Sheep

It is the work of feeling

to undo expectation.

A black-faced sheep

looks back at you as you pass

and your heart is startled

as if by the shadow

of someone once loved.

Neither comforted by this

nor made lonely.

Only remembering

that a self in exile is still a self,

as a bell unstruck for years

is still a bell.

Jane Hirshfield

The Intake Questionnaire for the Pain Clinic Ask if Pain Has Prevented Me From Having a Fulfilling Life

All year the line between inside

and out has been hard to cross

but spring opens the gate.

I hear the sun calling. I hear

the magnolia tree down the block

calling. I go to the tree. I go

to the grocery store for coconut

I Left My House Today ice cream.

I think I see an ex waiting

in the line outside when I leave

but she has a mask on and last

I heard lived in another city.

I don’t want her to see me

because I don’t want to go back

to being the person I was

when she loved me. I want

to keep who I am now

despite my deep exhaustion.

Time reinvents itself so often

I forget I’ve always lived

in this body, on this planet. Inside,

I fantasize about going back

to the patio chairs in the middle

of the still-sunlit street and calling

Libby, but after climbing the stairs

to our apartment’s front door

I need the couch to hold me up.

I’m so used to shedding

my ambitions that it almost looks

graceful when I do it now. In all

my daydreams I have the energy

to call my friends. Rest my body

in a river of their voices.

Kyla Jamieson

Wolf Moon 

Hold on, they said, but she was tiny and let
the kite go flying above tears and treetops.
The kite had a will of its own, and its will
was wind which carried it the way love carries
surrender and forgiveness. I was right behind
and watched until hope was a speck and gone.
I’d have let it swoop me up the way a bird
of prey lifts a rabbit or a mouse, not afraid
to rub my nose in sky and roll about in deep
fields of snow far above cirrostratus.
Not afraid to let bliss devour me whole.
Or grief, if I must live my forever in orbit
with the Wolf Moon as it prowls night
after night howling for the wilderness we lost.

Susan Mitchell

Sunrise

You can

die for it–

an idea,

or the world. People

have done so,

brilliantly,

letting

their small bodies be bound

to the stake,

creating

an unforgettable

fury of light. But

this morning,

climbing the familiar hills

in the familiar

fabric of dawn, I thought

of China,

and India

and Europe, and I thought

how the sun

blazes

for everyone just

so joyfully

as it rises

under the lashes

of my own eyes, and I thought

I am so many!

What is my name?

What is the name

of the deep breath I would take

over and over

for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is

happiness, it is another one

of the ways to enter

fire.

Mary Oliver

 

Wounds

I have been wounded so often and so painfully,

dragging my way home at the merest crawl,

impaled not only by malicious tongues—

one can be wounded even by a petal.

And I myself have wounded—quite unwittingly—

with casual tenderness while passing by,

and later someone felt the pain,

it was like walking barefoot over the ice.

So why do I step upon the ruins

of those most near and dear to me,

I, who can be so simply and so sharply wounded

and can wound others with such deadly ease?

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Translated by Arthur Boyars and Simon Franklin

I want to live the rest of my life, 

however long or short, 

with as much sweetness 

as I can decently manage, 

loving all the people I love, 

and doing as much as I can 

of the work I still have to do. 

I am going to write fire 

until it comes out of my ears, 

my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. 

Until it's every breath I breathe. 

I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!

Audre Lorde

Document

The day is winter bright. I blink against it.

Each time the sun glints in my eyes,

each time I close my lids & let them go

orange & freckled with light,

my mind files it into a folder

that contains every other time

it’s happened before: folders nested

inside folders going back, I imagine,

to one morning standing in my crib,

waiting for my mother to reach down

& lift me out, the sun keeping me

company until her arms appeared.

In the file: sun, sun_2, sun_3,

sun_75, sun_700. Each a document

I can return to & open, even revising

old experience with new thinking.

As if the eye has its own memory—

not the mind’s eye but the eye’s mind—

cataloging material it claims as its own.

Cataloging as long as I live. Sun_7000,

sun_final, sun_final_revised, sun_final_final. 

Maggie Smith

An Old Story

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 

 

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful 

Dream. The worst in us having taken over 

And broken the rest utterly down. 

 

                                                                 A long age 

Passed. When at last we knew how little 

Would survive us—how little we had mended 

 

Or built that was not now lost—something 

Large and old awoke. And then our singing 

Brought on a different manner of weather. 

 

Then animals long believed gone crept down 

From trees. We took new stock of one another. 

We wept to be reminded of such color. 

 

Tracy K. Smith

❤️

What Was Told, That

What was said to the rose that made it open was said
to me here in my chest.

What was told the cypress that made it strong
and straight, what was

whispered the jasmine so it is what it is, whatever made
sugarcane sweet, whatever

was said to the inhabitants of the town of Chigil in
Turkestan that makes them

so handsome, whatever lets the pomegranate flower blush
like a human face, that is

being said to me now. I blush. Whatever put eloquence in
language, that's happening here.

The great warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude,
chewing a piece of sugarcane, 

in love with the one to whom every that belongs!

Rumi

If You Feel Sorry

If you feel sorry for yourself
this Valentine's Day, think of
the dozens of little paper poppies
left in the box when the last
of the candy is gone, how they
must feel, dried out and brown
in their sad old heart-shaped box,
without so much as a single finger
to scrabble around in their
crinkled petals, not even
one pimpled nose to root and snort
through their delicate pot pourri.
So before you make too much
of being neglected, I want you
to think how they feel.

Ted Kooser

Valentine 

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

Carol Ann Duffy

The Before Picture

It’s complicated, my relationship status

with progress. I often prefer

the “before” picture. The future

is where I’m going only because

I have no choice, because time

moves in one direction, dragging

a bit of itself behind like meat.

An unseen hand keeps

tugging it—time’s rabbit leg,

time’s hunk of red venison—

just out of reach. Did I just describe

the future as bait? Am I strung

along? I know, when I arrive there,

it won’t be there. Won’t be that.

It’ll be now, the way it is

right now. And again. Refresh,

refresh, refresh. The befores

pile up behind me. It’s now again.

Maggie Smith