Category: Poetry

“Fall” by Edward Hirsch

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Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s
Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

From Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch Copyright © 1986 by Edward Hirsch.

“Beyond Recall” by Sharon Bryan

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Nothing matters
to the dead,
that’s what’s so hard

for the rest of us
to take in-
their complete indifference

to our enticements,
our attempts to get in touch-
they aren’t observing us

from a discreet distance.
they aren’t listening
to a word we say-

you know that,
but you don’t believe it,
even deep in a cave

you don’t believe
in total darkness,
you keep waiting

for your eyes to adjust
and reveal your hand
in front of your face-

so how long a silence
will it take to convince us
that we’re the ones

who no longer exist,
as far as X is concerned,
and Y, that they’ve forgotten

every little thing
they knew about us,
what we told them

and what we didn’t
have to, even our names
mean nothing to them

now-our throats ache
with all we might have said
the next time we saw them.

– Sharon Bryan, from Flying Blind

“Two Linen Handkerchiefs” by Jane Hirshfield

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

 

How can you have been dead twelve years
and these still

 

***

The poem is broken off in exactly the way a life is broken off, in exactly the way grief breaks off, takes us beyond any possible capacity for words to speak. And yet it also, short as it is, holds all of our bewilderment in the face of death. How is it that these inanimate handkerchiefs — which did belong to my father and are still in a drawer of mine, and which I did accidentally come across — how can they still be so pristinely ironed and clean and existent when the person who chose them and used them and wore them is gone? … – Jane Hirshfield via NPR

 

 

“Sorrowful Ode” by Richard Jackson

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I’m sorry for still loving you this way. I’m sorry for letting these
words
lunge between us the way the wind does through a tiny knot of
flame.
I’m sorry for letting them ferment the way the sun does each
night.
There’s no excuse, and yet, maybe I am not so sorry for still loving
you
this way. I don’t pay any attention to the way the filament in the
bulb
glows for only a few seconds when the light goes out. It doesn’t
matter to me that the river stores the city’s lights only to sweep them
downstream.

Sorry or not, I don’t think there is anyone left in my soul.
Therefore,
I am not so sorry for still loving you this way, the way a sunken
boat
recalls its sail. Sometimes I think the heart is a beehive someone
has
turned over. Sometimes it is a silkworm building its obscure
cocoon.
There must be a few derelict constellations with no light to show
us yet.
I’m sorry, but sometimes I also think you have created the night.
Other times I think you must have inhaled the breath of stars.

I’m sorry for loving you this way, for loving you still. Each
memory
hollowed out the way water drips for centuries through a sandstone cave.

The ambulance siren slithering away through the streets but
lingering on.
The wood frogs freezing themselves dry all winter to revive in
spring.
I’m sorry, but maybe the truest love is the most desperate. I’m
sorry.
I’m not sorry. Sometimes I think these words rot like fallen fruit,
and
sometimes I think you are the smell of rain that inhabits the air
before a storm

Richard Jackson, Prairie Schooner (Volume 81, Number 2, Summer 2007)

“Ex-Boyfriends” by Kim Addonizio

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry

They hang around, hitting on your friends
or else you never hear from them again.
They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober,

they’re passing through town and want dinner,
they take your hand across the table, kiss you
when you come back from the bathroom.

They were your loves, your victims,
your good dogs or bad boys, and they’re over
you now. One writes a book in which a woman

who sounds suspiciously like you
is the first to be sadistically dismembered
by a serial killer. They’re getting married

and want you to be the first to know,
or they’ve been fired and need a loan,
their new girlfriend hates you,

they say they don’t miss you but show up
in your dreams, calling to you from the shoeboxes
where they’re buried in rows in your basement.

Some nights you find one floating into bed with you,
propped on an elbow, giving you a look
of fascination, a look that says I can’t believe

I’ve found you. It’s the same way
your current boyfriend gazed at you last night,
before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights

above the bed, and moved against you in the dark
broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs
of headlights from the freeway’s passing trucks,

the big rigs that travel and travel,
hauling their loads between cities, warehouses,
following the familiar routes of their loneliness.

“Ex-Boyfriends” by Kim Addonizio, from What Is This Thing Called Love. © W.W. Norton, 2004.

 

“Ex’s & Oh’s” by Elle King