over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:
Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.
Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-.
Not-yet-not.
I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students
Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me
snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting
you were beautiful; goodbye,
Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain
brown envelopes for the return of your very
“Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer
of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues
give the fullest treatment in literature yet
to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,
who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,”
instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long,
neat-scripted letters demolishing
the pre-Raphaelites:
I swear to you, it was just my way
of cheering myself up, as I licked
the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,
the game I had
of trying to guess which one of you, this time,
had poisoned his glue. I did care.
I did read each poem entire.
I did say what I thought was the truth
in the mildest words I knew. And now,
in this poem, or chopped prose, not any better,
I realize, than those troubled lines
I kept sending back to you,
I have to say I am relieved it is over:
at the end I could feel only pity
for that urge toward more life
your poems kept smothering in words, the smell
of which, days later, would tingle
in your nostrils as new, God-given impulses
to write.
Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell—
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.
GALWAY KINNELL
Homecoming
I went back in the alley
And I opened up my door.
All her clothes was gone:
She wasn't home no more.
I pulled back the covers,
I made down the bed.
A whole lot of room
Was the only thing I had.
LANGSTON HUGHES
Navy Barbie
wants to see the world,
she does get a little
seasick but likes
the white uniform, tho
the skirt is a little
too loose and long for
her taste. Still it might
be a change she can go
with. Actually the sequins
dug into her shoulders,
the ballerina tulle
scratched, and tho it was
kept secret, fun fur
made her sneeze. And
forget the Parisian
Bonjour look: that was
the worst, a cameo
choker size of a plum
or a small coconut
wedged against her larynx,
so she says when I try
to say yes or no it
scraped, and the lace
under my arms—talk
about sandpaper. But
the worst was those fish
net hose, rough, and the
garter, Jesus, grating,
my toes burned from that
pattern, crammed into
high-heeled platform
open-toes and the hair
piece with feathers. At
least in the navy they've
actually, she smiles,
given me something to
read. My hair is natural.
I'm authentic. First
Class Petty Officer.
I finally am more than
just a pretty: I rank
LYN LIFSHIN
why some people be
mad at me sometimes
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.
LUCILLE CLIFTON
The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
WALLACE STEVENS
Danse Russe
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
The Suitor
We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.
JANE KENYON
Chai 1924–2000
for Yehuda Amichai
Page of sand, scab-flakes of ink;
page of sand, page of skin:
where are you now?
On the tongue, life is a verb
and death, a proverb:
Apple eats apple-blossom,
seed eats the apple.…
Your name, in the macaroni
of tongues, Ah-me-hide,
foriegn and sentimental
as the pendant Chai—life—
noosing the ancients of St. Pete
waiting for the Early Bird Special
—or the girls in Bolinas
you saw loosening
their tefillin-strap
bikinis: souls
opening and closing,
a prayer drifting everywhere
but up—
Proverbial waves lap
a beach of crumbs.
Letters swirl in fat broth,
a name is lifted to the lip
s;
waiters wipe
the clock face clean.
Drop the page,
come out. Come out:
the body is an apple
to the seed,
the body is a seed in the earth.
DAVID GEWANTER
Believing
WHEN YOU
STAY STRONG
Here's the scary thing about reaching Believing. No doubt about it—you're really happy. You're grounded in good relationships and meaningful work, amazed and grateful that somehow this is your life. But the better things get, the more you find yourself waiting for the sky to cave in again. You're thrilled with the too-good-to-be-trueness of every day, and terrified that you'll screw it all up somehow. It's as if you just won the Super Bowl and you're headed to Disneyworld, but all you can think about is getting thrown from a roller coaster or having to watch Bambi's mother get blown away by the hunters again.
No, you haven't landed in some Happiness theme park. You're still in the same world that once crushed your spirit and left you forsaken. But the great thing is you're different now. Sure the world can still slam you around, but you've worked hard to build hope and courage. You have a center, and it's going to hold.
Still, you may get a little scared or nervous sometimes, and you may need reminders of how and why you built that core. So we filled this section with exhilarating, comforting poems aimed at helping you keep the faith in yourself and the world.
Take a look at “Sadie's Poem,” for starters. This is how our four-year-old friend Sadie approaches the world—with absolute confidence and joy. She's not quite sure what the day holds for her—will it be cenie, meenie, minie, or moe? But it doesn't really matter because there's this hot-diggitty fire in her toe! She's itching to move, to run, to explore. And wherever her choices take her, she's going to grab her butt and not let go—she's going to hang on to herself and jump into the day.
“Sadie's Poem” cracks us up, but it also calls us to take the same approach to life, to trust that fire in the toe. The key, we think, is to free yourself from conventional standards of happiness. Stop thinking you have to keep up with everyone else, want what they want, acquire what they acquire (the husband, the baby, the summer home, the SUV). There is no one “right” way to be happy—you get to pick your own way, you get to follow your own fire. Sadie already knows this—she took a conventional nursery rhyme, dumped the parts she didn't like, and created something entirely new, in a voice she owns and respects. She followed her own butt-grabbing philosophy and created a poem that is unmistakably, uniquely Sadie.
We think you can do the same thing with your life. Stop sweating the big choices that make you fear the future and pull a Sadie instead. Remember that whatever you choose, minie or moe, you'll be okay if you just trust your own sensibilities. And be sure to pay attention to the tiny things around you that burn with intensity (that fire in the toe)—that's where you'll find the beauty and inspiration you need to keep believing in yourself.
So instead of walking past the poor old woman munching on a plum in William Carlos Williams's “To a Poor Old Woman,” stop and really look at her. You could see just an old paper bag woman slurping fruit in the street and think, “How pathetic.” Or you could drop your uptight judgments, open your eyes, and glimpse a moment of pure pleasure and comfort, a moment as perfect as a ripe plum. And you'd carry that delicious moment of solace with you the rest of the day.
That's the only way to live in Believing—stay open to moments of revelation and grace, even in the most unlikely places. The speaker in Elizabeth Bishop's “Filling Station,” for example, finds herself in a filthy gas station, run by an oil-soaked, monkey-suited father and his greasy sons. Yuck, ick, disgusting, is all she can think at first. But then she notices the garish comic books, the big dim doily, the hairy begonia—and even though she wants to dismiss it all as horribly tacky, she instead finds herself deeply moved by these little signs of home, these proud attempts at beauty. “Somebody embroidered the doily,” and “somebody waters the plant.” Maybe “somebody loves us all,” she thinks. Even her, a high-strung automobile of a yuppie, even this imperfect filling station we call the world.
What a relief to experience moments like these in Believing, when you know with certainty that you're part of something grander than yourself. Call it an epiphany, or like poet James Wright, call it “A Blessing,” to find yourself rooted in a place of such hope and tenderness that you feel “that if I stepped out of my body I would break/into blossom.” You have access to this kind of serene beauty because you've made the effort to find these moments, to “step over the barbed wire into the pasture” where the Indian ponies wait with eyes full of kindness.
Of course these simple little epiphanies are harder to come by when ordinary chaos is erupting around you—deadlines and family crises and flat tires. Sometimes everything seems so complicated and crazy that even though you know you're Believing and all, yadda, yadda, yadda, you just can't figure out how to keep everything together.
That's when Gerard Manley Hopkins might tell you to pull another Sadie—turn convention on its head. Instead of cursing the world, take a minute to thank your lucky stars that you're part of a place this complex, this rich, this full of dappled beauty. Of course things get complicated—the world offers us everything: “All things counter, original, spare, strange.” We need the slow in order to appreciate the swift, the sweet to complement the sour, the dim to give full glory to everything adazzle. Sometimes this spotted, couple-colored world might overwhelm us, but we've got to put it in perspective. We all have a place in the abiding order and the beauty that “is past change” of our intricate universe.
While we're praising the pied beauty of the world, we may want to take a shot at appreciating and accepting our own contradictory selves. All of us are a jumble of impulse and restraint, emotion and reason, the sacred and the profane—and that includes the Pope himself, Sharon Olds suggests in “The Pope's Penis.” At our best we are-bells waiting to ring in praise of goodness, we are striving toward the divine, but most of the time our halos are strictly human. What more could we hope for in an imperfect world?
Even our mixed-up families—so irritating! so burdensome!—can shine with a dappled charm, once we free ourselves to really see them. The speaker in Gregory Djanikian's “Immigrant Picnic” tries hard to be the stereotypical all American guy, with his hot dogs on the grill and his “hat shaped/like the state of Pennsylvania.” His family drives him nuts with their misunderstandings of English idioms and their irrepressible bad jokes. But once the speaker throws up his hands and stops trying to force them into some sitcom picture of an American family (and he's thinking Brady Bunch, not Costanzas), he's free to see them for who they are: the jumbled-up people who love him.
So instead of wishing things were simpler (like a boring old nursery rhyme anyone could recite), sometimes we need to celebrate everything that's mixed up (“Sadie's Poem”!). That's the fun of vacations like the one described in Lynne McMahon's “We Take Our Children to Ireland”—we get away from the usual routine, kiss off comfort, and fall into adventures that change the way we see everything. Like the kids—and the parents—in McMahon's poem. At first they're stopped cold by the cheerful profanity they hear in Ireland. But soon a “fuck off, will ye” doesn't even faze them—they know it's meant lovingly, teasingly. And they become converts, offering their own “grand responses to everyday events” in Belfast. So your breakfast isn't just good, it's brilliant. Your crust is gorgeous. Even the “shite” smeared on the face of two-year-old Jack is brilliant and gorgeous.
This is the kind of happiness you want in Believing—not the kind you can shield from the elements, like some Martha Stewart garden, but a brilliant assemblage of “grand responses to everyday events,” rooted in love, humor, and glorious shite, thriving in full view of the barbed wire and turf fires.
Believing in yourself isn't about finding a perfect plateau and staying there. It's about being se
cure enough to see change as an opportunity for growth, no matter how much you like things the way they are. Look at “Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven.” Emily doesn't rest on her laurels as the Belle of Amherst, and Elvis doesn't strut around being King. Who needs a heaven where you spend all day being the same old thing you used to be, anyway? No, these two shake it up, try new things, challenge and delight each other. They'd rather rock the house where “God wears blue suede shoes,” then dawdle on some quiet cloud for eternity.
In “Sister Lou,” Sterling A. Brown tells us that maybe we can have that kind of rocking heaven right here on earth. Maybe we can approach every day the way Sister Lou approaches Paradise. After a lifetime of Jim Crow indignities, Sister Lou finally reaches heaven, but she doesn't expect fancy harps and angels. Instead she finds joy in earthly pleasures, like teaching Martha how to make greengrape jellies or giving Lazarus a passel of her Golden Biscuits. Heaven is a neighborhood where people know and care for one another, where you can visit with Jesus for a spell and joke awhile with Jonah. If we can learn to live that way here and now—to forgive all the betrayals we've endured, the way Sister Lou rubs the poor head of mixed-up Judas; to face the world with courage and kindness, the way Sister Lou always follows the rules of her raising—then maybe every day we'll find ourselves in a life with windows “openin’ on cherry trees an’ plum trees/Bloomin’ everlastin’.”
In Believing, you're finally free to live in your own unconventional heaven on earth. You're not looking for uninterrupted bliss, you just want to be able to maintain trust in yourself and the world. You want to know that whatever comes, you'll face it with bedrock integrity, grace, and acceptance.
The speaker in Grace Paley's “Here” epitomizes the way we want to feel in the ultimate stage of Kiss Off—simply free to be who we are. Somehow this laughing “old woman with heavy breasts/and a nicely mapped face” makes us think of Sadie. It's that butt-grabbing, fire-in-the-toe sensibility that we love in them both. This grandmother isn't afraid to age, to sit with her “stout thighs apart under/a big skirt,” to enjoy the sweat of the summertime—she is utterly content to be here in her garden, still full of desire to kiss the “sweet explaining lips” of her old man.
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