This poem reaches back to a time when I thought a lot about relationship endings and what holds us—and doesn’t hold us—together. It takes on a new meaning 18 months into a pandemic that has both bound and divided us.
“And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;”
Artwork by Courtney Tucker
Some poems are just made for celebrating, and this poem went into the poetry box without me knowing that on our street it was a time for celebrating. A neighbor emailed me to say how much the poem “hit the spot.” He and his partner brought home their first baby and he found cummings saying, “this is the birth /
day of life and of love and wings.”
Another reason to feel glad? The poetry box has letters now, designed by the talented Elena Eidelberg. There is no doubting what sits behind that plexiglass display.
“i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky”
All these years, I didn’t know that Tony Hoagland had written a poem about Barton Springs, and I discovered it the same weekend I went to the springs for the first time in years, still using the paper swim pass a friend gave me in 2002 when he moved away from Austin. I went with out-of-town friends, after a hike on the hot and dusty greenbelt, and I agree that it is a marvel. So is this poem. Truly, I hope Tony Hoagland found his way to the water many times before he died.
“Now, because all things are joyful by water,
there just might be time to catch up on praise.”
What fun, what summer fun, this poem! And to affirm this, when I went to change out the poem at the end of the week, every single copy had been taken.
“When toddlers swallow you,
their top lips mustache in color
as if they’ve kissed paint.”
When I threw myself into poetry as a young adult, I threw myself into Stephen Dunn. His poems were plain spoken and sometimes witty and incredibly honest. I carried his poem “A Secret Life” around in my day planner as I went to work and went about sifting through my lists and responsibilities. It ends by affirming what I suspected: “A secret life is that important.” When I learned Dunn had died, I wanted to give him a space on the curb. “Sweetness” seemed the right poem for celebrating his life and his voice.
“ Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive”
Few poems have been as impactful as Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” something I didn’t know until this year, when a colleague and I taught a unit on ekphrastic poetry, poems written in response to works of art. She provided an art historian’s perspective on the Statue of Liberty. I brought in Lazarus’s poem, with its famous lines now written on a plaque on the sculpture’s base.
Lazarus wrote the poem as a donation to an effort to fund the statue, somewhat begrudgingly. She died in 1887, a year after the statue was dedicated. More than 15 years later, the once-forgotten poem found its home on the plaque through Lazarus’s friends, who wanted to give her a fitting memorial. But ultimately, the poem changed how people the world over view the Statue of Liberty. What was intended as a monument of “republican ideals” and the friendship between the U.S. and France became instead an international symbol of hope, of welcome, of the country’s open arms toward immigrants and refugees. And thus it remains.
Lesson over.
This is what poetry can do.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
How much do I love this poem? So much that I asked a friend to read it at my wedding reception, sometime after dinner and before dessert. At another friend’s wedding, I read it to the friends and family gathered around a Texas Hill Country swimming pool, not far from where farmers set out tables along the road to sell baskets of peaches. I read it to my classmates when I graduated from yoga teacher training and to my students just out of love and joy and in the spirit of sharing. And I knew it needed to go in the Poetry Box in the summer, peach season, which just happened to be the very weeks that we were out of town. It’s the first poem put up and taken down by someone else while we were gone. I wanted to share it at just the right time. I hope someone discovered it while ripe fruit waiting on the kitchen counter.
“O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days...”
One of the delights of the Poetry Box is discovering other people who post poems each day or week, mostly on blogs and journals they keep sometimes for years. And thus, the delight of discovering poems I might not have found otherwise. Gary Soto’s poem “Oranges” is among my favorites and I never teach a poetry workshop without including it. But I didn’t know “How Things Work” before now, and now its quirky fun conversationalist lines will forever be part of me.
“If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.”
In my experience, stories of summer are always stories of childhood. This poem captures that beautifully with its raspberries and hiding and soft fruit in the mouth. Mark Jarman was my professor in college, when I knew I loved poetry but didn’t know how to express that love. Thus, putting his work in the Poetry Box is a lovely coming full circle.
“We lie in bed at night, thinking about
The future, always the future...”
It’s a time of peppers and basil and zinnias here, the rain departing and the heat arriving as we always knew it would. I didn’t expect to add another Grace Paley to the box so soon, but her matter-of-fact voice seemed right for this moment. In only days the leaves of the vegetables will start to crisp and the electric utilities will tell us to back off the a/c because the system can’t handle it.
“I had another day in mind
something like this one”
This is one of those old classics, a poem that I have heard read aloud at gatherings, a poem I have been moved to have given to me by a colleague. After we rest, we get up again. We dive in again. We return to the work of the world.
“But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.”
It rained and rained and rained. And I chose this poem to capture it and for the little boys wondering at all the water.
“A young boy
in my garden
is bailing out water
from his flower patch”
There comes a time at the end of every academic year when the body and spirit are spent and it is time to begin again. And to make soup. That time for me was this week, and this is the poem I turned to.
“Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.”
Does it get any more beautiful than this?
“Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring”
It was the week we had our first dinner guests, the world slowly opening up post vaccination. They were the same friends we had our final dinner party with just before the pandemic lockdown. A coming full circle. A version of the good life. And it made me think of another, earlier good life, one like the one described in this poem.
“...and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread
Hungry all the time”
A postcard with this poem on it has been tacked above. my spice shelf for more years than I can count. I love it for its simplicity and for its quiet celebration of womanhood and for how gently it contains deep loss. I came to know Tess Gallagher’s work through my love of her husband Raymond Carver’s work. When I was 26 years old I sent Gallagher a postcard expressing my love for Carver’s work and how it encouraged me to be a writer. And to my amazement, she wrote back. Among what she said was “Brava.”
“Nothing can stop
our tenderness”
William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” As I choose a poem each week for the box, I consider where poetry intersects with the news, where the concerns of the immediate moment meet the perpetual concerns of the human condition.
A verdict may come this week in the trial of the police officer who killed George Floyd with a knee to his neck. More black men have been killed by police since the trial began. Demonstrators against policy brutality take to the streets across the country. There remains so much work to be done. And there is this tender and devastating poem by Ross Gay to offer as reminder.
“...like making it easier
for us to breathe”
How often does a poem include the very date of the week it will be posted? And how, when you find one, do you resist? On the day I planned to post this, into my Facebook feed came a request for cheesy bread in Austin. I sent the post writer a suggestion for a Brazilian cheese bread sold at the farmer’s market. And I sent them this poem.
“It’s
April 14th. Spring, with five to ten
Degrees to go.”
Spring spring spring spring spring
The spring poems continue, as the garden greens and flowers pop up from plants that not long ago were brown and dejected. Which, of course, is why we love spring.
“I know what time and weather
will do to every leaf.”
Only, sadly, I forgot to snap the pic this week, so the poem sits in the dim light of my desk.
For several Sundays in a row, I’ve pulled this poem from its folder, itchy to put in the box. Bold and colorful and greedy with life, it’s everything spring offers. Little more than a month ago, yards across Austin were devastated by the worst winter storm in many decades. It seemed impossible that the plants would sprout again. But so much has seemed impossible in these months of pandemic and strife. Limón’s poem doesn’t deny “the mess of us, the hurt, the empty,” but it doesn’t deny the reasons to celebrate amid it all either—beginning with new leaves.
“...it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me”
