Wonder as Wander

At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,

my mother potters around her house.
Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one
there, no one to tell what to do,
she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,
fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly
throws out her arms and screams—high notes
lying here and there on the carpets
like bodies touched by a downed wire,
she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through
the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.
I feel, now, that I do not know her,
and for all my staring, I have not seen her
—like the song she sang, when we were small,
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,
for poor lonely people, like you, and like I
—on the slow evenings alone, when she delays
and delays her supper, walking the familiar
halls past the mirrors and night windows,
I wonder if my mother is tasting a life
beyond this life—not heaven, her late
beloved is absent, her father absent,
and her staff is absent, maybe this is earth
alone, as she had not experienced it,
as if she is one of the poor lonely people,
as if she is born to die. I hold fast
to the thought of her, wandering in her house,
a luna moth in a chambered cage.
Fifty years ago, I'd squat in her
garden, with her Red Queens, and try
to sense the flyways of the fairies as they kept
the pollen flowing on its local paths,
and our breaths on their course of puffs—they kept
our eyes wide with seeing what we
could see, and not seeing what we could not see

-- Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and teacher, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled, 

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle, 

Or a wizened aster in late September, 

I brought her back in again 

For a new routine-- 

Vitamins, water, and whatever 

Sustenance seemed sensible 

At the time: she'd lived 

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer, 

Her shriveled petals falling 

On the faded carpet, the stale 

Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves. 

(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.) 

 The things she endured!-- 

The dumb dames shrieking half the night 

Or the two of us, alone, both seedy, 

Me breathing booze at her, 

She leaning out of her pot toward the window. 

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me-- 

And that was scary-- 

So when that snuffling cretin of a maid 

Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can, 

I said nothing. 

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week, 

I was that lonely.

-- Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) American poet and teacher,  winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1954, for The Waking, two-time National Book Award winner

Narcissus Lullaby

If someone anywhere right now

is imagining me,
saying my name thoughtfully,

with her pink tongue touching
the smooth ceiling of her mouth
softly to pronounce the T,

like the first brush stroke
in a figurative landscape painting of
He-Who-Is-the-Subject-of-This-Poem,

--then I can relax a moment
in the matter of remembering myself,
I can close my eyes and let

the whole factory of identity go
drifting in the dark
like a big brick warehouse full of anxious secrets

in an unsafe neighborhood
gone quiet at the end of day,
yet guarded and protected and caressed

by the softly conscious flashlight
of my imaginary friend's
imagination.

--Tony Hoagland (1953-2018), American poet and teacher

The Clearing

The dog and I push through the ring 
of dripping junipers 
to enter the open space high on the hill 
where I let him off the leash. 

 He vaults, snuffling, between tufts of moss; 
twigs snap beneath his weight; he rolls 
and rubs his jowls on the aromatic earth; 
his pink tongue lolls. 

 I look for sticks of proper heft 
to throw for him, while he sits, prim 
and earnest in his love, if it is love. 

All night a soaking rain, and now the hill 
exhales relief, and the fragrance 
of warm earth. . . . The sedges 
have grown an inch since yesterday, 
and ferns unfurled, and even if they try 
the lilacs by the barn can't 
keep from opening today. 

I longed for spring's thousand tender greens, 
and the white-throated sparrow's call 
that borders on rudeness. Do you know— 
since you went away 
all I can do 
is wait for you to come back to me.

--Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), American poet and translator, from Collected Poems, 2005

Alone for a Week

I washed a load of clothes
and hung them out to dry.
Then I went up to town
and busied myself all day.
The sleeve of your best shirt
rose ceremonious
when I drove in; our night-
clothes twined and untwined in
a little gust of wind.

For me it was getting late;
for you, where you were, not.
The harvest moon was full
but sparse clouds made its light
not quite reliable.
The bed on your side seemed
as wide and flat as Kansas;
your pillow plump, cool,
and allegorical. . . .

--Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), from Collected Poems, 2005



Photo: Laundry drying on a balcony in Cuba, 2017

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountain and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

--Mary Oliver (1935- ), from Dream Work, 1986.