That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
1. I talked to my sister in northern Italy and it’s not just me who’s scared and this feels comforting.
2. She says, I’m not even worried, I’m healthy, my family’s healthy, yet I find myself now and then, well, my chest tightens, breaths are hard to suck in, blow out. My throat becomes little.
3. And I’m not even worried.
4. I jump from one piece of writing to the next. I was reading Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead and I know what she’s doing, this semi-comic, over the top recreation of Blake in rural Poland, I get it, but passages like this leave me breathless with anxiety:
We live in a state of siege. If one takes a close look at each fragment of a moment, one might choke with terror. Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memories of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized.
5. I don’t think this is the message of the novel. I believe this is who its quirky, tenacious, indomitable protagonist is. And I also believe Tokarczuk is giving voice to our time of anxiety and grieving.
6. Still not a soothing reading for me now.
7. I flit from poet to poet, grab a morsel here and there.
8. I seek solace. Good, hardy, luminous lines. The feeling that someone is hoping hard out there, like me.
You asked for beauty, and one morning, a small blue eggshell on the stoop, shattered open, its contents gone
Likely eaten
M asked if I’ve ever made a choice to live and why
I lied the way you lie to the suicidal
A few times, I said—not Most days
Most mornings
No, not morning
Morning I am still new
Still possible, I’m still possibly
Usually by 3:00
(from “Beauty” by Solmaz Sharif; image LitHub)
when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up
Excerpt from: “Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980” by Lucille Clifton. Scribd.
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