Goodreads helps you follow your favorite authors. Be the first to learn about new releases!
Start by following Marie Howe.
Showing 1-30 of 53
“I am living. I remember you.”
― What the Living Do: Poems
― What the Living Do: Poems
“Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.”
―
―
“WHAT THE LIVING DO
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you. ”
― What the Living Do: Poems
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you. ”
― What the Living Do: Poems
“I liked Hell,
I liked to go there alone
relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone.
The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then?
I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come.
Then nothing did, and no one.”
― Magdalene
I liked to go there alone
relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone.
The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then?
I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come.
Then nothing did, and no one.”
― Magdalene
“And I understood that if I kept it all up...
no one would know me.
A dim light far in the distance? No.
To love -- I had to be there.
I had to be there to be loved.”
― Magdalene: Poems
no one would know me.
A dim light far in the distance? No.
To love -- I had to be there.
I had to be there to be loved.”
― Magdalene: Poems
“Anything I’ve ever tried to keep by force I’ve lost.”
― What the Living Do
― What the Living Do
“Poetry is telling something to someone.”
―
―
“Even If I Don’t See it Again
Even if I don’t see it again.–nor ever feel it
I know it is–and that if once it hailed me
it ever does–
and so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t.–I was blinded like that–and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.”
―
Even if I don’t see it again.–nor ever feel it
I know it is–and that if once it hailed me
it ever does–
and so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t.–I was blinded like that–and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.”
―
“I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don’t live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten.”
―
―
“Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don’t want it. I want it. I don’t want it.”
―
―
“But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.”
― What the Living Do: Poems
I am living. I remember you.”
― What the Living Do: Poems
“Without devotion any life becomes a stranger's story...told for the body to forget what it once loved.”
― The Good Thief
― The Good Thief
“A traitor commits his crime but once. The rest/is retribution.”
― The Good Thief
― The Good Thief
“Each of us suffers with envy/for the forgiven.”
― The Good Thief
― The Good Thief
“Part of Eve’s Discussion
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.”
― The Good Thief
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.”
― The Good Thief
“and he: (and this was almost unbearable)
he saw me see him,
and I saw him see me.
He said something like, You're going to be ok now,
or, It's been difficult hasn't it,
but what he said mattered only a little.
We met — in our mutual gaze — in between a third place I'd not yet been.”
― Magdalene: Poems
he saw me see him,
and I saw him see me.
He said something like, You're going to be ok now,
or, It's been difficult hasn't it,
but what he said mattered only a little.
We met — in our mutual gaze — in between a third place I'd not yet been.”
― Magdalene: Poems
“Before we came to believe humans were
so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was? Before anything happen?
No I, No we, No one. No way. No verb. No noun.
only a tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is is
All everything home.”
―
so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was? Before anything happen?
No I, No we, No one. No way. No verb. No noun.
only a tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is is
All everything home.”
―
“Soon I will die, he said, and then what everyone has been so afraid of for so long will have finally happened, and then everyone can rest.”
― What the Living Do
― What the Living Do
“What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk down a sidewalk without looking back.”
― What the Living Do
― What the Living Do
“If I stopped dyeing my hair everyone would know that my golden hair is actually gray, and my long American youth would be over—and then what?”
― The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems
― The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems
“But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.”
― What the Living Do: Poems
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.”
― What the Living Do: Poems
“Someone hanging clothes on a line between buildings, someone shaking out a rug from an open window might have heard hammering, one or two blocks away and thought little or nothing of it.”
― Magdalene
― Magdalene
“I called her name into the fold between night and day.”
― The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems
― The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems
“--One day it happens: what you have feared all your life,
the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.”
―
the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.”
―
“When I walked across a room I saw myself walking
as if I were someone else,
when I picked up a fork, when I pulled off a dress,
as if I were in a movie.
It’s what I thought you saw when you looked at me.
So when I looked at you, I didn’t see you
I saw the me I thought you saw, as if I were someone else.
I called that outside—watching. Well I didn’t call it anything
when it happened all the time.
But one morning after I stopped the pills—standing in the kitchen
for one second I was inside looking out.
Then I popped back outside. And saw myself looking.
Would it happen again? It did, a few days later.
My friend Wendy was pulling on her winter coat, standing by the kitchen door
and suddenly I was inside and I saw her.
I looked out from my own eyes
and I saw: her eyes: blue gray transparent
and inside them: Wendy herself!
Then I was outside again,
and Wendy was saying, Bye-bye, see you soon,
as if Nothing Had Happened.
She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t known that I’d Been There
for Maybe 40 Seconds,
and that then I was Gone.
She hadn’t noticed that I Hadn’t Been There for Months,
years, the entire time she’d known me.
I needn’t have been embarrassed to have been there for those seconds;
she had not Noticed The Difference.
This happened on and off for weeks,
and then I was looking at my old friend John:
: suddenly I was in: and I saw him,
and he: (and this was almost unbearable)
he saw me see him,
and I saw him see me.
He said something like, You’re going to be ok now,
or, It’s been difficult hasn’t it,
but what he said mattered only a little.
We met—in our mutual gaze—in between
a third place I’d not yet been.”
― Magdalene: Poems
as if I were someone else,
when I picked up a fork, when I pulled off a dress,
as if I were in a movie.
It’s what I thought you saw when you looked at me.
So when I looked at you, I didn’t see you
I saw the me I thought you saw, as if I were someone else.
I called that outside—watching. Well I didn’t call it anything
when it happened all the time.
But one morning after I stopped the pills—standing in the kitchen
for one second I was inside looking out.
Then I popped back outside. And saw myself looking.
Would it happen again? It did, a few days later.
My friend Wendy was pulling on her winter coat, standing by the kitchen door
and suddenly I was inside and I saw her.
I looked out from my own eyes
and I saw: her eyes: blue gray transparent
and inside them: Wendy herself!
Then I was outside again,
and Wendy was saying, Bye-bye, see you soon,
as if Nothing Had Happened.
She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t known that I’d Been There
for Maybe 40 Seconds,
and that then I was Gone.
She hadn’t noticed that I Hadn’t Been There for Months,
years, the entire time she’d known me.
I needn’t have been embarrassed to have been there for those seconds;
she had not Noticed The Difference.
This happened on and off for weeks,
and then I was looking at my old friend John:
: suddenly I was in: and I saw him,
and he: (and this was almost unbearable)
he saw me see him,
and I saw him see me.
He said something like, You’re going to be ok now,
or, It’s been difficult hasn’t it,
but what he said mattered only a little.
We met—in our mutual gaze—in between
a third place I’d not yet been.”
― Magdalene: Poems
“What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up.
We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.
We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass […] and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
— Marie Howe, from “What the Living Do,” The Atlantic Monthly (April 1994)”
―
What you finally gave up.
We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.
We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass […] and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
— Marie Howe, from “What the Living Do,” The Atlantic Monthly (April 1994)”
―
“Until a day came when he said, Marie, you know how we’ve been waiting for the big pain to come? I think it’s here. I think this is it. I think it’s been here all along.”
― What the Living Do
― What the Living Do
“Marriage My husband likes to watch the cooking shows, the building shows, the Discovery Channel, and the surgery channel. Last night he told us about a man who came into the emergency room with a bayonet stuck entirely through his skull and brain. Did they get it out? We all asked. They did. And the man was ok because the blade went exactly between the two halves without severing them. And who had shoved this bayonet into the man’s head? His wife. A strong woman, someone said. And everyone else agreed.”
― The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems
― The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems
“the bridge appears when you walk across it—that”
― What the Living Do
― What the Living Do
“even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now she would never come into my arms without believing that I wanted something.”
― What the Living Do
― What the Living Do
