Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

My choice for this week's Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Damn-Well-Please is not a poem per se, but an excerpt from The World to Come by Dara Horn. I find it rhythmic and gorgeous and heartbreaking--everything I love in a poem. And who's to say it's not?

"There is a moment that has happened over and over again, in every place children have ever slept, on every dark night for the past ten thousand years, that almost everyone who was once a child will forever remember. It happens when you are being tucked into bed, on a dark and frightening night when the sounds of the nighttime outside our drowned out only by the far more frightening sounds in your head. You have already gone to bed, have tried to go to bed, but because of whatever sounds you hear in your head you have failed to go to bed, and someone much older than you, someone so old that you cannot even imagine yourself ever becoming that old, has come to sit beside you and make sure you fall asleep. But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear--a tiny rehearsal, though you do not yet know it, of what will eventually happen for good--time holds still, and you can feel, through your closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters. And Sara would give her right leg and her left just to live through that moment one more time" (118).

And a second excerpt from the same book, thrown in for good measure:

"Of course, beyond the cave stood an entire world of years. Indigo years, yellow years, orange years, years that blossomed like roses and years that froze like snow and years that dissolved like sand, weeks that rooted themselves and grew and rose and towered out of the earth, and months and months of hard pebble days that bit into sensitive soles and callused them for good. There were times Sara could never have dreamed of--looming pink cliffs of seasons that had to be scaled on their faces or climbed on treacherous paths, roaring iridescent cataracts of entire decades thrown over the edge, vague yellow dunes of sleeping hours, sudden eclipses of nightmares. A few weeks were hard shining apples, or thick bread. One year, her first, was pure white milk. And there were tiny instants, fractions of a second--glances, touches, kisses, sounds, words--that flooded over the time around them, raging, surging with churning currents, and washing entire years away" (246).

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

Ocean

Pablo Neruda

Body purer than a wave,
salt that washes the line,
and the luminous bird
flying without roots.

Lessons from Travel: What NOT to Do

Another article up, if anyone is interested!
(Casey, I think you'll enjoy this. And happy anniversary! I love you.)

Lessons from Travel: What NOT to Do

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

Answers

Mary Oliver

If I envy anyone it must be
My grandmother in a long ago
Green summer, who hurried
Between kitchen and orchard on small
Uneducated feet, and took easily
All shining fruits into her eager hands.

That summer I hurried too, wakened
To books and music and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers
That could not solve the mystery of the trees.

My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career.
So to please her I studied--but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year.

I Want to Go to There

I miss this place so much.

Why Isn't the Whole World Like This?

This story. I just...I am so in love with this story!

Vienna Introduces New, Same-Sex Themed Crosswalk Signals

Poetry Corner Monday

The Great American Poem

Billy Collins

If this were a novel,
it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train
or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

And as the pages turned, you would be told
that it was morning or the dead of night,
and I, the narrator, would describe
for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

and what the man was wearing on the train
right down to his red tartan scarf,
and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,
as well as the cows sliding past his window.

Eventually--one can only read so fast--
you would learn either that the train was bearing
the man back to the place of his birth
or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

and you might just tolerate all of this
as you waited patiently for shots to ring out
in a ravine where the man was hiding
or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

But this is a poem,
and the only characters here are you and I,
alone in an imaginary room
which will disappear after a few more lines,

leaving us no time to point guns at one another
or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.
I ask you: who needs the man on the train
and who cares what his black valise contains?

We have something better than all this turbulence
lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.
I mean the sound that we will hear
as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

I once heard someone compare it
to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat
or, more faintly, just the wind
over that field stirring things that we will never see.