because poems are simple, even when life isn't—plus, they don't care what's for dinner
Nudged awake,
in the still-dark morning,
by the sound of her shower’s rainfall—
I’d drag my aqua comforter to the toast-colored carpet
outside Mom’s bathroom. I’d drop the heap
and loll in the folds,
watching mist rise
from the slit of light beneath the door.
Before the tap of words was opened,
I’d ease into the school day,
inhaling her drugstore citrus,
and listening to the downpour
break on her first.
(first published at Mothers Always Write)
Daughter delivered by an attendant:
silent and watchful in your orphanage smock
with the cartoon dog, and pilled mended pants.
A smell of mildew came from your shock
of sweaty, cropped black hair. Stuck to your chest,
in English and Chinese a name tag read
Happy Springtime: a name pressed
upon you by no father, mother. Closeted
from the world before you came to us, as if
in some ancient tomb carving of a child
rising from the grave in a flowing shift.
Freed from the humid earth, she almost smiles.
You don’t remember, but love to be told
how they brought you through the doors and you were ours.
But buried in you is that place, still. Were you cold,
solitary, left wanting, maybe for hours . . .
Don’t go there, I tell myself. Instead,
I grab you and inhale your fragrant head.
—Carole Bernstein, from Buried Alive—A To-Do List
We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.
Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.
And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.
—Marie Howe
“Hurry”. Copyright © 2016 by Marie Howe, from THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
At fifteen, I drew stick figures
of my parents and me,
without flesh or feature,
quick, sexless.
Dissatisfied, I turned my pencil aslant
adding a tipped smile,
breasts and fingernails.
Knowing the tricks of the graphite then
I saw how easy it was to cause
and not analyze.
I could add apples to a tree’s branches
whether it had foliage or not,
and a peach tree could bear plums.
My drawings of my children are dimpled.
They shine like glazed paper.
This one of my son seems overpopulated,
so I will erase the brain that bedevils him
with pleated thoughts shuffling
like poker cards.
If I rub the eraser across my daughter’s heart
she’ll make her way like a straight-eyed
comet, leaving a wake of hunger.
—Luanne Castle, from Doll God
Here is the landscape of my son,
prying open the horizon with his grin;
of my daughter, trying to crack the sun
with her large laughter.
What of the clock that clucks, “No, no, no”?
They’ve flushed it down the commode
with all the toilet-training paraphernalia
until it backs up in the pipes,
bulges beautifully into the hills
that belch so early, “Hello, hello, good morning.”
Of course, we must answer,
must gather up the dew and daffodils
in our nightshirts, comb our hair through
with the larks’ incessant trill,
our two small ones trailing after us
into the wonderfully, brightening world.
—Marjorie Maddox, from Local News from Someplace Else
Outside, the Maple seeds turn as they fall,
turn in complex spirals from their branches.
Sleep, baby, as I rock, as the Maple sways
in the gusts of air, shaking loose its twirling birds.
I have been you, wrapped warm near a forgotten pane,
seasons rushing, now it seems, through dresses, shoes,
cap and veil, the leaves rolling behind my eyes,
over Fall lawns, then buried under flawless snows.
What shapes and sound conspire to bring you dreams,
before you discover the scattering force of the world.
There will be a morning when you rise and find a road away
from me, my love left pressed like Maple leaves in a book.
Years will pass in pages I write to keep you
in my heart; the years will turn in orbits near and far.
For now, by this window, I hold you, your touch
like the small fingers of the rain—beyond us,
the leaves, and the indifferent arms of the wind.
—Richard Maxson
The way a name lingers in the snow
when traced by hand.
The way angels are made in snow,
all body down,
arms moving from side to ear to side to ear—
a whisper, a pause;
slight, melting hesitation—
The pause in the hand as it moves
over a name carved in black granite.
The Chuck, Chuck, Chuck,
of great-tailed grackles
at southern coastal marshes,
or the way magpies repeat,
Meg, Meg, Meg—
The way the rib cage of a whale
resembles the architecture of I. M. Pei.
The way two names on a page
separated by thousands of lines,
pages, bookshelves, miles, can be connected.
The way wind hums through cord grass;
rain on bluestem, on mesquite—
The sandpiper’s tremble
as it skitters over tidal mudflats,
tracking names in the wet silt,
silt that has been building
since Foreman lost to Ali,
since Troy fell—building until
we forget names altogether—
The way children, who know only
syllables endlessly repeated,
connect one moment to the next
humming, humming, humming—
The way magpies connect branches
into thickets for their nesting—
Curve of thumb caressing
the letters of a loved one’s name
on the printed page, connecting
each letter with a trace of oil
from fingerprint to fingerprint,
again and again and again—
—Scott Edward Anderson, from Fallow Field