Ten minutes to write a scene of great happiness
Ten minutes to write a scene of sorrow, anger, despair
Thirty-five minutes to merge them and make peace
A SCENE OF HAPPINESS
Perhaps it begins with a sound
Tick tick tick ticktickticktick-bounce-ticktick-tick
Rice landing from east, north, south, west
He is right behind you
Your him
Right behind you
That southern James Dean
Tearing up all kinds of shit south of the Mason Dixon
Jumped the tracks and reeled you in
You are squinting, head up in that fancy hat
Your beautiful face
Shining
The two of you
Pelted with the rice that later fell from your coat
When he removed it in the place
I would eat onion rings some 35 years later
You, shining
A SCENE OF SORROW, ANGER, DESPAIR
Begin with a color if you’d like
Yellowed
Those papers you had
Yellowed to Strom Thurmond
(Your daddy said one time that he shoulda killed that bastard when he had the chance.)
Yellowed to what’s her name Representative
Your third appeal to be found disabled
Widow’s disability something or other
Yellowed papers carefully tucked away
I am the keeper of all the things and memories now
And I’m struck blind
Howling at your ghost
That was finally deemed yellowed by too many years of records of
Shock treatments
Pills
Deep purple despair
They finally believed you
Found you profoundly disabled and eligible for those benefits
Because you lost and lost and lost
It was 1990
How did I not know
GALACTOMERGE
Yesterday I touched your wedding dress
Yellowed
Stiff
Brittle
You were hardly bigger than a cardinal
The one who is you and visits me now in the spring
I sat on the floor
Fingering through layers of satin
And lace that broke in my hands
I had a surprise ceremony
Quietly snipped every yellowed thread
That held a button or a bead
Dropped them into a tiny box
Tick tick tick-bounce-tick
They will turn into something else later
Or maybe they just did
You had a life
I have found it seven thousand times
In your pocketbook
The kitchen drawer
Those bibles still holding notes that you made and left
(Did you know I would find them?)
The glove box of your car
The towels that were more than the shelves could handle
(Because if one towel was good, 97 would be almost enough)
The room under the house where you kept a ladder and hoe
The cup by your chair holding the pens you stopped trying to use
The hangers now stripped of your clothes
I needed to see that photo
The one I found yesterday
You were so happy
For a moment I did not know your face
And those papers I found yesterday
And the journal kept by your sitters making note of each day and each each each time
You took two of those
Or one of those along with two of the other
Often only an hour and some change apart
No wonder you slurred through the phone
Me, on the other end, trying to run with concrete feet
It was 2017
How did I not know
I think I can set you free
Now that I have seen that 1957 face
The one in the photo
It’s what I needed to begin prying my fingers
From the wall of the tunnel
Those yellowed papers at one dark end
That radiant photo face at the bright other
I howl one last time into the dark end
It howls back in ripples ripples ripples r i p p l e s
The faint touch of the last on my back
As I turn to face the bright end
Your radiant face far, far away
I will get there
This is what I know.
A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home. —Rumi
EVER
by Meghan O'Rourke
Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.”
They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing.
Never? Never ever again to see you?
An error, I aver. You’re never nothing,
because nothing’s not a thing.
I know death is absolute, forever,
the guillotine-gutting-never to which we never say goodbye.
But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever”
and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after.
I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you
is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver:
You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something.
Will I ever really get never?
You’re gone. Nothing, never—ever.
SUMMER NIGHTS
A recent work included in the Museum of Design Atlanta exhibition Text Me: How We Live in Language, curated by Debbie Millman
Image and text © Jane Dorn
THINGS TO THINK
Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own home you've never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
—Robert Bly
THE USES OF SORROW
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
― Mary Oliver, Thirst
AND THE DAYS ARE NOT FULL ENOUGH
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
— Ezra Pound
This landed between the eyes in a sea of loss.
KINDNESS
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
— Naomi Shihab Nye
STALK MEANING
—Dorn
SQUANDERED
If you asked about my Aunt Dorcas
I’d tell you she died yesterday.
I’d tell you
she buried two husbands:
one, a drunk bastard
one, a name she already wore
so then it doubled.
Thin as a kitchen match
Bright as the end of that hot-boxed Pall Mall
Sharp as the hook she baited
(squatting in tall grass
skeeters on her chin)
I’d tell you she cashed out
hid her money
in the safe at the funeral home
so she could live in hell for free
and I’d tell you
we shared some blood
and her name was biblical
but she wasn’t
even though she got popped on the foot
by a ball of lightning
skipping fast as “My Lou”
across the church parking lot
as she folded her double-name-causing second husband
and his oxygen tank
into that smoky sedan
(WheeeezgruntPOW)
She laughed at that devil
Southern Baptists
crock pot at home on low
fear now on high
turned to stone on hot, after-church asphalt
Later I’d tell you
how I squandered my last chance
to learn more of her little brother
my long-gone father
—Dorn
THOSE NIGHTS
I sit with crickets
in the very bottom of dark,
my heart
warm and wet
in my hands.
—Dorn
I will never forget the moment your heart stopped and mine kept beating.
—Angela Miller
Been thinking a lot about sacred rage. About the kindness of fire. About leaning into grief. I’ve been thinking a lot about everyone I know who knows the feeling of winded grace, and keeps running towards and towards and towards, and never away.
How often do you hear the tenderness you need to hear? I mean exactly when you need to hear it? Is it ever before that little yolk of hurt wraps itself in layers hard enough to break teeth?
GOSPEL OF THE TWO SISTERS, Terrance Hayes
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
—Mark Strand
“Yes, people sometimes do horrible things, and we can speculate about why they do them until we run out of words and sanity. But evil only prevails when we mistake it for the norm. There is so much goodness in the world — all we have to do is remind one another of it, show up for it, and refuse to leave.”
Some necessary thoughts on how to live with hope in a cynical culture. (via explore-blog)
TRUTH.
“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”