Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

If I Wanted a Boat

Mary Oliver
(from Blue Horses, 2014)

I would want a boat, if I wanted a
boat, that bounded hard on the waves,
that didn't know starboard from port
and wouldn't learn, that welcomed
dolphins and headed straight for the
whales, that, when rocks were close,
would slide in for a touch or two,
that wouldn't keep land in sight and
went fast, that leaped into the spray.
What kind of life is it always to plan
and do, to promise and finish, to wish
for the near and the safe? Yes, by the
heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want
a boat I couldn't steer.

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

My God

Sandra Beasley

My god is a short god. My god wears jeans.
When he swims, he has a lazy breaststroke.
When he gardens, he uses his bare hands.
My god watches reruns of late night talk shows.
My god could levitate but prefers the stairs
and if available, the fireman's pole. My god
loves bacon. My god's afraid of sharks.
My god thinks the only way to define a country
is with water. My god thinks eventually,
we will come around on ear candling. My god
spits chaw. My god never flosses.
My god reads Proust. My god never
graduated. He smiles when astronauts reach
zero gravity and say My god, My god.
My god is knitting one very big sweater.
My god is teaching his terrier to beg.
My god didn't mean for icebergs. My god
didn't mean for machetes. Sometimes
a sparrow lands in the the hands of my god
and he cups it, gently. It never wants to leave
and so, it never notices that even if it tried
my god has too good a grip, my god, my god.

I'm Alive! Sort of.

Greetings to my twos of readers! No, thine eyes do not deceive you: I have returned from my non-Amish blog Rumschpringe and have so little to report of the experience that I wonder how the hell I've been writing actual content here for so long. Two posts in three months--one of which was a poem written by someone else? Good work, Margoshes. But what's that, you say? I've never looked better? You're too kind.

I've had better days, though; I suppose I should start with that. I miss Orcas immensely. I wake each morning feeling like I've just taken a seat at a table in a junior high school cafeteria, only to have everyone stand up and leave all at once. I feel left behind in so many ways that sometimes I honestly wonder if everyone else is living in fast-forward while I'm still adjusting the tracking on the screen of my life. My friends have amazing jobs that they love. They're getting married and having babies, and I'm going to sleep every night in the same bed in the room in the house that I slept in when I was five. I flip through the pages of my National Geographic and pray that by the time I have the resources to travel again, the places I want to see will still be there. It's hard not to feel like a failure.

Normally, to snap out of this, I would take photographs. I would play the guitar and sing and write poetry about waking up in the middle of a windstorm. But ever since I got home in October all the light and the music has seeped right out of me. When I sit down to write, I tell myself that there's nothing I could possibly say that someone hasn't already said. I think, sometimes, that even my inner monologues are plagiarized.

Maybe--hopefully--this will be the week when my meager job qualifications are enough to qualify me for something I actually want to be doing. Maybe this unseasonably warm January will turn arctic and I can walk down the street at night in the snow and not hear my own footsteps.

Maybe I'll think of something that no one's ever thought of before.

Three Years

I love you, Hockley.

Thank you for calling on me when my hand wasn't raised, for waiting patiently as I stammered my way through various misreadings of Macbeth (Act I, Scene V) until finally, cheeks flushed and palms sweating, I figured it out on my own.

Thank you for displaying my Scarlet Letter creative project on your shelf as if my D (for diffident) were something I shouldn't ever feel I had to hide.

Thank you for helping me believe I was worthwhile. Thank you for telling me I should write. I do and I always will, and you will be in every single word.

I miss you so much. I wish you could see who I am because of you.

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

Boundaries

Mary Oliver

There is a place where the town ends,
     and the fields begin.
It's not marked but the feet know it,
also the heart that is longing for refreshment
     and, equally, for repose.

Someday we'll live in the sky.
Meanwhile, the house of our lives is this green world.
The fields, the ponds, the birds.
The thick black oaks--surely they are
      the invention of something wonderful.
And the tiger lilies.
And the runaway honeysuckle that no one
      will ever trim again.

Where is it? I ask, and then
my feet know it.

One jump, and I'm home.

Ever (Part II)

Never (Part I)

I never want to leave this place.