, blankets, sunlight, your love.

-Matthew Siegel

#matthew siegel

[poetryshoebox]

On the Nature of Understanding

Say you hoped to tame something wild and stayed calm and inched up day by day. Or even not tame it but meet it halfway. Things went along. You made progress, understanding it would be a lengthy process, sensing changes in your hair and nails. So it’s strange when it attacks: you thought you had a deal.

-Kay Ryan

#kay ryan

[poetryshoebox]

Second Helpings

I wear my heart on my sleeve, or rather both sleeves, since it’s usually broken.

Sometimes when I join my hands to pray, the jagged edges briefly touch,

like a plate that fell and cracked apart from being asked to hold too much.

— John Brehm

#john brehm

[poetryshoebox]

Carnegie Hall Rush Seats

Whatever else the orchestra says,

the cello insists,You’re dying.

It speaks from the core

  of the tree’s hacked-out heart,

shaped and smoothed like a woman.

Be glad you are not hard wood

  yourself and can hear it.

Every day the cello is taken

into someone’s arms, taken between

  spread legs and lured into

its shivering. The arm saws and

saws and all the sacred cries of saints

 and demons issue from the carved cleft holes.

Like all of us, it aches, sending up moans

from the pit we balance on the edge of.

—Mary Karr

#mary karr

[poetryshoebox]

Vinegar and Oil

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

Coming and going unfinished, puzzled by fate,

like the half-carved relief of a fallen donkey, above a church door in Finland.

—Jane Hirshfield

#jane hirshfield

[poetryshoebox]

Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard

A life should leave deep tracks: ruts where she went out and back to get the mail or move the hose around the yard; where she used to stand before the sink, a worn-out place; beneath her hand the china knobs rubbed down to white pastilles; the switch she used to feel for in the dark almost erased. Her things should keep her marks. The passage of a life should show; it should abrade. And when life stops, a certain space— however small— should be left scarred by the grand and damaging parade. Things shouldn't be so hard.

—Kay Ryan

#kay ryan

[poetryshoebox]

Nights in the Neighborhood

I carry joy as a choir sings, but quietly as the dark carols. To keep the wind away so the hidden ones will come out into the street and add themselves to this array of stars, constellations and moon. I notice the ones in pain shine more than the others. It’s so they can be found, I think. Found and harbored.

—Linda Gregg

#linda gregg

[poetryshoebox]

Poet of an Ordinary Heartbreak

Who hasn’t been tempted by the sharp edge of a knife? An ordinary knife cutting ordinary tomatoes on an ordinary slab of wood on an ordinary Wednesday. The knife nicks, like a bite to the soul. A reminder that what is contemplated is as real as the blood sprouting from a finger. As real as a bruised eye. Instead turn back to the meat stewing on the stove. Scrape pulpy red flesh into the heat and turn. Say: even this is a prayer. Even this.

—Chris Abani

#chris abani

[poetryshoebox]

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations. Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies like a snowflake falling on water. Below us, some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death, snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn back into the little system of his care. All night, the cities, like shimmering novas, tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

—Ted Kooser

#ted kooser

[poetryshoebox]

Singapore

In Singapore, in the airport, A darkness was ripped from my eyes. In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open. A woman knelt there, washing something in the white bowl. Disgust argued in my stomach and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket. A poem should always have birds in it. Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings. Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees. A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain rising and falling. A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem. When the woman turned I could not answer her face. Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and neither could win. She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this? Everybody needs a job. Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem. But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough. She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as hubcaps, with a blue rag. Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing. She does not work slowly, nor quickly, like a river. Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird. I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life. And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop and fly down to the river. This probably won’t happen. But maybe it will. If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? Of course, it isn’t. Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life. I mean the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth, The way her smile was only for my sake; I mean the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds. —Mary Oliver

#mary oliver

[poetryshoebox]

Injury

Insult is injury taken personally, saying, This is not a random fracture that would have happened to any leg out there; this was a conscious unkindness. We need insult to remind us that we aren’t always just hurt, that there are some sources— even in the self—parts of which tread on other parts with such boldness that we must say, You must stop this.

-Kay Ryan

#kay ryan

[poetryshoebox]

The Birthdays of Ex-Lovers

How they pinball through the mind like the combinations of outgrown lockers, a mishmash of Virgos and Cancers

on whose soft favor we once depended — useless now like the few syllables bored in from foreign language classes,

the equations of elementary physics they swore we must memorize if we held any hope for future happiness.

But no — the world knuckles along whether we remember or not, hauling everyone for whom the heart once

flounced like a broadsided schooner, for whom we raised mythologies all sin-sweet, proud as a dead religion.

-Michael Meyerhofer

#michael meyerhofer

[poetryshoebox]

The Primer

She said, I love you.

He said, Nothing.

(As if there were just one of each word and the one who used it, used it up).

In the history of language the first obscenity was silence.

-Christina Davis

#christina davis

[poetryshoebox]

Love After Love

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott

#derek walcott

[poetryshoebox]

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker, and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots in the night.                     It even comes to the boulder in the perpetual shade of pine barrens, to rain falling on the open sea, to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

-Jane Kenyon

#jane kenyon

[poetryshoebox]

Anger

You tell me that it’s all right to let it out of its cage, though it may claw someone, even bite. You say that letting it out may tame it somehow. But loose it may turn on me, maul my face, draw blood. Ah, you think you know so much, you whose anger is a pet dog, its canines dull with disuse. But mine is a rabid thing, sharpening its teeth on my very bones, and I will never let it go.

-Linda Pastan

#linda pastan