Alison McGhee's Blog, page 14

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness” seared itself into my brain the first time I read it. She’s another of those poets to me, one whose name I google to see if she’s got another poem out there, one that I haven’t ever read before, let alone memorized. This particular poem makes me feel as if she’s with me throughout the day, happy in the same way, that feeling of secret love when the boiling water begins its steeping of the grounds, or the sheets and blankets are shaken out over the bed, or the sun slanting through the window makes soap bubble rainbows in the sink.

 

Daily

- Naomi Shihab Nye

These shriveled seeds we plant,

corn kernel, dried bean,

poke into loosened soil,

cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into

perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips

This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten

smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket

and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address

so the name balances like a cloud

in the center of sky

This page I type and retype

This table I dust till the scarred wood shines

This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again

like flags we share, a country so close

no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them

The hands are churches that worship the world.

–

​For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.​

–

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Four Sentences from the Road

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On Day One she pointed the car south and drove through the frozen tundra of Minnesota, the barren cornfields of Iowa and the vaguely southernish-feeling byways of Missouri until she reached a place where the highway rest stop could be broached without the aid of mittens, hat or parka, and that land was called Kansas, and there, ignoring the fact that the entire motel smelled vaguely of poop, she slugged back some Jim Beam and rested.

On Day Two she angled the car southwest, fought the gale-force winds of western Kansas, crossed into the enormous flatness of the northern Oklahoma panhandle, shut the windows against the dense smell of manure and piss as she passed through massive holding pens of cattle in northern Texas, crossed into the Land of Enchantment to behold the vast magnificence of that rangeland and its fiery setting sun, and cruised through invisible mountains until the lights of Albuquerque twinkled in the distance.

On Day Three she pointed the car west-northwest, set the cruise to 78 and sang along with Greatest Hits of the 70′s all the way across New Mexico –a state that she fell in love with due to its unearthly beauty and the smiles and kindness of every single person she met eyes with or spoke to at gas stations, Cracker Barrel, rest stops and traffic lights– then crossed over into Arizona and made her way to Sedona, where she hiked Bell Rock and tried to feel the mysterious vortex energy but instead felt only an unmysterious happiness, after which she drove into the sunset to Prescott, where she took herself out for an old-school martini and made friends with the waitress, a woman born and raised in NH who two years ago took six weeks’ vacation to ride her motorcycle to Arizona and never went back.

On the Last Day she passed through a hundred miles of Arizona desolation, outposts with crumbling stores surrounded with razor wire, observed that the cars crawling their way up and down a steep and narrow road looked like bugs clinging to the side of the mountain, realized that her car was one of those bugs, crossed into the California desert at a gateway where every vehicle was photographed and where traffic began inexorably to multiply, until the wind turbines stood sentry by the hundreds on ridgetops and the sense of speed and density was so omnipresent and oppressive that she kept both hands gripped on the wheel and tucked the tiny car between two giant trucks, the better to hide for a while, until at long last she reached a small and beautiful town perched on the far western edge of the country where the mountains meet the sea, and that town was her destination, so she parked, unpacked, and drank some wine.

Poem of the Week, by Ellen Bass

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Some poets are so precious to me that sometimes, late at night usually, I start googling their names. Maybe they’ve got a new poem out there, one I haven’t yet seen, one that will instantly burn itself into my heart the way this one below did. It came to me by random chance –the Sun Magazine, probably– and I finished reading it and went on an immediate Ellen Bass hunt. The first question in this one is one I’ve asked myself at least once a day ever since I read it.

 

If You Knew

- Ellen Bass
What if you knew you’d be the last

to touch someone?

If you were taking tickets, for example,

at the theater, tearing them,

giving back the ragged stubs,

you might take care to touch that palm,

brush your fingertips

along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase

too slowly through the airport, when

the car in front of me doesn’t signal,

when the clerk at the pharmacy

won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember

they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.

They’d just had lunch and the waiter,

a young gay man with plum black eyes,

joked as he served the coffee, kissed

her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.

Then they walked a half a block and her aunt

dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume

have to come? How wide does the crack

in heaven have to split?

What would people look like

if we could see them as they are,

soaked in honey, stung and swollen,

reckless, pinned against time?

–

​For more information on Ellen Bass, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Lianne Spidel

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When I was little I read a novel called “A Lantern in Her Hand,” by Bess Streeter Aldrich. It was about a pioneer woman, surprise surprise (you wouldn’t think that there could be all that many pioneer woman books, but take it from me, there are) who homesteaded on the plains. The husband in that book has stayed with me lo these many years. His name was Will and he was so kind (and goodlooking). This book was one of my favorites ever, and my mother cried when I described the ending of it to her, in which the long-dead Will came walking back across a field. This lovely poem brought that whole book right back to me: the small worn paperback copy I had, the picture on the front cover, the scent of cut grass (I must have read it in summer), the love that man had for his wife.

Snowfall at Solstice

- Lianne Spidel

I wonder if this might be the night

when you decide to go, with snow

stippling the screen of your small window

and you snug in your chair, wound

in an afghan, full of shepherd’s

pie and the sugar cookie dunked for you

in tea. You are at peace. Listening, you

feel the soundless weight of this night,

starless, without sentinel or shepherd,

as heaven comes down to earth in snow

to level each crevice, seal each wound,

fill the cup of space outside your window.

The courtyard framed in the window

is all that remains of the world you

knew, a place where whiteness has wound

the tree with garlands heavy as night,

where there is no respite from snow,

no landmark to be seen by shepherds.

In young years, friends—winter shepherds

and maids—summoned you from any window

when the sky threw itself blue over snow,

over the ice of the Rideau. With them, you

learned ski trails curving into night

up the Gatineau, and every path wound

its way through some adventure, wound

magically toward one who would shepherd

you through cities on starless nights,

whose homecoming you awaited at windows,

who carried your furred boots for you

through seventy winters of snow.

He will find his way in winging snow,

white-haired, a woolen scarf wound

at his neck, coming from darkness to you

stooped but sure-footed as a shepherd,

an overcoated angel reflected in the window,

stamping from his shoes the snow, the night.

When you choose, take the shepherd’s arm, leave

the narrow window, walk safe with him by night

out where all stars are wound in snow.

 

For more information on Lianne Spidel, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Jacqueline Osherow

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​When I first saw this poem I almost didn’t read it due to its extreme length. (One of my friends has a “will not pay to watch” actors list; my semi-equivalent is the “super-long or too-freaky-looking-or-full-of-itself-in-my-instant-opinion poems list.) But the first stanza sucked me in with its reference to memory, and walls alive with light, and then I kept going all through the effortless length. It felt familiar to me in so many ways – the nature of memory, the unconquerability of childhood impressions, “all that captured, concentrated light.”

Penn Station: Fifty Years Gone

- Jacqueline Osherow

There must have been a train, a subway ride,

but what I remember is the palace

in between: its high glass walls alive with light

and so enticing I thought closed-in space

more open, even, than open air,

light the only presence in the concourse,

though I must have seen throngs of women there.

Wednesday was Ladies’ Day on the Pennsyl-

vania Railroad; women paid half fare

(a practice eventually declared illegal).

I was three or four and rode for free,

my unlucky sister stuck in school.

We did this often, my mother tells me—

Philly to Brooklyn in time for lunch—

and then the island on Eastern Parkway

where she sat with her mother on a bench

while I hopped from hexagon to hexagon,

examining the sidewalk, inch by inch,

for the secret of this new, compelling pattern

(molecule to petaled flower to star),

the quintessential feature of Brooklyn,

tightly fitted shapes nuzzling together

from Parkway pavement to bathroom floor.

Or did my notice of such things come after?

When we’d get there, as a family, by car,

the halfway mark in the Holland Tunnel

(whoever saw it first—always my sister—

awarded a nickel) arrival’s sentinel,

next Liberty from the Manhattan Bridge.

But even she—torch and all—could not annul

that more and more impossible assemblage

of wrought iron, granite, glass, and light

that gave me something of a sense of pilgrimage

a decade later in a window seat

on Amtrak, heading to a camp reunion.

My friends and I had arranged to meet

at the clock? information booth? in Penn Station,

then ride together to Valley Stream …

I’d be face-to-face with stored-up vision

(how much was memory? how much was dream?)

what for years conspired in me to nurture

the sort of intimate, fanatic claim

we make as children on what we adore

and though I didn’t know the terminology

my platonic ideal of architecture,

unaltered, really, to this very day:

openness corralled and sealed with light.

But on that day in autumn 1970,

I got off the train to find concrete

and crowds and trash and ugliness and smell.

I assumed that in the interim they’d built

a slapdash addition to my beautiful

(perhaps too good to use?) remembered space,

found my friends and convinced them all

to join—did we miss a train?—my wild-goose chase

until finally we asked a policeman,

who told us this was all there was

when we asked for the “main part” of Penn Station.

Perhaps I was thinking of Grand Central?

an easy subway ride, just go down

that stairway, ride one stop then take the shuttle …

But it was late; we had to reach Long Island

before the Sabbath (we were under the spell

of Jewish summer camp) so I abandoned

one dream for another. Adolescents

are flexible that way. And our weekend—

hectic and euphoric and intense—

turned my confusion at Penn Station

into a funny story, its disappointments

postponed for our reunion’s brief duration.

But on my train ride home, an acrid taste

pervaded everything: my initiation

into the recalcitrant mistrust

with which a bossy, noncompliant present

infiltrates and redesigns the past.

Still, I was, after all, an adolescent;

I had a world to change, a war to end,

and though I knew my vision wasn’t

of any other station, I abandoned

my newly defenseless memory—

though I would have liked to understand

where it had come from; perhaps TV?

But my childhood TV was black and white

and I could see pink stone against a shimmery

golden-yellow amplitude of light

extending in every known direction …

Only years later, as an undergraduate,

when the fate of Grand Central Station—

thanks to Jackie O’s gift for publicity—

became a topic of dinner conversation,

did I finally unravel my old mystery.

Jackie’s war cry was the demolition

of Penn Station in nineteen sixty-three!

I grabbed someone’s paper, in which Penn Station

was described as “great,” noble,” a “masterpiece,”

half-thrilled by this belated confirmation,

half-shamed at having betrayed my memories.

That light-struck little girl had not been wrong,

she and I the unsuspecting repositories

of the world’s lost treasure—all along

(there’s no overstating the world’s recklessness

with what’s irreplaceable) in our safekeeping—

and—or so it seemed—nowhere else.

Still, it was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory,

since there’d be no returning to my palace,

though I did have sightings: an illusory

thirty-five-millimeter meteor

flashing by me in The Palm Beach Story

(in those days, we saw movies in the theatre),

The Seven Year Itch, Strangers on a Train.

And then, a real find, outside a bookstore

in the used-books rack? remainders’ bin?

among the pages of photos in a cast-

off coffee-table book of old Manhattan:

wrought iron, stone and glass, possessed

by something more like sorcery than sun,

an image I suspect has long replaced

or perhaps just merged with? my childhood vision,

Berenice Abbott: Penn Station Interior.

Take a look, reader, it’s online.

(Perhaps I should have told you this before?)

You can even buy a print: an aura magical

enough to turn a person, even at four—

especially at four?—elegiacal

for at least another half century—

which explains the, for me, irresistible

allure of train stations—call it my history—

the more gargantuan and whimsical,

over the top, absurd, unnecessary

the more I love them: Antwerpen-Centraal

(Sebald’s Austerlitz), Milan, St. Pancras …

Forgive me, but, for all its grace, Grand Central

doesn’t have the lushness to redress

what turns out to be my great childhood loss.

The place—after all—is steeped in darkness:

too much travertine, too little glass.

And yet, reader, I still thrill to go there,

famished as I am for any trace

of the notion that arrival or departure—

anyone’s at all—is apt occasion

for unstinting outpourings of grandeur.

And there it is, reader—it’s not Penn Station:

Interior by Berenice Abbott I see

but an entire universe’s concentration

on the daunting task of welcoming me—

Jackie!—after my first ride on a train,

which—oh how memory breeds memory—

must have had a caboose, a little red one—

like the one in the story in the Golden Book

my mother surely read me on that train

(she made it an adventure to be stuck

at a railway crossing: the caboose! look!).

For a minute, I imagine she walked me back

to see the caboose on our train in New York—

but only freight trains had cabooses; wrong again.

Oh reader, forgive me, the nostalgic

wasn’t my intended destination

but what can I do? I’ve been derailed.

I wanted to tell you about Penn Station—

so magical a place even a child

would claim it as her private, secret palace—

how I once inhabited a world

so benevolent, its public space

seemed to cherish every human being.

I honestly haven’t thought of that caboose

for nearly fifty years (it wasn’t among

the Golden Books I read to my own children;

perhaps they didn’t reprint it?). I wasn’t expecting

to be blindsided by my mother all of a sudden,

but she had a way of singling out

anything she thought might give her children

even a brief instant of delight,

must have reveled in my private store of marvels,

though I was sure I kept them secret.

She’d present the simplest things as miracles

(not that she could have known they’d turn elusive).

Have I managed to do that for my girls?

What will they half recall, half try to prove

in fifty years? With what tenacious

if hazy spectacle they’ve caught a glimpse of

(one I likely see as commonplace)

will I—or, rather, my memory—be entwined?

Just let it be wide-open and gratuitous,

evocative of something like the kind

of—what shall I call it?—solicitude?

that made me think the world had been designed

with only me in mind, my childhood

a string of wonders. With each fresh thing—

a stray leaf clinging to a piece of fruit,

a twin yolk in an egg, a cardinal idling

in our neighbor’s birdbath: my mother’s voice,

so urgent and excited we’d come running.

Back from the laundry, a pillow case

with a tiny Chinese character inside its hem

was bounty from an over-brimming universe

with a prize (Cracker Jack writ large) in every item.

No doubt it was she who pointed out

the way Penn Station’s granite walls would gleam

in all that captured, concentrated light,

the roof of windows letting in the sky’s

wide-open pathways, the infinite

just one among a host of possibilities

in a world so enthralling, so magnanimous

all you had to do was open your eyes

and you’d be swept up in a fast embrace

of deft if momentary harmonies,

an eleventh-hour glimpse of iron, stone, and glass,

an ultimatum from paradise.

–

For more information on Jacqueline Osherow, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/j...

For those of you interested in poetic form, this poem is written in terza rima, a series of three-line stanzas with a (very loose, in this example) aba, bcb rhyme scheme.

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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/p...

Poem of the Week, by Suzanne Cleary

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Yesterday I wrapped gifts and hit Play over and over on a youtube recording of my niece’s choral group singing a capella. I clapped for a six year old friend who had been instructed by his piano teacher to play Jingle Bells (for someone besides his parents) in preparation for his recital today. I read this poem and dug out my old tape –yes, tape– of the Messiah so I could listen to it, but I had nothing to listen to it on, so I youtubed it instead. Then I read this poem and was, for no reason that makes sense, transported back to 8th grade All-County choir, where I stood on the back riser (always the tall girl) of an unfamiliar bleacher in an unfamiliar school, practicing Amazing Grace over and over with no one I knew, the smell of May sun and spring wind and cotton and empty-school-on-a-weekend rising all around us.

Glory

- Suzanne Cleary

My husband and his first wife once sang Handel’s Messiah

at Carnegie Hall, with 300 others who also had read

the ad for the sing-along, and this is why I know

the word glory is not sung by the chorus,

although that is what we hear.

In fact, the choir sings glaw-dee, glaw-dee

while it seems that glory unfurls there, like glory itself.

My husband sings for me. My husband tells me they practiced

for an hour, led by a short man with glasses,

a man who made them sing glory, twice, so they could hear it

fold back upon itself, swallow itself

in so many mouths, in the grand hall.

Then he taught them glaw-dee, a distortion that creates the right effect,

like Michelangelo distorting the arms of both God and Adam

so their fingertips can touch.

My husband and his first wife and 300 others performed

at 5 o’clock, the Saturday before Christmas,

for a small audience of their own heavy coats,

for a few ushers arrived early, leaning on lobby doors.

But mostly they sang for themselves,

for it is a joy to feel song made of the body’s hollows.

I do not know if their marriage, this day, was still good

or whether it seemed again good

as they sang. I prefer to think of the choral conductor,

who sang with them. He sang all the parts, for love

not glory, or what seemed to be

glory to those who wandered in

and stood at the back of the hall, and listened.

 

- For more information on Suzanne Cleary, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Philip Dacey

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Once, when my older daughter was about 12, she played a newspaper reporter in a school play. I arrived at the school for the performance to see her emerge from the dressing room wearing a skirt and heels, clutching her clipboard prop. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and her face was made up with lipstick and eyeshadow. It felt as if time had unfolded itself and this was my one possible glimpse into a 20 years’ distant future, a life in which she was all grown up. It made me want to cry, the same way this poem does.

Lifeboats

- Philip Dacey

“Life is a shipwreck but we must not

forget to sing in the lifeboats.”

— VOLTAIRE

I’m visiting my son’s 8 a.m. philosophy class,

one he’s teaching, not taking, a graduate student,

tall and serious though not unsmiling

before a sea of backwards baseball caps

and Siren-like hairdos on heads inclined

to dream of last night’s deeds or misdeeds.

His topic’s Utilitarianism, and I

have tucked myself into a desk at the back

of the room, unsuccessful at inconspicuousness,

target of stares as one by one

the acolytes of wisdom scuffed past me to their seats

already occupied by morning light

Now Austin’s talking ethical choices,

as prisoner either kill one fellow prisoner

and save the rest or refuse to kill any,

though all will then, by design of the captors, die.

Bentham says kill the one, the end is good;

Kant none, our acts are us, and nothing else.

Soon I am weeping, not, I think, for any prisoners

who might die, or for one faced

with an impossible, a killing choice

guaranteed to leave the chooser’s

peace of mind dead either way

and choice suddenly no choice at all,

but for something I can only guess at, the loss

of the child my son once was,

or the beauty of the man he has become,

heroic in this time and place, facing

the most benign of enemies, youth

not fully awakened to the world.

The drops pool on my notes, blurring the words

“maximize utility.” The students don’t notice

I am losing it, engaged as they are

in friendly argument now with my son

about members of a lifeboat,

who’s to stay, who’s to feed the fish.

The whole room begins to rock under me,

who have traveled hundreds of miles

to visit him in his world, to glimpse,

first-hand, his life, the boat he is in.

By this weeping surely I have thrown myself

overboard, and I begin to swim.

Later, he’ll write to me that the students,

and he, will miss the old visitor

in the back of the room, and I will want to

tell him then that, not to worry, once there,

the old man’s always there,

his tears the lecture’s constant subtext,

his presence something useful perhaps,

a chance for those left behind to choose, or not,

to see him, that prison doors open wide

into other prisons and all lifeboats leak,

though waking up, eyes pried apart by the light

of language, is one act that sends everyone

to the head of the class.

 

–

For more information about Philip Dacey, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Mark J. Mitchell

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The image of Sisyphus has been in the back of my mind forever, head and shoulders down, legs and back straining, grimly pushing that damn boulder up and up and up an endless hill. I make jokes about him, reference him to friends when one is trudging through an awful stretch, turn to the thought of him for a weird kind of solace when things feel unbearable. But I never thought of him this way before: A human being, drawn to something beautiful, something unexplainable, something that surely must be worth all the effort it’s going to take.

Mechanics of a Myth

- Mark. J. Mitchell

Sisyphus, aching under moonlight,

Looks down the mountain.

Something confuses him.

Fresh reflections are bouncing

Off a boulder or something

Way down in that valley.

It’s blue and beautiful.

He thinks, weary as he is,

“I ought to go get that.”

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For more information on Mark J. Mitchell, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Mark Strand

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I just returned from the Red Balloon Bookshop, where I sat at a table for a couple of hours signing books and talking to any of the customers who felt like talking. One of them was an older woman wearing a big poofy winter jacket. She was in town for a few days from Kentucky, where she lives, and buying up bunches of picture books to give to her grandchildren. She admired my pigtails; I admired her smile. “Well, I certainly am happy,” she said (and she was, she gave off a kind of lightness of being), and I told her that the older I got the happier I got. “Just wait till you’re 70!” she said. “You’re not going to BELIEVE how happy you’ll be!”
* * *
The Coming of Light


     - Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:

the coming of love, the coming of light.

You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,

stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,

sending up warm bouquets of air.

Even this late the bones of the body shine

and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

–

​For  more information on Mark Strand, please click here.

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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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Poem of the Week, by Suzanne Cleary

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We’re born with backups, twinned in so many ways: two hands, two ears, two eyes, two kidneys. Lose one and the other steps right up and does the job of both. But not with the heart. We each have only one of them.

Echocardiogram

- Suzanne Cleary

How does, how does, how does it work

so, little valve stretching messily open, as wide as possible,

all directions at once, sucking air, sucking blood, sucking air-in-blood,

how? On the screen I see the part of me that always loves my life, never tires

of what it takes, this in-and-out, this open-and-shut in the dark chest of me,

tireless, without muscle or bone, all flex and flux and blind

will, little mouth widening, opening and opening and, then, snapping

shut, shuddering anemone entirely of darkness, sea creature

of the spangled and sparkling sea, down, down where light cannot reach.

When the technician stoops, flips a switch, the most unpopular kid in the class

stands off-stage with a metal sheet, shaking it while Lear raves.

So this is the house where love lives, a tin shed in a windstorm,

tin shed at the sea’s edge, the land’s edge,

waters wild and steady, wild and steady, wild.

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​For more information on Suzanne Cleary, please click here.

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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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