Author: Christina's Words

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

“diogenes tries to forget” by Mary Karr

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

it’s one of those days when everything is half-off,
half-on. my shirt, for example, which i notice
is buttoned wrong while staring in the diner window.
i think i want a slice of pecan pie, some life
sweeter than this, life my childhood in texas.
there’s no pie today, just you,
by accident again, bent over your coffee
like the “v” the geese fly south.
it’s a fall day. because we’re melancholy,
we kick leaves, pick up rocks to consider
tossing them at dogs. i only breath with one lung
since you’ve been gone, you say. and i love you
with one hemisphere of my brain,
the dumb one, which forgets.

 

Mary Karr, via Poetry Magazine, June 1981

“Warbler” by Jim Harrison

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry, Reader Recommended2 Comments

This year we have two gorgeous
yellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush.
The other day I stuck my head in the bush.
The nestlings weigh one-twentieth of an ounce,
about the size of a honeybee. We stared at
each other, startled by our existence.
In a month or so, when they reach the size
of bumblebees they’ll fly to Costa Rica without a map.

“Warbler” by Jim Harrison from Dead Man’s Float. © Copper Canyon Press, 2016.

***

* With a wave to kind reader Usha who, during the Spring, offered this as one of her favorite poems, shortly after Jim Harrison passed away (March 26, 2016). 

Usha’s suggestion led me to learn more about Harrison. Reading more, I learned that Linda King Harrison, his wife of 55 years, had passed away less than six months earlier (October 2, 2015) and that Mr. Harrison had “died a poet’s death, literally with a pen in his hand, while writing a new poem,” (from “Jim Harrison and the Art of Friendship” by Doug Peacock via thedailybeast.com.) And although Harrison (author of many novels as well, including Legends of the Fall) said in a 1980 interview-–“I’m always having a man in desperate straits trying to help somebody else out with no apparent success,” Mr. Harrison said, “because nobody can be helped by anybody.”–he did indeed help and champion many during his life, according to Peacock:

Jim Harrison was one of the most generous men I ever knew. He lent countless thousands to dozens of less fortunate friends who needed help; he seldom if ever got paid back and that didn’t stop him. Jim would invent jobs for me when he thought I was broke. He lent money to my ex-wife that I never knew about. When traveling he kept his single good eye out for a paucity of tip, the dangerous baldness of tires, or the looming mortgage payment. He took care of working writers like Chuck Bowden and Jack Turner. That generosity extended to sharing his time with younger and beginning writers who he encouraged and sometimes mentored throughout his life. At my wife Andrea’s bookstore, Jim was always up for signing books by the box-load. One night in 2011, when Jim was sicker than shit and Linda was in the hospital with a coma, he crawled up on the stage at a benefit and read with Peter Matthiessen—Livingston, Montana’s greatest literary night.

Thank you, Usha, for the suggestion and for the gentle nudge to learn more about Harrison. Click here to read another piece by Harrison, “Bridge,” which includes the beautiful line: What beauty in this the darkest music / over which you can hear the lightest music of human / behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.

“A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

 

~ Ross Gay, via Oofpoetry

* Related: “Known for his death, this was Eric Garner’s life” via HLN.com

“Eating Poetry” by Mark Strand

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

 

– Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand.

“Writing in the Afterlife” by Billy Collins

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry5 Comments

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles—
and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

~ Billy Collins

Source: Poetry (October 2002).