How to Love the World

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How to Love the World Page 6

by James Crews


  wondrous how those words would come back and make

  him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice

  ten years after the day she died—the catch, the rasp,

  the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.

  Cathryn Essinger

  Summer Apples

  I planted an apple tree in memory

  of my mother, who is not gone,

  but whose memory has become

  so transparent that she remembers

  slicing apples with her grandmother

  (yellow apples; blue bowl) better than

  the fruit that I hand her today. Still,

  she polishes the surface with her thumb,

  holds it to the light and says with no

  hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . .

  they’re so fragile, you can almost see

  to the core. She no longer remembers how

  to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but

  her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants.

  And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core—

  to that little cathedral to memory—where

  the seeds remember everything they need

  to know to become yellow and transparent.

  Lynne Knight

  Third Year of My Mother’s Dementia

  I looked out the window and it filled with peacocks,

  flaring their many eyes at me. I had been waiting

  for months for some sign, and now from the high bank

  where I was so often afraid to climb blared cries

  of the peacocks as they fluttered and dipped

  their soft plumules. One lay down to sleep

  like a human, positioned on its side, and its fan

  folded back into itself, into nothing but a long

  dull tail. The others kept moving up and down the bank,

  so many eyes I could not count them. They ignored

  the sleeping one. Stepped over him, or rushed by

  with a swish. As they would rush by me, if I stood

  among them in my wonder that beauty is needed

  most of all when it is useless, when it fixes nothing.

  Heather Swan

  Rabbit

  After a long numbness, I wake

  and suddenly I’m noticing everything,

  all of it piercing me with its beautiful,

  radical trust: the carpenter bee tonguing

  the needles of echinacea believing

  in their sweetness, the exuberance

  of an orange day lily unfolding itself

  at the edge of the street, and the way

  the moss knows the stone, and the stone

  accepts its trespass, and the way the dog

  on his leash turns to see if I’m holding on,

  certain I know where to go. And the way

  the baby rabbit—whose trembling ears

  are the most delicate cups—trusts me,

  because I pried the same dogs’ jaws

  off his hips, and then allows me to feed him

  clover when his back legs no longer work,

  forcing me to think about forgiveness

  and those I need to forgive, and to hope

  I am forgiven, and that just maybe

  I can forgive myself. This unstoppable,

  excruciating tenderness everywhere inviting

  us, always inviting. And then later, the firefly

  illuminating the lantern of its body,

  like us, each time we laugh.

  Dale Biron

  Laughter

  When the

  face we wear

  grows old and weathered, torn

  open by time,

  colors

  tinted as dawn

  like the late

  winter mountains

  of Sedona

  ashen and crimson,

  it will no longer

  be possible

  to distinguish

  our deepest scars

  from the long

  sweet lines left

  by laughter.

  January Gill O’Neil

  In the Company of Women

  Make me laugh over coffee,

  make it a double, make it frothy

  so it seethes in our delight.

  Make my cup overflow

  with your small happiness.

  I want to hoot and snort and cackle and chuckle.

  Let your laughter fill me like a bell.

  Let me listen to your ringing and singing

  as Billie Holiday croons above our heads.

  Sorry, the blues are nowhere to be found.

  Not tonight. Not here.

  No makeup. No tears.

  Only contours. Only curves.

  Each sip takes back a pound,

  each dry-roasted swirl takes our soul.

  Can I have a refill, just one more?

  Let the bitterness sink to the bottom of our lives.

  Let us take this joy to go.

  Alice Wolf Gilborn

  Leaning to the Light

  Our neighbor planted twelve

  bulbs in the shadow of his barn

  in the shadow of the trees

  in the shadow of a mountain.

  And now a dozen lilies grow

  at an angle toward the sun

  that touches them only

  in the afternoon. Our neighbor

  sold his house to strangers

  who come for just a week

  or two so they never see

  their flowers bloom, later

  than the rest, their soft pink

  petals tinged with white,

  curled like shavings, stamen

  tuned to the western sky.

  Like me since I left the land

  where I was born, leaning west,

  these laggard lilies with mouths wide

  open, drinking in the setting sun.

  Andrea Potos

  I Watched an Angel in the Emergency Room

  Tall in twilit

  blue sneakers, feet winged

  to the task of holding

  my mother’s hand as

  he explained the source

  of the infection, all it will take

  to restore her

  to the stronghold of

  this earth that has known her

  eight decades and more, the gate

  of her body where my gratitude begins.

  Alberto Ríos

  When Giving Is All We Have

  One river gives

  Its journey to the next.

  We give because someone gave to us.

  We give because nobody gave to us.

  We give because giving has changed us.

  We give because giving could have changed us.

  We have been better for it,

  We have been wounded by it—

  Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,

  Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

  Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,

  But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

  Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,

  Mine to yours, yours to mine.

  You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.

  Together we are simple green. You gave me

  What you did not have, and I gave you

  What I had to give—together, we made

  Something greater from the difference.

  Albert Garcia

  Offering

  Here, take this palmful of raspberries

  as my gift. It isn’t much

  but we’ve often said our needs

  are simple, some quiet

  time alone on the patio

  in the cool morning, coffee,

  a few words over the newspaper.

  I’ve rinsed these berries

  so you can tumble them

  right into your cereal, one minute

 
on the vine, the next in your bowl,

  my hand to your mouth.

  Let’s say my words were as simply

  sweet as these berries, chosen

  as carefully, plucked and held,

  then delivered as perfect

  morsels of meaning. Not

  what you hear, which is never

  what I mean to say. Will you take

  these berries? Will you feel their weight

  on your tongue, taste their tang

  as they slide into you, small, bright, honest:

  the only gift I have to give?

  Alison Luterman

  Too Many to Count

  My father hands me the bucket and scissors

  and asks me to go cut peonies: white, pink, magenta.

  Tightly balled and slightly unfurled,

  they’ve multiplied like crazy on the slope behind his house.

  Long ago, Dad taught himself to garden out of books.

  My childhood was fat with exulted-over tomatoes,

  blueberry bushes covered with cheesecloth,

  and a zillion profligate zucchinis,

  which caused an outbreak of zucchini bread,

  zucchini muffins, and ill-fated zucchini pizza crust,

  inciting both my brothers to go on a zucchini strike

  that has lasted to this day.

  But these peonies!

  God must have been a little stoned when She dreamed them up,

  not stopping at one petticoat or two,

  but piling layer upon layer, until even the exhausted bees

  surrender to excessive lingerie.

  I stuff the bucket with closed buds

  and half-opened blooms showing their lacy knickers

  and trudge back up the steep-sloped hill to the house,

  leaving behind a glowing field of peonies, too many to count,

  like my father’s many kindnesses over the decades—

  pots of soup, loaves of home-baked bread,

  hours of earnest listening,

  all offered with the same voluptuous generosity

  as now when he takes the laden bucket from my arms

  and tells me to divide the bounty into smaller bunches

  so he can distribute them among the neighbors.

  Marjorie Saiser

  If I Carry My Father

  I hope it is a little more

  than color of hair

  or the dimple or cheekbones

  if he’s ever here in the space I inhabit

  the room I walk in

  the boundaries and peripheries

  I hope it’s some kindness he believed in

  living on in cell or bone

  maybe some word or action

  will float close to the surface

  within my reach

  some good will rise when I need it

  a hard dense insoluble shard

  will show up

  and carry on.

  George Bilgere

  Weather

  My father would lift me

  to the ceiling in his big hands

  and ask, How’s the weather up there?

  And it was good, the weather

  of being in his hands, his breath

  of scotch and cigarettes, his face

  smiling from the world below.

  O daddy, was the lullaby I sang

  back down to him as he stood on earth,

  my great, white-shirted father, home

  from work, his gold wristwatch

  and wedding band gleaming

  as he held me above him

  for as long as he could,

  before his strength failed

  down there in the world I find myself

  standing in tonight, my little boy

  looking down from his flight

  below the ceiling, cradled in my hands,

  his eyes wide and already staring

  into the distance beyond the man

  asking him again and again,

  How’s the weather up there?

  Sally Bliumis-Dunn

  Work

  I could tell they were father and son,

  the air between them, slack as though

  they hardly noticed one another.

  The father sanded the gunwales,

  the boy coiled the lines.

  And I admired them there, each to his task

  in the quiet of the long familiar.

  The sawdust coated the father’s arms

  like dusk coats grass in a field.

  The boy worked next on the oarlocks

  polishing the brass until it gleamed

  as though he could harness the sun.

  Who cares what they were thinking,

  lucky in their lives

  that the spin of the genetic wheel

  slowed twice to a stop

  and landed each of them here.

  Reflective Pause

  The Joy of Making

  Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s “Work” shows two people steeped in the joy of what they’re doing. They seem to be beaming, the fullness of their gratitude and good luck suddenly contagious.

  We share her relief at watching this father and son build a boat together, disengaged from the technology that can disconnect us from each other. We all crave a creative outlet like this and can deeply enjoy being so involved in the task of making something that we lose all sense of time. In the space of creativity and cooperation, we also lose touch with our self for a while and shed those anxious thoughts that can be fed by social media and news.

  This poem urges us to bear loving witness to the world as it is, to find beauty in the simple scene of a father and son coming together to accomplish something much larger than themselves. She points to “the spin of the genetic wheel” that led them, and each of us, to this very moment in our lives, and invites us to feel the luck of having become exactly who we are right now.

  Invitation for Writing and Reflection

  Can you remember a time when you felt so consumed with the act of making something that you lost all sense of time, and your mind seemed to clear? What allowed you to enter this mindful creative space?

  Danusha Laméris

  Goldfinches

  Good luck, they say,

  to see one,

  its face and breast

  pure citrus

  against the grey sky.

  And today,

  I am twice blessed

  because two such birds

  grace the low boughs

  of the persimmon,

  eating the soft heart

  of winter’s fruit—

  though they will also

  feast on thistles

  pulled from the dry flowers

  and so are said

  to eat the thorns

  of Christ’s crown,

  to lift some small measure

  of his suffering.

  Whatever your grief,

  however long you’ve carried it—

  may something

  come to you,

  quick and unexpected,

  whisk away

  the bristled edge

  in its sharp

  and tender beak.

  Connie Wanek

  The Lesser Goldfinch

  It was hardly bigger than an apricot,

  a goldfinch, yes, but smaller and paler,

  a little ghost in the lavender

  eating seeds too tiny for

  my old eyes. Sometimes I think

  Heaven needn’t measure

  even two by two

  inches, much less all the sky

  above the Vatican;

  for peace is lodged deep

  within the very

  spacious thought of itself.

  Quiet bird, your gestures

  are vast in such a place

  as I dream of.

  Tony Hoagland

  The Word

  Down near the bottom

  of the crossed-out list<
br />
  of things you have to do today,

  between “green thread”

  and “broccoli,” you find

  that you have penciled “sunlight.”

  Resting on the page, the word

  is beautiful. It touches you

  as if you had a friend

  and sunlight were a present

  he had sent from someplace distant

  as this morning—to cheer you up,

  and to remind you that,

  among your duties, pleasure

  is a thing

  that also needs accomplishing.

  Do you remember?

  that time and light are kinds

  of love, and love

  is no less practical

  than a coffee grinder

  or a safe spare tire?

  Tomorrow you may be utterly

  without a clue,

  but today you get a telegram

  from the heart in exile,

  proclaiming that the kingdom

  still exists,

  the king and queen alive,

  still speaking to their children,

  —to anyone among them

  who can find the time

  to sit out in the sun and listen.

  Barbara Crooker

  Tomorrow

  there will be sun, scalloped by clouds,

  ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong.

  It will be a temperate seventy-five, low

  humidity. For twenty-four hours,

  all politicians will be silent. Reality

  programs will vanish from TV, replaced

  by the “snow” that used to decorate

  our screens when reception wasn’t

  working. Soldiers will toss their weapons

  in the grass. The oceans will stop

  their inexorable rise. No one

  will have to sit on a committee.

  When twilight falls, the aurora borealis

  will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet.

  We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek,

  decorate our hair with fireflies, spin

  until we’re dizzy, collapse

  on the dew-decked lawn and look up,

  perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines

  of cold code written in the stars . . .

  Cynthia White

  Quail Hollow

  Think of the path as calligraphy—

 

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