Tag: Dorianne Laux

On the Future of “Words for the Year” (a note from Christy and poem from Dorianne Laux)

On By Christina's WordsIn Blog News, Poetry16 Comments

It’s hard to believe that at the end of this month, Words for the Year will have published a poem or quote every day for two years.

What started as a small independent project–my diary captured in poetry–has grown into an intimate community of poetry and word lovers all via word of mouth and social media sharing. And I am grateful that the poems and words I’ve shared have helped so many of you, as they have helped me, especially in times of grief, depression and darkness.

The simple truth is I had planned to end this project at the end of this year. The more complicated truth is that I cannot. Poetry will always be a part of my life; it’s my lighthouse in times of darkness, and it’s an icon of beauty and gratitude to help me better appreciate the world around me and the moments (and people) I so often take for granted. Poetry is often my voice when I am without words. Poetry in general, and certain poems and poets, save my life, often.

And what I have learned is that I am not alone in this.

I have heard from many of you over the past two years. You have shared with me the very personal ways the poems you read here have helped you and healed you. YOU represent the reason I love doing Words for the Year.

And YOU are the reason I will KEEP doing Words for the Year.

At least for one more year anyway. 😉

I do plan to take a short break at the beginning of the new year. I’ll be back no later than April 1 (in time for National Poetry Month), but probably sooner than that.

Here’s where I need your help:

While I am on break, I may occasionally (re)post some of your favorite poems. Will you please leave a comment with a favorite poem you’ve read here on Words for the Year? Or if you have a favorite that we have not posted, let me know the name of the poem and the poet (and a link if available). Or you can leave me a private message via our contact page, here. If you have feedback or ideas for the new year, please feel free to share that also. If you read only by email, you are welcome to email me: wordsfortheweekend@gmail.com .

To the poets, writers, artists, publishers and copyright holders who have allowed me (or who haven’t disallowed me) to share your work, my deep gratitude and thanks. Your work matters. You matter.

To my readers and friends, thank you for all of your support. To each of you, I dedicate a Dorianne Laux poem (one of the poems–and favorite poets–that saves my life). I originally shared it on Words on March 19, 2014.

“For the Sake of Strangers” by Dorianne Laux

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another – a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them –
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

 “For the Sake of Strangers” by Dorianne Laux, from What We Carry, 1994. 

 

Your turn . . . What’s one (or more) of your favorite poems?  No need to answer right away. I’ll keep comments open until April.  ~ Christy

P.S. – For readers who follow our Apocalypse Love Story featuring Sam & Dave (it began on our sister site, Words for the Weekend), we have exciting news! Sam, Dave and friends will soon have their own home at The Lovely Fire. It’s under construction, but you are more than welcome to visit and sign up for future posts.

 

“On the Edge” by Dorianne Laux

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry4 Comments

After your mother dies, you will learn to live
on the edge of life, to brace yourself
like she did, one hand on the dashboard,
the other gripping your purse while you drive
through the stop sign, shoulders tense,
eyes clamped shut, waiting for the collision
that doesn’t come. You will learn
to stay up all night knowing she’s gone,
watching the morning open
like an origami swan, the sky
a widening path, a question
you can’t answer. In prison, women
make tattoos from cigarette ash
and shampoo. It’s what they have.
Imagine the fish, gray scales
and black whiskers, growing slowly
up her back, its lips kissing her neck.
Imagine the letters of her daughter’s name
a black chain around her wrist.
What is the distance between this moment
and the last? The last visit and the next?
I want my mother back. I want
to hunt her down like the perfect gift,
the one you search for from store to store
until your feet ache, delirious with her scent.
This is the baggage of your life, a sign
of your faith, this staying awake
past exhaustion, this needle in your throat.

~ Dorianne Laux, via Superstition Review

“Abschieds Symphony” by Dorianne Laux

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Someone I love is dying, which is why,
when I turn the key in the ignition
and back the car out of the parking space
in the underground garage, and the radio
comes on, sudden and loud, something
by Haydn, a diminishing fugue, and maneuver
the car through the dimly lit tunnels
with their low ceilings, following the yellow arrows
stenciled at intervals on the gray cement walls,
I think of him, moving slowly through the last
hard days of his life and I can’t stop crying.
When I arrive at the toll gate I have to make myself
stop thinking as I dig in my pockets for the last
of my coins, turn to the attendant, indifferent
in his blue smock, his white hair curling like smoke
around his weathered neck, and say Thank you,
like an idiot, and drive into the blinding midday light.
Everything is hideously symbolic,
and everything reminds me of cancer:
the Chevron truck, its rounded underbelly
spattered with road grit and the sweat
of last night’s rain, the dumpster
behind the flower shop, its sprung lid
pressing down on dead wedding bouquets–
even the smell of something simple, coffee drifting
from the open door of a cafe and my eyes
glaze over, ache in their sockets.
For months now all I’ve wanted is the blessing
of inattention, to move carefully from room to room
in my small house, numb with forgetfulness.
To eat a bowl of cereal and not imagine him,
scrubbed thin and pale, unable to swallow.
How not to imagine the tumors
ripening beneath his skin, flesh
I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,
pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights
so hard I thought I could enter him, open
his back at the spine like a door or a curtain
and slip in like a small fish between his ribs,
nudge the coral of his brain with my lips,
brushing over the blue coils of his bowels
with the fluted silk of my tail.
Death is not romantic. He is dying,
no matter how I see it, no matter
what I believe, that fact is stark
and one dimensional, atonal,
a black note on an empty staff.
My feet are cold, but not as cold as his,
and I hate this music that floods
the cramped insides of my car, my head,
slowing the world down with its
lurid majesty, transforming everything I see
into some sort of memorial to life,
no matter how ugly or senseless–
even the old Ford in front of me,
its battered rear end thinning to scallops of rust,
pumping black classical clouds of exhaust
into the shimmering air– even the tenacious
nasturtiums clinging to a fence, vine and bloom
of the insignificant, music spilling
from their open faces, spooling upward, past
the last rim of blue and into the still pool
of another galaxy, as if all that emptiness
were a place of benevolence, a destination,
a peace we could rise to.

Dorianne Laux, Smoke

“Antilamentation” by Dorianne Laux

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

~ Dorianne Laux, from The Book of Men: Poems

 

(With thanks to Maria at BrainPickings)

“I write to add my voice to the sum of voices, to be part of the choir. …

On By Christina's WordsIn Quote2 Comments

“I write to add my voice to the sum of voices, to be part of the choir. I write to be one sequin among the shimmering others, hanging by a thread from the evening gown of the world. I write to remember. I write to forget myself, to be so completely immersed in the will of the poem that when I look up from the page I can still smell the smoke from the house burning in my brain. I write to destroy the blank page, unravel the ink, use up what I’ve been given and give it away. I write to make the trees shiver at the sliver of sun slipping down the axe blade’s silver lip. I write to hurt myself again, to dip my fingertip into the encrusted pool of the wound. I write to become someone else, that better, smarter self that lives inside my dumbstruck twin. I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is fun.”

 – Dorianne Laux (read more)