““I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart” ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
—
You said you would like
to make me dinner. I would like
to make you hungry.
Dorothea Lasky, “You Are Beautiful”
but don’t read this poem whose title implies I think you’re old but you are at least older than me time passing makes everyone old unless death and I don’t want that which is not to say I’m terrified but don’t not read this poem because you’ve died! I’d rather insult you what I mean is—oh look! I think the rookie cops are graduating today Times Square is a sea of blues there’s a secret staircase at the other end of the shuttle platform that takes me right to my therapist’s office but you don’t live here anymore anyway Alice I haven’t got much time or maybe I have no one knows and I want to tell you that all the people who say they love me are siphoning me, feeding off me not like they did when they were babies but eating away at me and for a while my soul seemed to fly out of my body but I didn’t know that’s what had happened didn’t know I was a living dead they talk about in sci fi books until today when it flew back in and I woke up with my soul intact and the days of rain made my city as clean as it can get I ran around the bridle path in Central Park not dressed warmly enough and like a good horse my breath soft and white in the air and I listened to a podcast of Dharma talks they chanted may all sentient beings feel and know happiness and the causes of happiness I do today feel happy and now on the subway just read your poem “poem” that starts with your kids talking and thought “oh look children in poems!” but you’re old now and maybe I am too we already did that lived that life with young children and while I was running I really felt happy, felt I knew the cause of happiness, felt my soul had returned to my body and shuddered to realize how like the living dead I’d been but you seem so alive to me your language so human angry real happy and also the cause of these things—I’m passing the day care now on a bus to pick up my middle son and take him to therapy I won’t apologize for saying so my oldest boy is walking home alone which he doesn’t like to do oh how I must trust the universe how it fills and siphons me but you with your fuck-you beauty and siren song [End Page 184] but no, not siren you’re not stopping the boats but rather pushing us along—what I want to know is how to be old and strong and not care so much by which I mean care so much as I do and always will but not care about how much I care my therapist asked do you lose a lot of hands in poker? and said I was a bad negotiator said I tolerate too much emotional chaos and put the needs of others before my own but what? I asked is the alternative? and he gave me nothing maybe because I’m a bad negotiator? “how could a woman write an epic?” you wrote “how could she now if she were to decide the times called for one” but you did even though you wrote that women are more likely to write something “lyric/(elegiac) or polemical rather than epic or near-epic” so I’m asking you not just how to be old but how to be a woman as my girlhood if I ever had one is over now really gone and the sharp fear I feel when my son does not call when he says he will—how can any mother write an epic when—my fear receding behind his small-voiced apology (a little hard nodule in my right breast) safe—when I’m so terribly interruptible [End Page 185]
by Rachel Zucker, Ploughshares, Spring 2012
“I feel no madness in my desire to bite into stars, but the Earth still exists. And the first truth resides in the Earth and in the body. Here I am, returned to my body. To return to my body.When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful: I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. If the brilliance of the stars causes eternal pain, if remote communication is possible, it’s because something resembling a star glimmers inside me.”
— Clarice Lispector
She waits in the jungle beside a dirt road
Dead ends into Turnbull Bay, pelicans,
Skeets, close heat, no-see-ums, armadillos
Scratching in the dead leaves beneath the poison-tip
Blades of the killer fans of the yucca gloriosa. Headlights
Ply the dust. Pulling himself out, blinking hard, no reason,
Presents himself to his fare, he’s a 50 something hillbilly skinny,
Damp hair, chews on the remains of a menthol smoker’s
Cough; a juiceless ghoul in a Members Only Jacket,
Gray socks, a blood sugar tester, driving a ‘90 88
In a 2 car fleet run out of a Locksmith’s shack.
She laughs, a little nervous, pictures centaurs assaulted
By ten million stars, dreams of Voltaire’s secular
Angels, a magical technology and fetal abductions. He starts
To wheeze, a vacuum of awkward pity opens up
And she goes weak in the knees. What happens next,
She tells it better. “I’ll do it if you want.” He couldn’t
Hear, she opened her mouth, he gave up only a little prod.
It was like an apology for how beautiful she was.
“I think I feel that I would give a great deal to share with you the daily happiness. But you know that if there is anything I could ever give you, I would give it, but perhaps the only thing to give is to be oneself with people.”
— Virginia Woolf to Gwen Raverat, 11 March 1925
“No, it’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you. If it touched, if it tasted you, each of its three hearts would turn red.”
— Mary Szybist, from “The Lushness of It”
filled/ with longing to be filled
You are in a very high tree.
If you jump
you will live a full life
while falling.
You will get married
to a hummingbird
and raise beautiful part-
hummingbirds.
You will die of cancer
in mid-air.
I will not lie.
It will be painful.
You are a brave little boy
or girl.