Author: Christina's Words

“The darkness around us is deep.” ~ William Stafford

“Muse” by Kim Addonizio

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry
When I walk in,
men buy me drinks before I even reach the bar.
They fall in love with me after one night,
even if we never touch.
I tell you I’ve got this shit down to a science.
They sweat with my memory,
alone in cheap rooms they listen
to moans through the wall
and wonder if that’s me,
letting out a scream as the train whines by.
But I’m already two states away, lying with a boy
I let drink rain from the pulse at my throat.
No one leaves me, I’m the one that chooses.
I show up like money on the sidewalk.
Listen, baby. Those are my high heels dangling from the
    phone wire.
I’m the crow flapping down,
that’s my back slip
you catch sight of when the pain
twists into you so deep
you have to close your eyes and weep like a goddamned
    woman.

 

“What We Haven’t Read” by Joseph Mills

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

We play the party game,
admitting what we haven’t read.
Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary,
anything of Faulkner’s.
Amid mock gasps, we name titles
with a mix of embarrassment,
swagger, and relief
that we can finally reveal
how we never made it
more than twenty pages
into Portrait of a Lady,
Middlemarch, Moby Dick.
We don’t bother pretending
we’ll get to them eventually.
We’re confessing, but unrepentant,
and then we begin to get serious:
the newspaper, warning labels,
the mortgage, legal contracts,
every Christmas card from her
for the last twenty years,
the letter he sent before he died,
the lab’s blood results last month
and this month and the next.

Joseph Mills, This Miraculous Turning

“His Elderly Father as a Young Man” by Leo Dangel

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn’t in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn’t want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with an imitation pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.

When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away –
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed,
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such a letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.

“His Elderly Father as a Young Man” by Leo Dangel, from Home from the Field. © Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997.

*

“Old Man” by Neil Young

“How It Is with Us, and How It Is with Them” by Mary Oliver

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

We become religious,
then we turn from it,
then we are in need and maybe we turn back.
We turn to making money,
then we turn to the moral life,
then we think about money again.
We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.

“How It Is with Us, and How It Is with Them” by Mary Oliver, from Dog Songs. © Penguin, 2013

“A Few Words on the Soul” by Wislawa Szymborska

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.