ordinariness is lovely

Take Love for Granted

by Jack Ridl

Assume it's in the kitchen,
under the couch, high
in the pine tree out back,
behind the paint cans
in the garage. Don't try
proving your love
is bigger than the Grand
Canyon, the Milky Way,
the urban sprawl of L.A.
Take it for granted. Take it
out with the garbage. Bring
it in with the takeout. Take
it for a walk with the dog.
Wake it every day, say,
"Good morning." Then
make the coffee. Warm
the cups. Don't expect much
of the day. Be glad when
you make it back to bed.
Be glad he threw out that
box of old hats. Be glad
she leaves her shoes
in the hall. Snow will
come. Spring will show up.
Summer will be humid.
The leaves will fall
in the fall. That's more
than you need. We can
love anybody, even
everybody. But you
can love the silence,
sighing and saying to
yourself, "That' s her."
"That's him." Then to
each other, "I know!
Let's go out for breakfast!"

"Take Love for Granted" by Jack Ridl, from Practicing to walk Like a Heron. © Wayne State University Press, 2013. Reprinted with permission.

perfection

The Layers

 Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes. 

i love this poem

Slowly in Prayer

Matthew Lippman

To be thankful for the Starbucks lady, Lucy,
who is pissed at me for asking too many questions
about my damn phone app
is one thing.
To be thankful for my wife plastering my face to the bathroom floor
with pancake batter
for missing the bus
is another thing.
I tried to be thankful for my eyes this morning
even though one of them is filled with puss
and the other with marigold juice.
Marigold juice is the stuff that comes from the flower
when you put it between your palms and rub, slowly in prayer,
even though nothing comes out.
It’s the imagined juice of God,
the thing you can’t see when you are not being thankful.
I try to be thankful for the lack of energy that is my laziness
and my lonely best friend with no wife and children
knowing I am as lonely as he
with one wife and two daughters.
Sometimes we travel five minutes to the pier in Red Hook
and it takes hours in our loneliness to know, in our thankfulness,
that if we held hands it’d be a quiet romance for the ages.
I’ll admit, I’m thankful for Justin Timberlake
because he’s better than Beethoven
and my friend Aaron
who lived in the woods with an axe and never used it once.
I try hard to forget love,
to abandon love,
so that one day I will actually be able to love.
Until then, I am thankful that Lucy wanted to spit in my coffee,
or imagined that she did,
and thanked her profusely
for showing me which buttons to push
and how to do it, with just the right amount of pressure,
the whole tips of all my fingers dancing like stars
through the blackness
of a mocha latte, black.

“‘Slowly in Prayer’ was written one Sunday morning at Starbucks. The woman who took my order was angry, not at me, but at something, and it was all over her face and in her tone of voice. When I sat down I tried to write myself out of my own anger and into a more beautiful, generous, and, dare I say, sweeter place, so I could move on with my morning.”
—Matthew Lippman

sounds about right

Our Daily Becoming

by Adam Clay

Like animals moving daily
through the same open field,
it should be easier to distinguish
light from dark, fabrications

from memory, rain on a sliver
of grass from dew appearing
overnight. In these moments
of desperation, a sentence

serves as a halo, the moon
hidden so the stars eclipse
our daily becoming. You think
it should be easier to define

one’s path, but with the clouds
gathering around our feet,
there’s no sense in retracing
where we’ve been or where

your tired body will carry you.
Eventually the birds become
confused and inevitable. Even our
infinite knowledge of the forecast

might make us more vulnerable
than we would be in drawn-out
ignorance. To the sun
all weeds eventually rise up.

poem by a mom for the health of her soul

the most powerful thing I read today

Yes

I Want to Write Something So Simply

by Mary Oliver, from Evidence

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself
out of your own heart
had been saying.

Sad, but also kind of awesome...

Learning to Read
Franz Wright

If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.

My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, each time I spoke.

My favorite was The Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names;
but when was I going to pronounce them, and

to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English -

two, he had sufficient cause
to smirk or attack
without prompting from me.

Loneliness boredom and fear
my motivation
fiercely fueled.

I get down on my knees and thank God for them.

Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.

____
A window onto the childhood of Franz Wright, who turned sixty last year and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for Walking to Martha's Vineyard. This poem appears in F, his newest collection.

Scott's is celebrating Spring!

Welcome Spring by taking advantage of my limited-run Print Sale! “A Warm Spring Rain” is on sale this week – offering 25 signed prints at $75.00 each, sized 12x18. Email me at scottsnyderphotography@gmail.com to order by Sunday, April 6. Feel free to share this post if you like. ~Scott Snyder

Lovely

by Scott Snyder, www.scottsnyderphotography.com

If the ocean had a mouth

by Marie-Elizabeth Mali

I'd lean close, my ear

to her whisper and roar,

her tongue scattered

with stars.

She'd belt her brassy voice

over the waves' backbeat.

No one sings better than her.

Would she ever bite

the inside of her cheek?

Would she yell at the moon

to quit tugging at her hem,

or would she whistle, drop

her blue dress and shimmy

through space to cleave

to that shimmer?

What did she mean to say

that morning she spit out

the emaciated whale

wearing a net for a corset?

All this emptying

on the sand. Eyeless

shrimp. Oiled pelicans.

Within her jaws the coral forests,

glittering fish, waves like teeth,

her hungry mortal brine.

Copyright © 2014 by Marie-Elizabeth Mali. Used with permission of the author.

About This Poem 

"As an underwater photographer one of the things I love most about being in the ocean is interacting with a world that has nothing to do with me, a world with its own passions, social structures, dangers. The awareness that we humans are harming that world is always with me so I wondered what the ocean might say if given a chance."

--Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Oh Marie, you get me...

http://theenglishkitchen.blogspot.com/2014/02/mac-and-cheese-on-monday-afternoon.html

Auld Lang Syne is one of the songs I sing to Jack at night to help him sleep. Such a beautiful tune.

Auld Lang Syne

by Jennifer L. Knox

 

Dad couldn't stop crying after Kathy moved him into the facility. When she came to visit, he'd cry and say he wanted to die. He said the same thing to the nurses. This went on for about a month until the doctor put him on an antidepressant especially for Parkinson's patients. The next time Kathy came to visit, she found him in the cafeteria, talking to some of the other residents and not crying at all--just enjoying his lunch. When it was time for her to go, he didn't cry, but rather calmly escorted her to the car. "Do you like this car? My wife and I were thinking about getting one," he told her. "That's very interesting," Kathy smiled, "because I am your wife." Dad chuckled, "Is that right?" He squinted over the palm trees towards the freeway. So many cars. Busy busy busy. "Well, we'll see you later, then," he said, and shook her hand firmly, the way he'd learned to do at Rotary. What funny new friends he was making. 

 

 

Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer L. Knox. Used with permission of the author.

About This Poem 

"Near the end of his life, my father proved to be, at his core, a very polite, chivalrous man. He walked the halls of the facility where he lived, introducing himself and shaking people's hands as he had done at Rotary meetings. He complimented the nurses, 'You have a lovely figure.' He could also eat an entire two-pound box of See's Candies in an afternoon, which requires considerable effort with stage five Parkinson's disease."

--Jennifer L. Knox