"Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know."

❤️

“Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

"What you think of me is none of my business."

Works and Loves by Jane Hirshfield

               1 

Rain fell as a glass 

breaks,

something suddenly everywhere at the same time.

               2 

To live like a painting 

looked into from more than one angle at once —

eye to eye with the doorway,

down at the hair,

up at your own dusty feet. 

               3 

“This is your house,”

said my bird heart to my heart of the cricket, 

and I entered.

               4 

The happy see only happiness,

the living see only life,

the young see only the young,

as lovers believe

they wake always beside one also in love.

               5 

However often I turned its pages,

I kept ending up 

as the same two sentences of the book:

The being of some is: to be. Of others: to be without.

Then I fell back asleep, in Swedish.

               6 

A sheep grazing is unimpressed by the mountain

but not by its flies.

               7 

The grief

of what hasn’t yet happened —

a door closed from inside.

The weight of the grass 

dividing

an ant’s five-legged silence

walking through it.

               8 

What is the towel, what is the water, 

changes,

though of we three, 

only the towel can be held upside down in the sun.

               9 

“I was once.”

Said not in self-pity or praise.

This dignity we allow barn owl, 

ego, oyster.

Round by James Hoch

Perhaps you covet something of 

               its emptiness, its uselessness 

in matters of  yearning or feeling 

               another’s yearn, that it can’t 

know a damn thing, yet damns 

               everything it touches: the water 

it gathers along its passage, 

               the air it pushes through,

swallow-like. It is no bird,

               though you envy the song 

you hear only after it’s gone, 

               even if  it sings through paper, 

a goat, the neck of a man 

               wearing a scarf that tufts just as 

the rest of   him flies out of

               his shoes and collapses in dirt.

Or, how it is like the dirt

               receiving him, the privilege 

of not knowing if   he was 

              kind or unkind, as you

chamber another, waiting for 

              someone to come for his shoes.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Related Poem Content D

i

Tell me it was for the hunger

& nothing less. For hunger is to give

the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light

whittled down by another war

is all that pins my hand

to your chest.

i

You, drowning

between my arms —

stay.

You, pushing your body

into the river

only to be left

with yourself —

stay.

i

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after

backhanding

mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel

in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.

And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing

to surrender.

i

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.

Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.

Say autumn despite the green

in your eyes. Beauty despite

daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn

mounting in your throat.

My thrashing beneath you

like a sparrow stunned

with falling.

i

Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.

i

I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once.

i

Say amen. Say amend.

Say yes. Say yes

anyway.

i

In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed.

i

In the life before this one, you could tell

two people were in love

because when they drove the pickup

over the bridge, their wings

would grow back just in time.

Some days I am still inside the pickup.

Some days I keep waiting.

i

It’s not too late. Our heads haloed

with gnats & summer too early

to leave any marks.

Your hand under my shirt as static

intensifies on the radio.

Your other hand pointing

your daddy’s revolver

to the sky. Stars falling one

by one in the cross hairs.

This means I won’t be

afraid if we’re already

here. Already more

than skin can hold. That a body

beside a body

must make a field

full of ticking. That your name

is only the sound of clocks

being set back another hour

& morning

finds our clothes

on your mother’s front porch, shed

like week-old lilies.