Alison McGhee's Blog, page 17

Poem of the Week, by Barbara Hamby

Tweet



How to Pray

- Barbara Hamby

Falling down on your knees is the easy part, like drinking

a glass of cold water on a hot day, the parched straw

of your throat flooded, your knees hitting the ground,

a prizefighter in the final rounds. You’re bloody,

your bones like iron ties, hands trembling in the dust. What

do you do with your hands? Clasp them together

as if you’re keeping your heart between your palms,

like their namesakes in the desert oasis,

because that’s what you’re looking for now, a place

where you can rest. It has been a dry ride for months,

sand filling your mouth, crusting your half-blind eyes,

and you need to speak to someone—though who

you don’t really know. Pardon is on your mind. Perhaps

you could talk to your mother. You are fifteen

and think her life is over. You don’t say it, but you think it,

and she’s ten years younger than you are now,

her hair still dark. How do you thank her for waking up

each morning and taking on a day that would kill you

and not just one but thousands? How do you thank her

for the way she tossed words around and made them

spin and laugh and do cartwheels on the lawn?

And your father, he’s the one who loved poetry,

bought the book that opened your world to you

like someone cutting into a birthday cake the gods

have baked just for her. Do you talk to him about not caring

and teaching you that same cool touch?

And King James, how do you thank him for all the words

his scribes took from Wycliff and Tyndall, and Keats

for his odes, and Neruda for his. But this wasn’t meant to be a prayer

of thanksgiving but a scourge with a hair shirt and whips

and bowls of gruel. But is it blood the gods need,

or should your offering be all you have—words

and too many of them to count on the fingers pressed to your lips,

or maybe not enough and never the right ones.

–​For more information about ​​Barbara Hamby, please click here: http://www.barbarahamby.com/biography/​

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Patricia Smith

Tweet



When the Burning Begins

- Patricia Smith

for Otis Douglas Smith, my father



The recipe for hot water cornbread is simple:

Cornmeal, hot water. Mix till sluggish,

then dollop in a sizzling skillet.

When you smell the burning begin, flip it.

When you smell the burning begin again,

dump it onto a plate. You’ve got to wait

for the burning and get it just right.

Before the bread cools down,

smear it with sweet salted butter

and smash it with your fingers,

crumple it up in a bowl

of collard greens or buttermilk,

forget that I’m telling you it’s the first thing

I ever cooked, that my daddy was laughing

and breathing and no bullet in his head

when he taught me.

Mix it till it looks like quicksand, he’d say.

Till it moves like a slow song sounds.

We’d sit there in the kitchen, licking our fingers

and laughing at my mother,

who was probably scrubbing something with bleach,

or watching Bonanza,

or thinking how stupid it was to be burning

that nasty old bread in that cast iron skillet.

When I told her that I’d made my first-ever pan

of hot water cornbread, and that my daddy

had branded it glorious, she sniffed and kept

mopping the floor over and over in the same place.

So here’s how you do it:

You take out a bowl, like the one

we had with blue flowers and only one crack,

you put the cornmeal in it.

Then you turn on the hot water and you let it run

while you tell the story about the boy

who kissed your cheek after school

or about how you really want to be a reporter

instead of a teacher or nurse like Mama said,

and the water keeps running while Daddy says

You will be a wonderful writer

and you will be famous someday and when

you get famous, if I wrote you a letter and

sent you some money; would you write about me?

and he is laughing and breathing and no bullet

in his head. So you let the water run into this mix

till it moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,

which is another thing Daddy said, and even though

I’d never even seen a river,

I knew exactly what he meant.

Then you turn the fire way up under the skillet,

and you pour in this mix

that moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,

like quicksand, like slow song sounds.

That stuff pops something awful when it first hits

that blazing skillet, and sometimes Daddy and I

would dance to those angry pop sounds,

he’d let me rest my feet on top of his

while we waltzed around the kitchen

and my mother huffed and puffed

on the other side of the door. When you are famous,

Daddy asks me, will you write about dancing

in the kitchen with your father?

I say everything I write will be about you,

then you will be famous too. And we dip and swirl

and spin, but then he stops.

And sniffs the air.

The thing you have to remember

about hot water cornbread

is to wait for the burning

so you know when to flip it, and then again

so you know when it’s crusty and done.

Then eat it the way we did,

with our fingers,

our feet still tingling from dancing.

But remember that sometimes the burning

takes such a long time,

and in that time,

sometimes,

poems are born.

–

​For more information on Patricia Smith, please click here: http://www.wordwoman.ws/​

–

My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Gary Soto

Tweet



Oranges

Gary Soto

The first time I walked

With a girl, I was twelve,

Cold, and weighted down

With two oranges in my jacket.

December.  Frost cracking

Beneath my steps, my breath

Before me, then gone,

As I walked toward

Her house, the one whose

Porch light burned yellow

Night and day, in any weather.

A dog barked at me, until

She came out pulling

At her gloves, face bright

With rouge.  I smiled,

Touched her shoulder, and led

Her down the street, across

A used car lot and a line

Of newly planted trees,

Until we were breathing

Before a drugstore.  We

Entered, the tiny bell

Bringing a saleslady

Down a narrow aisle of goods.

I turned to the candies

Tiered like bleachers,

And asked what she wanted -

Light in her eyes, a smile

Starting at the corners

Of her mouth.  I fingered

A nickel in my pocket,

And when she lifted a chocolate

That cost a dime,

I didn’t say anything.

I took the nickel from

My pocket, then an orange,

And set them quietly on

The counter.  When I looked up,

The lady’s eyes met mine,

And held them, knowing

Very well what it was all

About.

Outside,

A few cars hissing past,

Fog hanging like old

Coats between the trees.

I took my girl’s hand

in mine for two blocks,

Then released it to let

Her unwrap the chocolate.

I peeled my orange

That was so bright against

The gray of December

That, from some distance,

Someone might have thought

I was making a fire in my hands.

–

​For more information about Gary Soto, please click here: http://www.garysoto.com/​

–

My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

My baby done graduated

Tweet

She was a scruffy little thing when they handed her to me. Fingers in mouth. Brushy black hair worn off in back from scrubbing her head back and forth on the crib mattress. Skinny legs kicking wildly below a little sleeveless purple-and-white striped number.

She was handed over to me in a stuffy room in an office building 6,824 miles from Minneapolis. It was suffocatingly hot that summer and we were both sweaty. For one second, as I held my arms out to her and she looked at me for the first time, she screwed up her face to cry.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” I said in Chinese, desperate to soothe her. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to have so much fun. I promise you.”

She stared at me and listened, her face still twisted in fear and confusion. Then she took the fingers out of her mouth and gave me a huge smile, a smile that made her entire body wiggle.

Later that day, when we were alone in the hotel room, I laid her down on my stomach in her diaper. She stared at me with her deep dark eyes and wiggled and smiled. She took her fingers out of her mouth, stuck them back in. I played peek a boo and she laughed a throaty little chuckle of a laugh.

When I had to get up to go to the bathroom I put her in her crib and her dark, dark eyes followed me across the room.

In a restaurant a few days later, four waitresses took turns holding her. When they realized I spoke Chinese they beckoned me to a corner and, unsmiling, told me that I had to tell her something when she got older.

Tell her she was wanted, they said. Explain to her about the one-child policy. Tell her about us, here in this restaurant, and how we thought she was beautiful and funny. No matter what anyone ever says, don’t ever let her think she wasn’t wanted.

On the flight to Minneapolis she slept and stared out the window and sucked down bottle after bottle and wiggled her legs and laughed. The pilot gave her some plastic wings and she stuck them in her mouth.

6,824 miles later, at midnight, we landed.

There have been many miles since.

How many trips we have been on together, her riding shotgun, me driving. Through the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains and the White Mountains. Down south, hugging the Mississippi and then venturing east to the southern wilds of the Florida panhandle.

Driving west from Minneapolis, feeling the earth swell and rise beneath the car, all the way to Idaho and then heading north to the Canadian Rockies. Most recently down the Pacific Coast Highway in the rain and clouds, Big Sur in the mist, stopping to listen to the sea lions on the rocks.

Hundreds, thousands of miles. She is my road warrior daughter. Dozens of playlists masterminded by her: one perfect song after another. She long ago stopped sticking those two fingers in her mouth, but her dark, dark eyes are as observant as ever.

We play a game I think of as Sure. She points and asks, I answer.

Mom, can I have an elephant?

Sure.

Mom, can we live there?

Sure.

Mom, can I quit school and we’ll go on an around the world trip?

Sure.

Once, a few years ago, we flew eastward, back over those same thousands of miles to the land she was born in. We hiked the Great Wall in 106 degree heat, ate dumplings, melted into the middle of crowds to cross the terrifying streets.

She weighed almost nothing in the beginning. She couldn’t sit up by herself and her  big brother and sister liked to haul her around like a floppy stuffed animal. When she was little her main goal in life was to make them laugh, and she was very good at that task.

She didn’t walk until she was almost two but once she did, she was an unstoppable force of nature. She used to throw herself at the car windows if we passed a playground. She zipped around the block on her trike or scooter or rollerblades. She would shriek like a tiny madwoman if anyone tried to keep her off the slide or the swings.

Eighteen years went by.

Now she’s asleep upstairs, having just gotten home from the all-night high school graduation party. Her purple cap and purple gown are crumpled on the dining room table. Her dog waits patiently for her to wake up. When she does, she will pet him and then drink a mug of strong black coffee.

Come the end of August she will be living 1463 miles away from me, when in all these years since I met her she has never been farther than a few blocks.

Once she didn’t exist. Then she was born. Then I flew a long way to meet her, and we came home to a world that was new because we were new to each other, just getting to know each other, figuring each other out.

What am I trying to say here? Nothing that isn’t a cliche. A cliche about how the day you meet your baby, time slows down inside but speeds up outside. How the years whirl by until the night comes when you’re sitting in a huge auditorium while someone at a microphone is calling out name after name, and your daughter steps across the stage, smiling and shaking hand after hand.

You applaud and smile but inside you’re remembering that very first moment, when she looked at you and almost cried, but didn’t.

I still have the journal I kept about her all those years ago, tucked in a cardboard box with the tiny purple striped outfit, her original passport, the first photo I ever saw of her.

Now I look at the journal and think, She wasn’t even born yet when you began this thing. Strange. But that’s how babies begin. How parenthood begins. You dream about something that doesn’t yet exist.

Miles to go before we sleep.

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Fraser

Tweet



At the Degas Exhibit

- Gregory Fraser

The docent wends us to The Dance Class

and it all flits back: the studio downtown,

few bucks an hour, ragging off the finger

grease of toe-shoed cygnets, tutu-ed swans,

who glided hardwood blind to both

of me—spray of acne, high-top Keds.

I would clatter on the local after school

(weekends once the Christmas pageant neared),

my face, at every stop, floating outside

the window by my seat—a mask

tried on by stars in movie ads, commuters

cooling heels for later cars. Then Windex,

buff, till six, waving hello, farewell,

from glass to glass, plié to pointe—my hand

emitting squeaks, eliding dainty prints and streaks.

In my knapsack: comics, Catcher, lunch

untouched. And never once did I happen on

the courage even to speak to one of those

sugarplums of Rittenhouse, Society Hill.

Degas’s girls, our guide informs, practice

attitudes, inspected by their master

(one Jules Perrot) propped on his staff.

Note the Parisian mothers dabbed

on the wall in back. Yet I see only tights

that bear the stamp Massey Dance, hear

gripes about third position, giddy talk

of boys, and search the sides and corners

for my Old World counterpart—some

sponge-and-bucket kid from a ragged edge—

undersized, nearsighted, invisible to art.

–

​For more information on Gregory Fraser, please click here: ​
​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_...​

–

My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

From the archives, because it’s graduation central around here.

Tweet

Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self

Dear self,

This is the only photo I could find of you. You held an instamatic out in front of you, hoping somehow to capture your own face, and pressed the little black button. I remember exactly when you took that photo. You had just gotten out of the shower. You were wearing cut-offs and that blue workshirt you wore every day back then.

You wondered if maybe you could capture something in a photo that would tell you something you didn’t know about yourself.

Now I look at that photo and I think: You were on the verge. Of so much.

You don’t think of yourself as unhappy right now. You go to high school out in the country, you have friends, you belong to a bunch of things. You don’t think of yourself as lonely.

But in retrospect, you’re waiting and you don’t even know it. You’re waiting for the doors of your life to blow open, for the sky to lift high overhead.

What can I tell you now, from this long perspective of time?

You can let up some. You think you have to push yourself every day, that you have to maintain some high rigid standard, be ultra-disciplined, but you don’t. Why are you setting your alarm every morning for 4:45? So sleepy.

Then again, that discipline will come in handy years later, when you have three little kids –yes! you do end up with three kids, just like you wanted!– and you get up at four because it’s the only time you can write in silence.

So many things that you think matter so much right now do not, in the end, matter. Or they matter, but in a way that you’re too young to understand yet.

That one night you’re thinking about, when they took off and left you there? When you get to my age, instead of blaming yourself –too ugly, too boring, all my fault– you’ll shrug and think, it’s clear that whatever I was back then, I at least wasn’t mean.

All those times on the schoolbus, in school, walking the dirt roads past broken-down trailers, when you feel helpless in the face of others’ pain, will eventually be transformed into art. Even if you feel right now as if you’ll break apart from it, it will be worth it.

Most everything that you are going to live through will, in the end, be worth it.

It’s too late to go back and re-do things, but if I could, I’d tell you a few things that you’re too young to know:

When your grandmother and your father and your mother tell you not to change your plans, that the tickets are nonrefundable, that he knew how much you loved him, don’t listen to them. Go to your grandfather’s funeral, because when you don’t, you will forever regret it.

You don’t need to wash your hair every day.

Don’t listen when people tell you that love fades, that it becomes humdrum, ordinary, that this is the way it is for everyone. It’s not.

You are not ugly the way you fear you are.

Don’t be so afraid, out of self-consciousness, of trying things that it seems as if everyone around you already knows how to do. Skiing, for example. In two years you’re going to go to a college that has its own snow bowl; learn to ski.

Four years from now, when that boy you have the massive crush on comes to your room in Hepburn Hall with a bottle of wine and a bunch of roses, invite him in. Do not stand there in dumb shyness, your heart beating like a hummingbird’s, and thank him politely and watch his face fall and say goodnight and shut the door. Because that’s something else you’re going to regret forever.

When you’re afraid of something, tell someone.

When you need help, ask for it.

When your insides are whirling around and you feel as if you’re drowning, panicking and desperate, don’t put a calm smile on your face and walk around as if you’re fine.

There are lots of people who would love to help you.

There are lots of people who love you. You don’t know that yet, but you will.

In some ways, you’re going to live your life in reverse of most people your age. Awful things are going to happen to you when you’re young, and you’re going to feel much older than your friends. For many years your interior will not match your exterior.

But guess what? Time will go by, and your friends will catch up to you. Life catches up to everyone. The older you get the happier you get, the more rebellious, the less willing to suffer fools, to put up with bad behavior. You’re going to feel so free when you get older.

You are going to be so much happier when you’re older than you can believe possible right now. Most of that happiness will come when you let go of trying to come across a certain way, when you just let people see you for who you are.

It makes me sad that this is going to take you a long time to learn, and I wish I could change it for you, but I can’t.

So many years from the day you held that camera out and hoped this photo would reveal something you couldn’t explain, something you wanted so badly to know about yourself, you will look at it and feel this big sweep of love for that young girl, her whole life stretching out before her, as if she isn’t you.

But she is.

 

 

Poem of the Week, by Sharon Olds

Tweet

Feared Drowned

- Sharon Olds

Suddenly nobody knows where you are,

your suit black as seaweed, your bearded

head slick as a seal’s.

Somebody watches the kids. I walk down the

edge of the water, clutching the towel

like a widow’s shawl around me.

None of the swimmers is just right.

Too short, too heavy, clean-shaven,

they rise out of the surf, the water

rushing down their shoulders.

Rocks stick out near shore like heads.

Kelp snakes in like a shed black suit

and I cannot find you.

My stomach begins to contract as if to

vomit salt water

when up the sand toward me comes

a man who looks very much like you,

his beard matted like beach grass, his suit

dark as a wet shell against his body.

Coming closer, he turns out

to be you – or nearly.

Once you lose someone it is never exactly

the same person who comes back.

 

For more information on Sharon Olds, please click here: http://www.sharonolds.net/biography/

My Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alison...

Poem of the Week, by Ted Kooser

Tweet

Mother

- Ted Kooser

Mid April already, and the wild plums

bloom at the roadside, a lacy white

against the exuberant, jubilant green

of new grass an the dusty, fading black

of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,

only the delicate, star-petaled

blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.

You have been gone a month today

and have missed three rains and one nightlong

watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar

from six to eight while fat spring clouds

went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,

a storm that walked on legs of lightning,

dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

The meadowlarks are back, and the finches

are turning from green to gold. Those same

two geese have come to the pond again this year,

honking in over the trees and splashing down.

They never nest, but stay a week or two

then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts

burning in circles like birthday candles,

for this is the month of my birth, as you know,

the best month to be born in, thanks to you,

everything ready to burst with living.

There will be no more new flannel nightshirts

sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card

addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.

You asked me if I would be sad when it happened

and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house

now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots

green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,

as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.

Were it not for the way you taught me to look

at the world, to see the life at play in everything,

I would have to be lonely forever.

–

​For more information on Ted Kooser, please click here: http://tedkooser.net/​

–

My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Kate Clanchy

Tweet



Timetable

- Kate Clanchy

We all remember school, of course:

the lino warming, shoe bag smell, expanse

of polished floor. It’s where we learned

to wait: hot cheeked in class, dreaming,

bored, for cheesy milk, for noisy now.

We learned to count, to rule off days,

and pattern time in coloured squares:

purple English, dark green Maths.

We hear the bells, sometimes,

for years, the squeal and crack

of chalk on black. We walk, don’t run,

in awkward pairs, hoping for the open door,

a foreign teacher, fire drill. And love

is long aertex summers, tennis sweat,

and somewhere, someone singing flat.

The art room, empty, full of light.

–

​For more information on Kate Clanchy, please click here: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/kate-clanchy​

–

My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by William Butler Yeats

Tweet



The Song of Wandering Aengus

- William Butler Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

–

​For more information on Yeats, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-butler-yeats​

–

My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts