MUSE
after reading Rilke

No angel speaks to me.
And though the wind
plucks the dry leaves
as if they were so many notes
of music, I can hear no words.

Still, I listen. I search
the feathery shapes of clouds
hoping to find the curve of a wing.
And sometimes, when the static
of the world clears just for a moment

a small voice comes through,
chastening. Music
is its own language, it says.
Along the indifferent corridors
of space, angels could be hiding.

~ Linda Pastan, via Poetry Dec. 2000; found on-line at washingtonart.com

Ars Poetica
for Billy Collins

As I sit reading your book of poems,
page after page
of ordinary things
but with a twist– the kind of flavor
a twist of lime can give
a gin and tonic,

I wonder why I can’t
write poems like that, melancholy
but not sad exactly,
instead of writing the way
I always do
under a darkening cloud.

And so I take pencil to paper
and try to describe your book,
why it makes me happy.
But here comes that cloud again,
no larger at the moment
than a man’s hand.

–Linda Pastan
from The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2015

For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm
is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year’s Eve by counting
my annual dead.

My mother, when she was dying,
spoke to her visitors of books
and travel, displaying serenity
as a form of manners, though
I could tell the difference.

But when I watched you planning
for a life you knew
you’d never have, I couldn’t explain
your genuine smile in the face
of disaster. Was it denial

laced with acceptance? Or was it
generations of being English—
Brontë’s Lucy in Villette
living as if no fire raged
beneath her dun-colored dress.

I want to live the way you did,
preparing for next year’s famine with wine
and music as if it were a ten-course banquet.
But listen: those are hoofbeats
on the frosty autumn air.

“The Cossacks” by Linda Pastan from The Last Uncle. © Norton, 2003.

Though the landscape subtly changes,
the mountains are marching in place.

The grasses take on the fading
yellows of the sun,

and cows with their sumptuous eyes
litter the fields as if they had grown there.

We have driven for hours
through bluing shadows,

as if the continent itself leaned west
and we had no choice but to follow the old ruts—

the wagons and horses, the iron snort
of a locomotive. We are the pioneers

of our own histories, drawn
to the horizon as if it waited just for us

the way the young are drawn
to the future, the old to the past.

“Driving West” by Linda Pastan from Traveling Light. © Norton, 2011.