Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Meaning by chance, unintended.
Meaning, inspired by an occasion.
Or no particular occasion, just
the occasion of the everyday.
Issa wrote about snow
melting, and the dewdrop
world. About a snail inching
up a great mountain.
This is our life, made of small
moments. Hearing the call
of a bird, resonant
as a bell, longing
and desire become
indistinguishable.
"Every day is a god, each day is a god."
~ Annie Dillard
You buy fruit when you can: mangoes, peaches, cherries
for their polislhed crimson globes, pears for their green
dimpled hips. Piled high in bins at the store, apples look
like they're glowing from within because they've been
coated with carnauba or candelilla wax. An apple a day
keeps the doctor away, your mother would chant, washing
then peeling a Red Delicious apple bought from the post
exchange market where you could get "Stateside" goods.
Expensive, but worth it if it would bring your appetite back,
your health, the health of the one languishing in bed
from long illness. It's as if a god had put a miracle in
the fruit, or a god was in the fruit itself, waiting for
the merest chance to show its benevolence. If a bruise
darkens the cheek of a peach overnight, if the toilet
on your office floor smells like something died in there
or if the mail brings you alarming test results, are these,
then, also some kind of message from the divine?
Every day, you keep some kind of tally: how many cups
of coffee before noon, how much rain came down to flood
the intersection, who called and left how many voicemails?
Every evening, you rinse the plates after dinner with a soapy
sponge. You draw the blinds close, heat water for tea.
The car swerving without warning into your lane just
narrowly missed you. You gave a reference for
a former student. All the things you managed to do
and say Yes to before the day, or the god, shut the door.
My youngest daughter remembers us
stopping at little hotels during family trips.
She says she feels a certain type of nostalgia
for the free-though-you-know-it’s-not-really-
free breakfasts, where there are waffle machines
you load with batter and flip over. When the beeper
goes off, you pry your breakfast from the gridded
skillet with the tip of a plastic knife and slide it onto
a paper plate. Almost made from scratch, but better
than the sad precooked pancakes in the store’s
freezer section, their taste and texture like the boxes
they’re packed in. “Convenience” is the reason
offered for almost everything “streamlined” or
“deliverable”—meaning speed, meaning you shouldn’t
have to work so hard or spend all day writing memos,
summarizing documents, reading the book, drafting
a first draft. Surveys report that 86% of college
students use AI in school. Fewer adults read books
for pleasure, and only 34% of children said they enjoyed
reading in their free time. Once, a book could be a tent
lit up with a flashlight, the wilderness of night kept
outside with a cosy blanket fort. My colleague told
her literature class to find two examples for each
of the literary terms in their book: simile, metaphor,
metonymy, conflict, rising action, irony. They blinked
and acted stupefied. What do you mean? they said,
as if she’d asked them to separate lentils and pebbles
with dented spoons. Imagine waffles and pancakes
not just landing on conveyor belts, but coming
to you pre-buttered, pre-masticated, stamped
with a complimentary phrase from Shakespeare.
What I mean is
will you read all of it, or
only the first ten pages?
Will you come at it
with a slide rule or a ruler,
or a more abstract measure
of error? Sometimes
it takes longer to work
on common mistakes.
The more difficult
to detect are the product
of some kind of subtle
engineering. Harder
to undo, until they are no
longer abstract, or
a fine line has been
crossed, broken, restructured,
embargoed, or banned.
Your therapist reminds you that neither fear
nor hypervigilance are equivalent to devotion.
Roses in the bowl wilt despite the flower food
you stirred into the water. Hinges will rust
from being out in sun and rain, eventually
making it hard to push open or close
the gate. But you have a hard time separating
from scenes of disaster that play constantly
in your head. Has something terrible happened
if you don't hear from one of your daughters?
Does the silence in the alcove mean your spouse
has fallen into an irreversible trance? Light leaks
through the blinds. Spores speckle the undersides
of mushrooms that shoot up overnight after rain.
The moon comes out of hiding, its face gashed
with shadow, puffy from the blunt force of wind.
"I am a little breath that always goes the distance
Longing requires...." ~ Larry Levis
It is flooding in the south and in the north
and all the islands between, so the rice crops
shed their pearls before any harvest
and ferry boats topple their load
into the mouth of the bay. This was
a country with two seasons. But now
there is only one, into which whole towns
disappear, all the way to their church steeples.
When everything we used to know is erased
from the face of the earth, where does our
longing go? As evening fell, when I was a child
I would turn my eyes to the hills, crowned
by two radar dishes and a haunted seminary.
We lived at the bottom of this teacup, and
the world lay somewhere beyond.
Archimedes discovered that an object
submerged in liquid displaces a volume
equal to that of itself. How long
has it been since we were tipped out,
since we fell from the rim? We strain
to hear the sound a pebble makes
bouncing off rock, arriving.
Well past middle age, I still hear the tide
in my blood rush up on the shore and back
to where its pulse begins, and when I close
my eyes I see a long-legged wading bird
step carefully into the water, intent on its goal
just beneath the surface—its whole attitude
keyed into the certainty that what it wants
will yield as long as it is quick, as long
as its aim is true, as long as the ceiling
we mistake for sky has not yet fallen in—
and perhaps this a way of looking at
the world from habit, which is to say,
according to beliefs we were taught:
one day, there will be earth enough yet
to inherit; one day, those who mourn will be
comforted, the wounds of the broken-hearted
bound and healed, the dead restored to life,
both love and dread absolved in gentleness.
~ after Larry Levis
I will begin with this cicada shell,
exuvia a dull bronze armor cast
thinner against the early light.
Where the body clung to this
form and where it emerged,
there is a split back. Waterproof
chitin yet husk-thin, paper-thin.
I think of all that lies dormant
underground where moles
build tunnels with no windows,
where warmth and light are rumors
until suddenly the soil, too, rips
its casings open. The gardens, wet
with rain after weeks of near-drought.
The waterspouts garrulous again.
This artifact of long-held desire,
this proof that there is life after
a long imprisonment in darkness.
I, too, am still trying to find
ways to go on, the courage
to look daily griefs in the face
instead of pretending not to see them.
When I became a mother, I learned
what it means to always keep one
eye open, my ear cocked for the merest
sound of danger. Even now, with grown
daughters, I still check
the weather by means of other signs.
Pushing my grocery cart past bins
of shining produce, flowers,
little boxes of temptation right by
the cash registers, my mind forms
the same questions—are they safe,
are they fed, are they faring
well enough for the world to not
destroy them or their joy? In my gut,
hope jostles for space with the acids
of worry as I will my hands not to shake.
On the news this week, it was reported
that we claimed ownership of the moon—
its hammered surface rising over beaches,
schools, parking lots, and detention centers;
its cratered Sea of Tranquility where Apollo 11
touched down and the astronauts left bootprints
that are still there because the moon has no weather
to wash them away. Perhaps someone will also try
to claim ownership of the bees and their gold
cells, the rivers and all their tenants folding silver
light beneath the bridges. Could we claim
ownership of the seas’ republics that predate
our own, the fireflies threading messages
in the dark, the sweetness spilled from honey-
suckle throats on the vine, the fields with too
much fruit because now no hands are there
to harvest them? Could we claim the bright
speckle of salt on the shore, the shoebill stork’s
voice mimicking artillery fire? Orchards before
blossom, seeds before they wake. Hunger
that opens its mouth all day without seeing
how taking is not the same as receiving.