where they’ve waited, paper and more paper
taking in the ocean air, about to sprout.
Mother’s sitting on the bed
with her tattered list of dispersals—who gets
what among the treasures she hopes
I’ll find, but I know I’m seeing
what she doesn’t want me to see,
the daughter cleaning doing what the son
would never do. After an hour of excavation
the console TV emerges from beneath
forgotten sweaters and balled up nylons
saved for stuffing puppets, a long ago church project—
the TV arrived in 1966 same day I crushed
the fender of the car, upsetting
the careful plans she’d made for payment.
She wants to leave so much behind. Hours later
I’ve found nothing I want but the purple mache mask
I made in the fourth grade. I like its yellow eyes.
She looks at each magazine I remove, saving
every word about my brother, the coach. He’s sixty
and a long dead mouse has eaten the laces
of his baby shoes. I want order. I say
I’m old myself, I’ve started throwing things away.
I’m lying. I’ve kept everything she’s ever given me.
Ode
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
I love all the mom bodies at this beach,
the tummies, the one-piece bathing suits,
the bosoms that slope, the wide nice bottoms,
thigh flesh shirred as gentle wind shirrs a pond.
So many sensible haircuts and ponytails!
These bodies show they have grown babies, then
nourished them, woken to their cries, fretted
at their fevers. Biceps have lifted and toted
the babies now printed on their mothers.
“If you lined up a hundred vaginas,
I could tell you which ones have borne children,”
the midwife says. In the secret place or
in sunlight at the beach, our bodies say
This is who we are, no, This is what
we have done and continue to do.
We labor in love. We do it. We mother.
Vietnam
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA
“Woman, what’s your name?” “I don’t know.”
“How old are you? Where are you from?” “I don’t know.”
“Why did you dig that burrow?” “I don’t know.”
“How long have you been hiding?” “I don’t know.”
“Why did you bite my finger?” “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you know that we won’t hurt you?” “I don’t know.”
“Whose side are you on?” “I don’t know.”
“This is war, you’ve got to choose.” “I don’t know.”
“Does your village still exist?” “I don’t know.”
“Are those your children?” “Yes.”
A Child
MARY LAMB
A child’s a plaything for an hour;
Its pretty tricks we try
For that or for a longer space—
Then tire, and lay it by.
But I knew one that to itself
All seasons could control;
That would have mock’d the sense of pain
Out of a grievéd soul.
Thou straggler into loving arms,
Young climber-up of knees,
When I forget thy thousand ways
Then life and all shall cease.
blessing the boats
LUCILLE CLIFTON
(at St. Mary’s)
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
SILENCE AND SOLITUDE
WE ARE ALL AFRAID of being alone. To teenagers, the idea of being alone is almost as bad as the idea of dying, which at least has a certain romantic appeal. But by the time women have young children, we would sacrifice almost anything to be by ourselves in a quiet house—if just for an hour. As we reach middle age, the fear returns. Every woman I know is filled with dread at the prospect of an empty nest. Though our sons may tower over us, and our daughters know more than we do about everything, we still wait up to make sure they are safely home, we volunteer to drive them miles out of our way hoping for a few moments of conversation, we clean their filthy rooms, and offer to give them things they don’t particularly want. Just when our children are about to go out in the world as we raised them to, we realize we have become as dependent on them as they are on us.
Middle age is a time to rearrange our lives and enjoy the chance to reflect rather than react. Silence and solitude may take some getting used to, but in my experience, the people who are happy being alone are often the people everyone wants to be around.
Involuntary solitude is another story. The pain of loss, the terror of being abandoned, or an echoing loneliness forces us to confront the most fundamental questions of existence and mortality. Perseverance, fortitude, and faith can help us salvage meaning and connection out of emotional devastation. Reading and writing poetry can help us find a pathway. Poets put universal feelings into words and remind us that in a world of language and feeling, we can never really be alone.
Often, poets celebrate the freedom of solitude. Emily Brontë and Rainer Maria Rilke write of the exhilaration of being unfettered by the world. Li Po, the eighth-century Chinese poet, writes of surrendering to nature and merging with something larger than oneself. Each of these strategies can help us accept the times in our lives when we may be alone, to appreciate them, and to learn from them.
One of my favorite lines of poetry is found in Wallace Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate.” Stevens describes a world from which everything has been subtracted, leaving only stillness and a bowl of white carnations. Yet the room is full, because of the presence of the “never resting mind.” Through our humanity, we have the power to create new worlds, alone and with others. Stevens concludes with a line celebrating life: “The imperfect is our paradise.” A feeling that women can surely embrace.
I’m happiest when most away
EMILY BRONTË
I’m happiest when most away
I can bear my soul from its home of clay
On a windy night when the moon is bright
And my eye can wander through worlds of light
When I am not and none beside
Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky
But only spirit wandering wide
Through infinite immensity
Keeping Things Whole
MARK STRAND
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
We All Know It
MARIANNE MOORE
That silence is best: that action and re-
Action are equal: that control, discipline, and
Liberation are bywords when spoken by an appraiser, that the
Accidental sometimes achieves perfection, loath though we may be to admit it:
And that the realm of art is the realm in
Which to look for “
fishbones in the throat of the gang.” Pin-
Pricks and the unstereotyped embarrassment being the contin-
Ual diet of artists. And in spite of it all, poets ask us just what it
Is in them that we cannot subscribe to:
People overbear till told to stop: no matter through
What sobering process they have gone, some inquire if emotion, true
And stimulated are not the same thing: promoters request us to take our oath
That appearances are not cosmic: mis-
Fits in the world of achievement want to know what bus-
Iness people have to reserve judgment about undertakings. It is
A strange idea that one must say what one thinks in order to be understood.
As Much As You Can
CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY
And if you can’t shape your life the way you want,
at least try as much as you can
not to degrade it
by too much contact with the world,
by too much activity and talk.
Try not to degrade it by dragging it along,
taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social events and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.
Sense of Something Coming
RAINER MARIA RILKE
I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live it through,
While the creatures of the world beneath still do not move in their sleep:
The doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full of silence,
The windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.
I already know the storm, and I am as troubled as the sea,
And spread myself out, and fall into myself,
And throw myself out and am absolutely alone
In the great storm.
Death, Etc.
MAXINE KUMIN
I have lived my whole life with death, said William Maxwell,
aetat ninety-one, and haven’t we all. Amen to that.
It’s all right to gutter out like a candle but the odds are better
for succumbing to a stroke or pancreatic cancer.
I’m not being gloomy, this bright September
when everything around me shines with being:
hummingbirds still raptured in the jewelweed,
puffballs humping up out of the forest duff
and the whole voluptuous garden still putting forth
bright yellow pole beans, deep-pleated purple cauliflowers,
to say nothing of regal white corn that feeds us
night after gluttonous night, with a slobber of butter.
Still, Maxwell’s pronouncement speaks to my body’s core,
this old body I trouble to keep up the way
I keep up my two old horses, wiping insect deterrent
on their ears, cleaning the corners of their eyes,
spraying their legs to defeat the gnats, currying burrs
out of their thickening coats. They go on grazing thoughtlessly
while winter is gathering in the wings. But it is not given
to us to travel blindly, all the pasture bars down,
to seek out the juiciest grasses, nor to predict
which of these two will predecease the other or to anticipate
the desperate whinnies for the missing that will ensue.
Which of us will go down first is also not given,
a subject that hangs unspoken between us
as with Jocasta, who begs Oedipus not to inquire further.
Meanwhile, it is pleasant to share opinions and mealtimes,
to swim together daily, I with my long slow back and forths,
he with his hundred freestyle strokes that wind him alarmingly.
A sinker, he would drown if he did not flail like this.
We have put behind us the State Department tour
of Egypt, Israel, Thailand, Japan that ended badly
as we leapt down the yellow chutes to safety after a botched takeoff.
We have been made at home in Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland,
narrow, xenophobic Switzerland of clean bathrooms and much butter.
We have traveled by Tube and Métro in the realms of gold
paid obeisance to the Winged Victory and the dreaded Tower,
but now it is time to settle as the earth itself settles
in season, exhaling, dozing a little before the fall rains come.
Every August when the family gathers, we pose
under the ancient willow for a series of snapshots,
the same willow, its lumpish trunk sheathed in winking aluminum
that so perplexed us forty years ago, before we understood
the voracity of porcupines. Now hollowed by age and marauders,
its aluminum girdle painted dull brown, it is still leafing
out at the top, still housing a tumult of goldfinches. We try to hold still
and smile, squinting into the brilliance, the middle-aged children,
the grown grandsons, the dogs of each era, always a pair
of grinning shelter dogs whose long lives are but as grasshoppers
compared to our own. We try to live gracefully
and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward
stumbling, afraid of the dark,
of the cold, and of the great overwhelming
loneliness of being last.
From When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
GALWAY KINNELL
7
When one has lived a long time alone,
one likes alike the pig, who brooks no deferment
of gratification, and the porcupine, or thorned pig,
who enters the cellar but not the house itself
because of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up,
and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself together
and expanding works her way through the ground,
no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worry
among the day lilies, as they darken,
and more and more one finds one likes
any other species better than one’s own,
which has gone amok, making one self-estranged,
when one has lived a long time alone.
9
When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half out of water utters
the cantillations he sang in his first spring,
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and creeps away among the stones, one sees
they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one’s kind, toward these other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside one’s own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one’s own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.
10
When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one’s ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby meets the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth’s and heaven’s,
until the sun rises, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.
>
Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain
LI PO
The birds have vanished down the sky,
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
The Poems of Our Climate
WALLACE STEVENS
I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations–one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations here.
II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
GROWING UP AND GROWING OLD
THIS BOOK BEGAN as a collection of poems for middle-aged women—something no one wants to be. When I turned fifty, it seemed that looking old was the only topic of conversation, everyone was bursting into tears at a moment’s notice, and proclaiming the importance of taking “time for yourself.” On a more serious level, midlife can be a time of reflection and self-reflection, when some of the chaos of raising a family subsides, we have become aware that time is precious, and we have learned what matters. Poems speak directly to those emotions.
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