All my stories are about being left,

all yours about leaving. So we should have known.

Should have known to leave well enough alone;

we knew, and we didn’t. You said let’s put

our cards on the table, your card

was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’t

get till 4 am, so tired from wanting

what we shouldn’t that when we finally found our heads,

we’d lost our minds. Love,I wanted to call you

so fast. But so slow you could taste each

letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear.

L, love, for let’s wait. O, for oh no, let’s not. V

for the precious v between your deep breasts

(and the virtue of your fingers

in the voluptuous center of me.)

 

Okay, E for enough.

 

Dawn broke, or shattered. Once we’ve made

the promises, it’s hard to add the prefix if. . . .

But not so wrong to try.

...

 

You Were You Are Elegy by Mary Jo Bang

Fragile like a child is fragile. 

Destined not to be forever. 

Destined to become other 

To mother. Here I am 

Sitting on a chair, thinking 

About you. Thinking 

About how it was 

To talk to you.

How sometimes it was wonderful 

And sometimes it was awful.

How drugs when drugs were 

Undid the good almost entirely 

But not entirely 

Because good could always be seen 

Glimmering like lame glimmers 

In the window of a shop 

Called Beautiful 

Things Never Last Forever. 

I loved you. I love you. You were. 

And you are. Life is experience. 

It's all so simple. Experience is 

The chair we sit on. 

The sitting. The thinking 

Of you where you are a blank 

To be filled 

In by missing. I loved you. 

I love you like I love 

All beautiful things. 

True beauty is truly seldom. 

You were. You are 

In May. May now is looking onto 

The June that is coming up. 

This is how I measure 

The year. Everything Was My Fault 

Has been the theme of the song 

I've been singing, 

Even when you've told me to quiet. 

I haven't been quiet. 

I've been crying. I think you 

Have forgiven me. You keep 

Putting your hand on my shoulder 

When I'm crying. 

Thank you for that. And 

For the ineffable sense 

Of continuance. You were. You are 

The brightest thing in the shop window

And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.

Ode to History by Mary Jo Bang

Had she not lain on that bed with a boy

All those years ago, where would they be, she wondered.

She and the child that wouldn't have been but was now 

No more. She would know nothing

Of mothering. She would know nothing

Of death. She would nothing

Of love. The three things she'd been given

To remember. Wake me up, please, she said,

When this life is over. Look at her- It's as if

The windows of night have been sewn to her eyes.

Jerusalem by Naomi Shihab Nye

        “Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
         Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
         is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
                        —Tommy Olofsson, Sweden

I’m not interested in

who suffered the most.

I’m interested in

people getting over it.

Once when my father was a boy 

a stone hit him on the head.

Hair would never grow there.

Our fingers found the tender spot

and its riddle: the boy who has fallen

stands up. A bucket of pears

in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.

The pears are not crying.

Later his friend who threw the stone 

says he was aiming at a bird.

And my father starts growing wings.

Each carries a tender spot: 

something our lives forgot to give us.

A man builds a house and says,

“I am native now.”

A woman speaks to a tree in place 

of her son. And olives come.

A child’s poem says,

“I don’t like wars,

they end up with monuments.”

He’s painting a bird with wings

wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

Why are we so monumentally slow?

Soldiers stalk a pharmacy: 

big guns, little pills.

If you tilt your head just slightly

it’s ridiculous.

There’s a place in my brain

where hate won’t grow.

I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.

Something pokes us as we sleep.

It’s late but everything comes next.