I intended to read your poems
certain they were full of
Delights and shadows.
However—
Yesterday, my friend snatched your book from the table
Not, sadly, because she is a lover of forthright poetry
but because your book was the perfect shape
to hold the yarn she unspooled
in a determined attempt
to teach me to make a ribbon scarf.
Ted, my enthusiasm for the project was minimal at first
but now this odd-looking yarn full of webbed bits of glitter
holds you firmly closed
and the only way to get to the heart-or even the surface
of your words is to
knit
my
way
there.
The good news is
when I arrive
I’ll have a scarf to keep me warm.
And maybe this is how poetry should be taught from now on:
Anticipation will hone the senses
and we’ll have made something useful of our journey.
What we can bring to the poem is lovely now—
Time, woven and warmed by our own hands.
Dear Ted Kooser
January Thaw
Some daughters drift away. Like fog, there then
lifting then gone. Others need a sharper break.
Something swift and cold and painful.
Every girl has her way of learning to leave.
Fits and starts. Till they can walk
away and back again,
grow confident that after every turn
towards home or away
they can turn around again. This takes so much practice.
We spent last weekend, mother and daughter,
doing nothing much. In sweaters and soft socks.
Ice cream for dinner. Cafe breakfasts with friends.
Popcorn and old TV shows. Mostly, music playing.
All night we heard crashes outside the windows.
Icicles, built over long winter weeks,
melted and fell from the roof.
January thaw. In the morning, for one day,
we could see the grass again,
so green and welcome I wanted to cheer, to bend down
and kiss all growing things in thanks,
for the reminder that this frozen world will pass, in time.
Cleanse Diets Exposed
January and everyone I know
who regrets
all they ever ate and drank–
which includes everyone I know–
is on a cleanse diet. Like the one person
who never gets the flu, I though I was immune
since each magazine’s Earnest Diet
begins with a No-Coffee rule,
the whim of a madman.
But all those photos next to the recipes
finally captured me too—
dark purple radicchio, orange squash, lemon yellow,
bright green leaves I can’t pronounce the names of–
It’s marketing genius on their part,
all these fruits and vegetables,
to look the way they do
when our eyes are starved
hungry for red, craving green,
yearning to be filled
in this winter world cleansed of color.
Red Sky At Night
Red sky at night
may be sailor’s delight,
but that old poem
fell apart this morning.
The sky is streaked hot pink
Its only warning to sailors is:
Look Out–
This is a day designed
for nine-year-old girls
who giggle.
The Hotel Mandalay
I want to stay there,
at the Hotel Mandalay
Which I read about in the newspaper.
I don’t remember where in the world it is,
The Hotel Mandalay–
but I read that if a guest catches flu while traveling,
the staff at the Hotel Mandalay brings a tray
with a bowl of chicken soup,
a glass of ginger ale
and a get well card.
And now that I’ve written its name
so many times, I’ve changed my mind—
I want a job there. I want a reason
to say, every time I’m asked
where I work, “Oh,” I cay say,
“I work at the Hotel Mandalay”
which is not even close
to the worst reason I’ve
kept a job. When the interviewer
asks me why I’m applying
I’ll tell him or her that I must
have this job and not just because of
the kindness of the chicken soup
or even way the word rolls off the tongue
luxurious as chocolate
It’s how it flows onto paper like
writing the word luxurious.
That Ship Sailed
When ordinary life sails away,
becomes a ship in the distance, then gone,
you can finally hear the sounds of the dock.
It creaks in the ebb and flow of waves,
the bump of mighty fish hidden
among the seaweed and the pilings.
Wind and salt have worn away the paint,
left you standing on bare and splintered wood.
You still have choices.
You can fall in love with the dock,
with studying the slivers of paint left behind
with waiting to see what happens next.
You can gather your breath and dive into the sea,
swimming hard, chasing the life that’s already left.
Or turn toward shore—
leave the ship, the dock,
walk into the town.
Buy a basket of bread and oranges
and keep walking till you
reach a new story.
Kittens Used Cars
On the road to the doctor,
radio silence for your nerves,
The Cranberries blasting in my head,
singing about life’s habit of changing every day,
we passed a battered junkyard
with a sandwich board out front.
Buy
Kittens
Used Cars
For Sale Here
is what the sign said.
I considered the possibilities
in waiting rooms for the rest
of the day. Thank you,
thoughtful proprietor
for your kind restraint
in the use of punctuation,
for letting me wonder
what it all means.
Glove Compartment
At the funeral home
in a Rust Belt downtown
we out-of-towners poured in
with the dark and the rain
greeted with hugs
and tears and questions
about our journeys, our hotels,
if we lost our way.
The others, all with GPS,
discussed the tricky turns
near the hotel where navigation
systems failed and sent you
too far, way down past the train station—
then recollected themselves
and asked about the family, said a prayer,
admired the flowers, agreed it was a blessing—
before plotting routes
to the restaurant. And this could easily
have turned into a poem about
how we distract ourselves
from thinking about death or
how we dread being the ones left behind,
or how we all hurry through our lives,
navigating madly towards the same
final destination. But no—I just
want to say how, for a moment,
in the middle of our sad and tired night,
I felt a tiny cozy joy to be
making my way as
a walking anachronism
with my paper maps
well-used and badly folded
stuffed inside my glove compartment.
Mapless At The Crossroads
Go forward, mapless. Give up searching, for directions are everywhere. Watch for patterns: Those moving clouds, the grass clippings dusted across the cobblestones, the pigeons on the cathedral roof, the swirl of seeds the old man scatters from his paper sack, the steps in the dance his little granddaughter dances across the lawn, twirling her skirt wide and dreaming of bells and umbrellas while she waits for him to finish feeding his birds.
Her dance doesn’t look like directions, at first. Skirt swirls wide, fabric billows and collapses on itself and billows out again, over and over as she spins. Shadows dance across her path—clouds, her own body, the small shadows of pigeons as they come to land for those seeds, circle, rise again to the spires.
Make this all the map you need.
Divorce Weather
Espresso and black leather
Slow jazz and Springsteen
Sky is one enormous cloud
Steady grey, occasional rain.
Divorce weather.
Puff Of Smoke Poems 