Category: April 2020

Poem-A-Day April 27: the last tribute of a daughter

The great Irish poet Eavan Boland, who was also my undergraduate advisor, passed away today. Prof. Boland introduced me to so many great poets during my time at Stanford — both on the page, and literally in person. The first full two days of Prof. Boland’s course on Women Poets was spent on Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck.” I think that poem meant a great deal to Prof. Boland, and that it lurks in the background of the poem of hers I am sharing with you today.
Enjoy.
Ellen

And Soul

My mother died one summer—
the wettest in the records of the state.
Crops rotted in the west.
Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens.
Empty deck chairs collected rain.
As I took my way to her
through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly
behind houses
and on curbsides, to pay her
the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something
I remembered
I heard once, that the body is, or is
said to be, almost all
water and as I turned southward, that ours is
a city of it,
one in which
every single day the elements begin
a journey towards each other that will never,
given our weather,
fail—
     the ocean visible in the edges cut by it,
cloud color reaching into air,
the Liffey storing one and summoning the other,
salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and,
as if that wasn’t enough, all of it
ending up almost every evening
inside our speech—
coastal canal ocean river stream and now
mother and I drove on and although
the mind is unreliable in grief, at
the next cloudburst it almost seemed
they could be shades of each other,
the way the body is
of every one of them and now
they were on the move again—fog into mist,
mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze
that lay on the railings of
the house she was dying in
as I went inside.

■
“And Soul” appears in poet Eavan Boland’s 2007 collection Domestic Violence.

Poem-A-Day April 25: I Worried

I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not, how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

■
“I Worried” appears in poet Mary Oliver’s 2010 collection Swan: Poems and Prose Poems.

Poem-A-Day April 24: left & sight / north & mouth

Babel & Juice

undo me
left & sight
north & mouth
uncompass me
with your tender
your further
& sideways
impossibilities
come on
murk me blue me
knock me out out
of me my
tight &
goodly just sweetly
behead me
with your babel
& juice your fiddle
your ruse your
arson your trees your
armpits your fishes
your loco your lilts
your mango
your licks

■
“Babel & Juice” appears in poet Chen Chen’s 2017 collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities.

Poem-A-Day April 23: Things That Don’t Suck

Hello Friends,
A recording of a 2014 draft of this poem is available from spoken word artist and poet Andrea Gibson on Facebook here. The text below is from a more recent poster version available from the merch table at shows.
Enjoy.
<3 Ellen.

Things That Don’t Suck

Salamanders. Rotary phones. Super woman capes. Hopscotch chalk. Unicycles. Hiccups while kissing. Pole Vaults. Gumball machines. Leprechauns. Music Boxes. Welcome Mats. Hand-me-down lockets. Train rides. Carnivals. Record players. Sewing kits. Barbershop chairs. Bubbles. Chestnuts. Barnacle hugs. Door frames. Melted crayons. Soldiers in the airport on their way home. Icicles. Time capsules. Hourglasses. Recess bells. Thrift store coffee mugs. Lost and found boxes. Go-Carts. Tambourines. Fire pits. Paper boats. Snap peas. Snowflakes. Bay windows. Porch swings. Dance routines. Macaroni necklaces. Flying ladybugs. High fives. Ferris wheels. Extra buttons. Crooked teeth. Dust drawings. Bearded women. Fabric stores. Turtle faces. Sleepovers. Mixed Tapes. Grandmothers. Freckles. Lily pads. Farmers’ tans. Windpipes. Accordions. Anyone willing to play the shakers in a band. The day I was so in love I mistook a nuclear power plant for a lighthouse. French kisses. The smell of a dog’s paw. Thumb wars. Letters in the mailbox. The things we never ordered but still arrived. Riding in the back of a pick-up truck beneath a holy New England sky. Banjo strings. Best friends. Tutus on boys. Tutus on girls. Hummingbirds. Whittle sticks. Hail collections. Rocking chairs. Thimbles. Love notes. Cigar boxes. Screen doors. Clawfoot tubs. Hopechests. Skateboard parks. Mismatched socks. Airplane sky-writing proposals. Baby giraffes. Beaver teeth. Porch lights. Tiny houses. Tire swings. Dandelion snow. Drive-in movie dates. Bathrooms without scales. Shitty poems. Chugging calming tea. Sex with the lights on. Sex with the lights off. Basketball hoops in dirt driveways in Iowa. Snort laughs. Sexy librarians. Vegan chocolate chip cookies. Boomboxes in the car when the stereo breaks. Slip N’ Slides. Butterflies that remember being caterpillars. Staying alive.

■

Poem-A-Day April 22: Ask me if I speak for the nautilus

Hello Friends,
It’s Earth Day, so we’re going to listen to Camille T. Dungy speak for the nautilus today.
<3 ellen

Characteristics of Life

A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.
— BBC Nature News


Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
          speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
               of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
                    I speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.

Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
          one thing today and another tomorrow
     and I will be as consistent as anything alive
on this earth.

          I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.

Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that’s all you know to ask of me.

Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances
     between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
                    I will speak
          the impossible hope of the firefly.

               You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
     such wordless desire.

To say it is mindless is missing the point.

■

Poem-A-Day April 21: Unaccompanied

Venice, Unaccompanied

Waking
on the train, I thought
we were attacked

          by light:
chrome-winged birds
hatching from the lagoon.

          That first day
the buoys were all
that made the harbor

          bearable:
pennies sewn into a hemline.
Later I learned to live in it,

          to walk
through the alien city—
a beekeeper’s habit—

          with fierce light
clinging to my head and hands.
Treated as gently as every

          other guest—
each house’s barbed antennae
trawling for any kind

          of weather—
still I sobbed in a glass box
on an unswept street

          with the last
few lire ticking like fleas
off my phonecard I’m sorry

          I can’t
stand this, which
one of us do you love?

■
“Venice, Unaccompanied” appears in poet Monica Youn’s 2003 collection Barter. Thank you to Rick Barot for introducing me to this poem.

Poem-A-Day April 19: Variation on the Word Sleep

Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
toward your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

■
“Variation on the Word Sleep” appears in Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems II: 1976 – 1986.

Margaret Atwood was also featured for Poem-a-day, April 21, 2008.