Poems By Others

I’ve become the person who talks to avocados.
Oh, look how ripe you are!

The one who talks to dust bunnies under the bed.
Oh, my goodness. How long have you been there?

I’ve become the person who narrates wind as it gusts,
the one who composes out loud while writing poems.

In short, I’m the person who once mystified me.
Does she really think lettuce seeds can hear her?

And I love being this woman who converses with stars,
with shadows, this person who notices feelings that rise

as I move through a day and takes pleasure in greeting them.
Hello shame. I say. Hello fear. Hello embarrassment.

How much easier life is when I join in the big conversation.
Then I am never alone. Not that the bananas talk back.

Neither does the mop. But that doesn’t stop me
from being curious about my connection with all of it—

the stain on the dishtowel, the pond as it melts,
the broken pot, the robin in the yard, the highway trash.

It’s not the talking part I love, but letting my attention
touch everything. Cracked glass. A lost glove. Tire tracks.

Mostly, I love the listening for what isn’t said back.

Why so many forms?
Why not just that one
hydrogen atom?

The creator goes off
on one wild, specific
tangent after another,
or millions simultaneously,
with an exuberance
that would seem to be
unwarranted, and with
an abandoned energy sprung
from an unfathomable font.

What is going on here?
The point of the dragonfly’s
terrible lip, the giant water bug,
birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle
and flash of sunlighted minnows,
is not that it all fits together
like clockwork – for it doesn’t,
particularly, not even inside
the goldfish bowl – but that
it all flows so freely and wild,
like the creek, that it all surges
in such a free, fringed tangle.

Freedom is the world’s water
and weather, the world’s nourishment
freely given, its soil and sap:
and the creator loves pizzazz.

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

We live on a planet
where trees whisper
to one another
through mycelial networks.
Where octopuses with nine brains dream,
and whales with hearts the size of small pianos sing,
calling each other by name.
Where elephants mourn their lost,
standing in silent vigil
over the bones of their kin.
Where bees dance
to the flowers,
and crows remember faces
never forgetting a slight.
Where ants build vast metropolises,
cats purr at the exact frequency of healing,
and the forest’s first breath after a fire
is a bloom of flowers.
Beauty and wonder are everywhere.
Life far more then we can imagine
Far more than we can even dream.
Walk softly upon this earth
There is room for ever more miracles.

it’s late now, it’s early, no way
to know which season it is
of the total years of my life,
weren’t we only just nineteen,
tonya & i, wasn’t she only just
alive, long-limbed & cross-legged
on my dorm room floor,
wasn’t it springtime of a year
so unlike this one, thirteen
years past, cool nights in line
outside the nuyorican hoping
to make it on the list, wasn’t it
a friday night like this one
& the only people i wanted to love
were poets, earrings swaying
against their necks, dancing
in the dark of the room where we
all knew each other’s secrets, weren’t
we all just at that party, wasn’t i only
just eighteen, pointed northward
on a chinatown bus to that city,
to watch ai elo onstage at the apollo,
wasn’t she only just alive, smoking
with camonghne, asking me my favorite
song, cackling on the apartment floor,
on the air mattress we used as a couch,
how is it that it was long ago, how is it
i am on the other side of it, long ago, how
did i leave that city, that time when we
were all together, everyone alive,
wasn’t the dream to be a poet, wasn’t
the plan to live forever, our powers
newly acquired, newly in love
with what we could do, didn’t we all
belong to each other, to that work,
going after to the pizza shop
to recite what we’d memorized,
weren’t we all just there, wasn’t it warm
outside, wasn’t the road long & clear,
isn’t it early still, isn’t it late, & why
am i still here, did i survive or was i left
behind, & what season is it that we are
no longer together & some of us have gone?

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

What if, says a small child to me this afternoon,
We made a poem without using any words at all?
Wouldn’t that be cool? You could use long twigs,
And feathers, or spider strands, and arrange them
So that people imagine what words could be there.
Wouldn’t that be cool? So there’s a different poem
For each reader. That would be the best poem ever.
The poem wouldn’t be on the page, right? It would
Be in the air, sort of. It would be between the twigs
And the person’s eyes, or behind the person’s eyes,
After the person saw whatever poem he or she saw.
Maybe there are a lot of poems that you can’t write
Down. Couldn’t that be? But they’re still there even
If no one can write them down, right? Poems in
Books are only a little bit of all the poems there are.
Those are only the poems someone found words for.

You get the bad news
and the sunrise in the same day.
You cry over the headlines,
then you laugh at a baby
wearing a hat shaped like a bear.
This is the dual citizenship
of being alive.
Rage and reverence,
Grief and grace.
You are allowed to feel both.
You are allowed to scream,
& still notice how good the soup is.
You don’t have to choose.
Let it all in.

*******
Editor’s note – In a world that breeds despair joy is defiance.

“The Place Where We Are Right”

“A Man Doesn’t Have Time in His Life “

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.