It is your own heart, in all falling things,
That calls you singing to the banquet door.
from Fontenen (The Fountain Cycle, Oslo: Frogner Park) by Nancy Willard
On my best days, I hold my hopes loosely,
relax into joy and wish this same
deep and easy happiness
for all my beloveds. On my best days,
for strangers too.
These days I’m steeped in joy
and hold my own hand whenever I get scared,
whenever I whisper in the dark—This Can’t Last.
These days I’m learning to smile and say,
Oh, hello again to you, lifelong worry,
Hello, familiar impulse
to shout at the blond girl on the screen,
Don’t go in the basement!
Or when I’m looking at one shoe—
a sneaker, a red stiletto—
to flinch, to duck, because everyone knows
they come in pairs and the other one
is about to fall on my head.
These days I’m older
and walking towards wisdom
or its neighborhood.
I sit down next to myself on the couch,
our shoes kicked off and transformed
to chew toys for the dogs
I pass myself the bowl of popcorn
because why not add some delicious crunch
to the hard truth—Hard? Soft?
Truth is truth, just itself,
solid as a pair of shoes.
Truth is, our houses have basements
and while we laughed and raged and cooked and slept
and wished
our basements waited all along,
patient and dark and not unkind,
full of our buried dreams and dumb luck
and shelf after shelf of history and hope.
Puff Of Smoke Poems 