"I am offering this poem to you, since I have nothing else to give." ~Jimmy Santiago Baca
Look at someone you love today,
for one minute,
as if you saw them for
the first time.
As if they were the first ray
of sunlight, caught by
the tender passion of your eye,
lighting up your whole world.
– from When Angels Are Born by Ron Starbuck. Saint Julian Press.
Don’t you dare climb that tree
or even try, they said, or you will be
sent way to the hospital of the
very foolish, if not the other one.
And I suppose, considering my age,
it was fair advice.
But the tree is a sister to me, she
lives alone in a green cottage
high in the air and I know what
would happen, she’d clap her green hands,
she’d shake her green hair, she’d
welcome me. Truly.
I try to be good but sometimes
a person just has to break out and
act like the wild and springy thing
one used to be. It’s impossible not
to remember wild and not want to go back. So
if someday you can’t find me you might
look into that tree or—of course
it’s possible—under it.
– Mary Oliver, “Green, Green is My Sister’s House,” from A Thousand Mornings (Penguin Press, 2012)
1. Are her lips like the hot chocolate your mother made
During the winter months when you were seven?
Or have you not tasted her well enough to find the fine granules of cocoa that lightly come with each kiss?
2. Do you know her favorite songs?
Not when she is happy, but when she is sad.
What music reaches inside her ribcage and softly consoles her heart?
3. When she is sad, are you on the phone or are you at her door?
Words do not wipe away tears, fingers do.
4. Do you know all the things that keep her up at night?
Do you know why she has gone three days without sleep?
Do you know of the insurmountable waves of sadness that wash over her like a tsunami?
5. Do you know the things to say that will calm her heartbeat? The places to touch? The places to love?
6. Everytime you see her do you kiss her like it’s the last time but love her like it’s the first?
7. Do you love her?
8. Do you love her?
– Nishat Ahmed, “Things I Want To Ask Your Boyfriend”
At 7:35 A.M, you lay your tired body on mine
before peeling off, like a slow band-aid.
At 8:40 you sprint home and make instant coffee.
At 9:45 we finally drink it, cold.
I finish your leftover half.
By 10:50 you are already breathless.
I live for every time we overlap.
When 11:55 comes I spend the entire minute convincing you to stay.
You never do.
By noon I put my hands on your shoulders and say, “Baby,
you’re getting thin. All this running in circles and barely sitting down to eat.”
At 1:05 you tell me that while you were gone,
15,300 babies were born.
At 2:10 you don’t say a word,
just come in and kiss me for sixty seconds straight.
At 3:15 we sit quiet, listening to rain falling everywhere
in the world at once: all 15,000 tons.
At 4:20 we pull a little from the tight joint I keep behind your ear.
You do not inhale.
At 5:25 you meet me for happy hour.
My neck already salted, a lime wedged in my teeth,
a shot of tequila sitting on the bar.
At 6:30 I hear the ticking.
I count your heartbeat like seconds between thunderclaps.
By 7:35 I can see you in the distance,
each second a tease until you drape over me.
We always love quick and you never let me hold you.
I dream of drinking you through a straw.
At 8:40 you watch my beard grow 0.00027 of an inch.
At 9:45 we do not speak.
Too many people have died since we last met.
At 10:50 we pray for a meteor,
at least a clumsy kid to spill sugar in our gears.
11:55 is my favorite.
We’re only apart for mere minutes.
But at midnight you’ll apologize sixty times
because it will always be like this.
At 1:04 AM I am already sleeping.
It’s exhausting loving someone
who is constantly running away.
– Megan Falley, “What the Hour Hand Said to the Minute Hand”
“There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.”
– Anne Enright, The Gathering
Words ... for the Time Being 