to my one life, when I will finally be wordless. What

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Occasionally I’m oddly undone by a casual comment. A month ago I ran into an old colleague, someone to whom I feel warmly and always enjoy seeing her. But she said two innocuous things that left my brain whirring around and my pie hole flappin soundlessly. She said, “You look good.” Comments about my looks always throw me. What do I say? I don’t really pay much attention to my looks, don’t think about them much. I mean, I try to look presentable. But beyond that I’m not always sure what I look like. What does “good” mean in the context of an aging chick who glances in the mirror and figures good enough? And do I say, “So do you” right away, or does that seem too…I don’t know…insincere or transactional. So I smiled brightly, I think, and said something like, “Oh.” Then she said, again, perfectly inoccuously and in that way of idle small talk, “Busy summer?” It threw me into this thoughtswirl of, oh yes, I guess it is summer, but it’s really only just started, and it’s not my favorite season so I pretty much just wait for it to be over, and I just got back from a trip so do I tell her that or was that really “spring” not summer and so doesn’t really answer her question and anyway am I going to have a busy summer? do I actually have anything planned… At which point I figured my silence was very awkward so I think I said something like, “Oh…” And then we had to part to find our seats at the performance at which we had run into each other, me feeling like an idiot and her probably wondering what had happened to me. All this to say that the quotidian can seem bizarre, thoughts can go spurting off like a just-burst balloon around the room, and the brain is a funny thing of words, sometimes. Which I guess is why I’m a writer. I love this poem by Victoria Chang for its wrestling with all kinds of little things and big. I found it on a recent OnlyPoems.com issue:

Fig. 15

Victoria Chang

Someone said metaphor is making the strange
familiar. All this time, I’ve been trying to make the

familiar strange. Now I can’t decide if the sky is familiar
or strange. Whether I should describe it as blue or

as a creditor. If it is endless or walked on. Whether
something that has no width or height should be

described. In the drawing, the lines look like electricity.
They are trying to say something that I can’t read but

I can feel. Something about our desire to name all
the roads and then cut them off. Something about

our desire to make everything an heirloom. I can only
read the small p in the upper left-hand corner. Or it is the

only thing I think I can read. The wires are a language.
The buildings are a language. My skin is a language.

What do I do now if it peels off. Each day I pick at
small flakes. Pull down time like a cord. What if all

along my hormones weren’t true. I’ve been peeling the
flakes off for months, wondering when I will get down

to my one life, when I will finally be wordless. What
happens when the forests are gone but the trees are still

here? How can I be an animal and have the form of a tree?
Once I am no longer a woman, the narrative poem will

finally turn into a lyric one. Maybe war is our insistence on
the narrative when we are descendants of the lyric.

if I should just calm down about that. I really hope I’m doing this right.

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I attended a concert by highly accomplished students and teachers from a music camp nearby, and I was awestruck by their skill. And envious of their world of music. And grateful too, that I’d had some experience through my voice studies of what it’s like to settle deeper and deeper into a piece of music, to gain levels of intimacy with the music, the composer’s intentions, and with the other musicians on stage. I loved the process of the awkward first encounters with a piece, all angles and unexpected rhythms and shifts, and then the parsing it down to movement and segment, then the managing of tricky bits, the technical stuff of managing the breath and sound, and even eventually the I-am-sick-to-death-of-this-piece-let’s-just-do-the-damn-concert. It’s an amazing experience. I realized after watching these musicians that even after ten years of study I never quite gained the level of confidence to be a comfortable performer. What is confidence? Is it a skill that can be learned, a muscle to be trained? Whatever it was, I just never quite managed it — I didn’t trust my voice not to do something funny on me, or my body to not falter with my breath, or my brain not to stumble over the words. Trust on shaky ground. I thought too of that other nuance of the word: a confidence, as in a secret shared “with trust.” And I think it’s that sense of sharing a confidence with a confidant that animates this lovely poem by Tina Kelley from her new book, Field Guide to North American Words.

Telling God

Tina Kelley

I need you to know I laughed sometimes at this magnificent and puzzling planet.
Ridiculously plentiful sandhill cranes taking off from the dawn lake, squawking.
The bleating sheep and his poetry of complaint, the oarking elephant seal, I chuckled.

The healthy fox cutting through our backyard up the hill, the taste of snow in Idaho,
the front seat of the roller coaster, the swooping fast fall. The hummingbird’s snore,
a high descending wheeze, the bounty of beachcombing when I found thirty jingle shells.

Did you hear this laughter as prayer or praise? I hope so. Thank you for this knowledge:
the moon is moving away from the earth an inch and a half a year. Exactly my height
now, there’s a space in space that a planet used to roar through, noisily? Violently?

I try to put each minute to the highest possible use, but sometimes I wonder
if I should just calm down about that. I really hope I’m doing this right.
I suspect it’s the approach of a woman raised funny, in old-fashioned ways.

Thank you for the drawstring light of sunset. For the double-folded three-part iris heart,
different color blooms smelling distinct. For phosphenes, glitter seen when rubbing eyes.
For the wave-tracing, levitated scamper of sandpipers I’ve never nailed the metaphor for.

Also: I hope it turns out okay. The others around me, I love dozens of them, fiercely.
We are tender and easily hurt so slow to understand no one gets off this planet alive.
The Christmas card list shrinks. Yet we loved the myth of happy endings.

But maybe you should know: I heard one of us say,
“A dying god is a reminder to shop more.” I don’t think
that’s fair, but it explains full mall parking lots on sunny days.

I want to spend myself entirely, not leave any lines unwritten
when it’s time to stop, to have given my all, empty at the end.
That’s all that I want you to know. It’s likely not news to you now.

And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain

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I have traveled a bit and have, wonderfully, a little mental cabinet of moments; they lie like orbs in the dark until I take them out into my mind’s light. One such is evoked by this poem by Lola Ridge. I had arrived after a journey to a hotel on the edge of things in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland. Spread out in front of my balcony were mountains that seemed so close I could reach out and stroke them like a beast. But a deep valley flew between me and the mountains, and up from its depth breezes came, and from around the mountains mists, and I spent a long time watching the show, and felt I could watch forever, or that forever itself was in front of me, and I was the brief show.

The Edge

Lola Ridge

I.

I thought to die that night in the solitude
            where they would never find me…
But there was time…
And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain
            staring into the abyss.

I do not know how long…
I could not count the hours, they ran so fast–
Like little bare-foot urchins–shaking my hands away.
But I remember
Somewhere water trickled like a thin severed vein…
And a wind came out of the grass,
Touching me gently, tentatively, like a paw.

As the night grew
The gray cloud that had covered the sky like sackcloth
Fell in ashen folds about the hills,
Like hooded virgins pulling their cloaks about them…
There must have been a spent moon,
For the tall one’s veil held a shimmer of silver…

This too I remember,
And the tenderly rocking mountain,
Silence,
And beating stars. …

II.

Dawn
Lay like a waxen hand upon the world,
And folded hills
Broke into a solemn wonder of peaks stemming clear and
            cold,
Till the Tall One bloomed like a lily,
Flecked with sun
Fine as a golden pollen.
It seemed a wind might blow it from the snow.

I smelled the raw sweet essences of things,
And heard spiders in the leaves,
And ticking of little feet
As tiny creatures came out of their doors
To see God pouring light into his star.

It seemed life held
No future and no past for me but this.

And I too got up stiffly from the earth
And held my heart up like a cup.

strong, but anxious and discontented amid all that messy beauty

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I’ve taken a break from submitting my work, to try to break the cycle of anticipation/dejection, to break the spell of maybe. And I’ve been on vacation, so freer to consider myself from afar, and think, okay, what are you, and let’s do something else with that. Or do the same thing differently. Or do a different thing samely. Or quit all together or start something completely new. Or something. The writing game wearies. Yes, I have that new book out, the “One Poet’s Writing Manual,” which is fun, and people have told me they’ve enjoyed it, and those I know well have said it’s like I’m right there talking to them. And I’ve done some presentations and workshops, and have a couple more scheduled. And it’s my fifth book, if you count the two chapbooks. But. I don’t know. I just thought somehow things would be different. At the same time, I’m utterly astonished at what has transpired, what I’ve stumbled into. And at what I’ve done, conjured up, gave a whirl. It’s all very strange, looking back, looking forward, and just looking around. What the hell, man? What the hell?

This poem by Alison Luterman, from a recent issue of The Sun, was rather on point to my thinking.

Access Road

Alison Luterman

I don’t know if other people feel like there’s a life
running alongside their so-called real life like an
access road runs alongside the main highway.
It’s funkier, lonelier; you didn’t expect to find yourself on this one-
lane frontage path, you kept thinking you’d get on the
freeway any minute now, where you fondly imagined yourself
doing eighty, ninety, hurtling down the untrammeled autobahn of
free will. That was the life you thought would be yours when you
were young and everything seemed laid out as at a picnic with red
gingham tablecloths. Only it was never like that, not really, you had
just been raised with too many stories, always stories, not the real,
ancient ones with burning bushes and three-headed dogs, but the
whitewashed, idealized, candy-coated pap fed to children in mid-
twentieth-century suburbs. And so in your fantasies you neglected
to factor in the reality of ants crawling up your legs at the actual
picnic, the way they tickle and sting, or the spilled juice and
crumbled potato chips and your beautiful mother young again, and
strong, but anxious and discontented amid all that messy beauty
because she, too, was always calibrating how reality didn’t measure
up to the story. So you’ve inherited her dilemma, what else is new,
and evening is drawing nigh, and you are still on that
access road, which as it turns out is going to the same place
the main road was headed all along.

& time works it out

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When I arrived, a woman was sitting in the quiet at a side table in front of a laptop, looking pensive over the keyboard. Two people were setting up a table of books for sale. One by one people drifted in, slightly disheveled, many, some looking halt and infirm, then others arriving in twos and threes, more nimble, clutching bags and notebooks, chattering, some, others sitting quietly, men, more women, mostly middle aged and above, some scattered younger folks, one group looked like a parent and an adult child or two. Sneakers, light jackets against the rain shower, some cool glasses here and there. A writers festival, the mountains of northern New York State. I spoke to someone from Vermont, a woman from Texas visiting a daughter. That family I saw turned out to be locals. An old friend was there with his son, having traveled in from two other parts of the north to meet there. Fiction, mystery, romance, memoir, poetry, fantasy, plays, screenplays — all the minds roiling with ideas and the desire to write. In Ukraine, according to the article, the same, but younger, many wearing army fatigues, chatter, hugs, periodic evacuations because of the possibility of incoming missiles, all clutching bags of books, minds full of stories. Physicists are positing that all reality is relational, not material. We are many things, we problematic human species, but we are word lovers, tellers of tales, avid listeners, against odds of geography, war, life’s inherent limitations, large and small, grievous and petty. I am moved by this. Here is a poem from Kevin Young’s terrific new book, Night Watch.

VI. Underworld (Circle Three)

Kevin Young

We are born
            with all our grief
already in us, like teeth,

& time works it out
            of us–our mouths–pain
for a spell & then there

grief sits, a lifetime, shiny,
            lucky. Pomegranate. Made
before I was unmade–

If not, the gaps
            where once milkteeth sat,
replaced by these holes

            we hope to eat with–
each supper a reckoning.

particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world

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I’ve been thinking about the wind, its partnership with seeds, with pollen, its agency with water, how it casts it beyond its own reach, and sand, rising as clouds from the desert to whirl and settle to crevices in odd places, and weather, wind its worldwide vehicle. And wind’s havoc, flattened forests, but from which new growth births, and us, our dust bowls, how wind carries even our own species with it, tangling itself in our hair, lining our faces with its force. But it occurs to me also that we are as wind ourselves, the same force of movement, destruction, new plantings. We also drive ourselves mad with our constant blowing. What can we learn from being like the wind? Could we be more humble? But the very trees themselves bow down. But though we can “harness the wind” for our energy generators, we have not yet learned to stop it. There’s that. This week the wind blew light rain pattering against the window. And here’s a charming poem by German poet Jan Wagner that translator David Kaplinger has rendered “portrait of the rain.” I guess I’ll have to start studying German, so taken have I become with some of the German poetry I’ve been dipping into.

portrait of the rain

by Jan Wagner, tr. by David Keplinger

it appears as a hand-kiss, gentle nudge,
spray of memory: remember
where you came from, frog.

or galloping, as a thundering horde,
to tender unto caesar what is caesar’s,
until everything flees into the entryways
under the cover of newspapers
and briefcases: whoever listens at the open window
senses that he may be dry, but the weather
has long since been inside him.

or how the gutters became musical,
when laundry lifts off the lines
and rivers flow out of their beds,
and the secret scent of earth and asphalt
unveils itself; when mushrooms, mosses,
vineyard snails run rampant;
it makes the outlines visible: where rain ends,
we begin.

it treks across the landscape like a circus,
the spectacle and curtain at the same time:
scenery loft of the great weather-
and wandering theaters; bestows upon blonds
darker hair, and on the bald the radiance
of billiard balls; to the hens it is a cage
that doesn’t imprison them. so often divined,
yet no church is founded on it.

good ears can still hear,
if you bend low enough,
the songs of humpback whales, glacier calving–
one geyser over north america
inspires umbrellas to blossom
from shanghai to rome.
each drop contains the whole book, water,
particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world.

resurrection–the easiest exercise.
meanwhile it slumbers in car tires
and from puddles and cisterns
stares back toward its own origin,
while the trees for hours and hours
are immersed in their soliloquies.

the soothing swoosh between the radio transmitters.
the wind in the forests yet to come.

regenporträt

erscheint als handkuß, als sanfter stubser,
erinnerungsgischt: denke daran,
wo du herkommst, lurch.

oder galoppierend, als donnernde horde,
dem kaiser zu holen, was des kaisers ist,
bis alles in die hauseingänge flieht
im schutz von zeitungen und aktentaschen:
wer lauschen darf am offenen fenster,
ahnt, daß er zwar trocken,
das wetter aber längst in ihm ist.

der gullis musikalisch werden läßt,
wäsche von den leinen hebt und flüsse
aus ihren betten, den geheimen duft
von erde und asphalt enthüllt;
läßt pilze, moose, weinbergschnecken wuchern,
macht umrisse kenntlich: wo er aufhört,
beginnen wir.

der über land zieht wie ein zirkus,
spektakel und vorhang zugleich,
schnürboden des großen wetter-
und wandertheaters; der den blonden
dunklere haare und kahlen
den glanz von billardkugeln schenkt;
den hühnern ein käfig, der hühner nicht einsperrt.
so oft vorhergesagt, doch keine
kirche, die auf ihm gründet.

für feine ohren noch zu hören,
beugst du dich nah genug hinab,
gesang von buckelwalen, gletscherkalben—
der geysir über nordamerika
läßt von shanghai bis rom die schirme blühen.
in jedem tropfen das ganze buch wasser,
partikel, pollen, all der dreck der welt.

auferstehung—die leichteste übung.
schlummert einstweilen in autoreifen
und starrt aus pfützen und zisternen
zurück auf den eigenen ursprung,
derweil die bäume noch stundenlang
vertieft sind in ihr selbstgespräch.

das tröstende rauschen zwischen den sendern,
der wind im künftigen wald.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/162257/regenportrat

into empty sky

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A gorgeous day as I rode the waves of a county road up from the river and into the glacial-carved bays and fjords of this county, rising into the air to crest a blind hill, easing past the slower vessels, a horse and buggy, a man in a flat brimmed hat pushing a bike, all sparkling in spring sun and new leaves pattering in the wind. Arrived lakeside, a park spread like its own picnic. A windsurfer coursed the chop of the dark blue lake. And I entered the community of food-bringers, of neighbors and friends, mostly strangers to me, chatting, no real laughter yet, as people assembled in slow spurts, some signing the guest book, some leafing through the photo albums, some pausing to hug hard the bereaved. I’ve done this a few too many times in the past six months. A spate of funerals and memorials. This one for a man I’d only known as a towheaded boy flinging himself around the yard, pausing briefly to pee in the bushes, too busy to bother with the niceties of a bathroom, or settling beside his tiny little sister to smooch or tickle. His mother, my friend. After we wailed together briefly, struck senseless by the simple devastation of her loss, broke apart to hold each other at arm’s length, enjoying seeing ourselves much unchanged after all this time. “He grew up to be a nice person,” she assured me, knowing I’d been a stranger to him, as we do not live near each other and had drifted apart. I will never know. Sudden death or slow, predicted or out of the blue, the shock of it remains much the same. Wait a minute, we wake to realize, day after day. Wait a minute.

Here is a poem by the ancient Japanese writer Isumi Shikibu, as translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani.

“Why did you vanish…”

Isumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani)

Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world.

text of earth, ocean, and breath. Let me, too, inhabit

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I’m writing a bit but not with vim. Whatever vim is. A wonderful word. I’m painting. I’m plunking on my piano. I love that this is my life. But I’m wasting an awful lot of time wasting time. I’ve been pretty creative in my life, but I feel the potential in me to be more so, bigger in thought, farther in reach, giddier in play, bolder, broader, braver, more wonder-full, more experimental. But I don’t seem to know how to get from this chair to whatever that is, that place where I’m being bold and giddy. What is the environment that will best draw this effort out of me? It does not seem to be this chair. It’s not the chair’s fault. (Is it?) Are there people who can help shift me to this mythical place? Is it inspiration? As I’ve said previously, I don’t believe in “muses,” alas, or I could blame THEM, their mulish absence. No, it’s the brain. My brain. That wrinkly thing that’s currently a bit soggy with allergy snot. It’s a nay-sayer often, a builder of obstacles, a doubting thomas. How do I call it to order? How do I poke it into action? I feel a little lost, in fact. Do you ever feel this way? Funnily enough I discovered I had tucked this poem by Patrick Rosal in my poems-I-might-put-in-my-blog. So here it is, from an issue of Orion magazine in 2025.

Prayer for When I’m Lost

Patrick Rosal

We know the ancestral sailors could navigate
without stars, by sound alone, rhythm, a history

of blood and sea and sex, a devotion to the indelible
text of earth, ocean, and breath. Let me, too, inhabit

the body entirely, along this epoch’s vast axes of loss,
zenith to horizon, amid the artificial gales’ emphatic
hammers, a tyrant’s merciless gavels. Let me be the hinge

swinging in swells, rocking in sacred undulation, plunged
from crest to trough, both terrestrial and aquatic.
I’m barely a blip, a pelagic circuit, and my only compass,

prayer: give me a language for grief, jubilation, the gamut
of danger in waves. Let me name it aloud: Give this trouble

a shape. Let me travel to silence, sanctified by the mysteries
of listening, a storm turned song–and its song, my freight.

there must be a door — a door

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I’ve been observing my mind lately. It’s been such a gadfly. In five minutes I’ll have searched five things on the internet, gotten up and splashed some paint on paper, written my little 100-word daily challenge (more on that in another post), sat back down and picked up a book, put it down to look something else up, started one thing only to interrupt myself with another. Is it spring that’s making me so flighty? Life in these times? Yes and yes? I’ve been busy in spurts and listless the rest of the time, aspiring to grand ideas but too scattered to think them up, or I think them up and immediately reject them. It’s spring and not-quite-spring, some trees are dangly with their bright catkins and some are well into their leaves. My lilacs are just showing their fists of will-be-blooms but someone’s three blocks away are in full purple. On my walk up on the ridge, no jacks in no pulpits, but flocks of marsh marigold in their fancy dress. A tiny speck of eagle high in the sky circling; in a field the very earthly dark mound of a turkey vulture, its terrible red head bent to its meal. I tried to write a poemish thing based on the crazyass mix of headlines in the Guardian, the whiplash of turning to witness democracy’s demise in one article, the ridiculousness gravity lent to some fashion “controversy” in another. But Rilke said poetry was no place for irony. I disagree. Except when I agree entirely. There’s my mind again, changing, changing. But here is the venerable Don McKay, with a poem from his book Another Gravity. I’m not sure I entirely follow the line of thought of the poem. But given the state of my mind, I think it’s okay. And, having trouble sleeping of late, I’ll take that “little tent in space.”

Song for the Song of the White-Throated Sparrow

Don McKay

Before it can stop itself, the mind
has leapt up inferences, crag to crag,
the obvious arpeggio. Where there is a doorbell
there must be a door – a door
meant to be opened from inside.
Door means house means – wait a second –
but already it is standing on a threshold previously
known to be thin air, gawking. The Black Spruce
point to it: clarity,
melting into ordinary morning, true
north. Where the sky is just a name,
a way to pitch a little tent in space and sleep
for five unnumbered seconds.