"On Punctuation"

not for me the dogma of the period
preaching order and a sure conclusion
and no not for me the prissy
formality or tight-lipped fence
of the colon and as for the semi-
colon call it what it is
a period slumming
with the commas
a poser at the bar
feigning liberation with one hand
tightening the leash with the other
oh give me the headlong run-on
fragment dangling its feet
over the edge give me the sly
comma with its come-hither
wave teasing all the characters
on either side give me ellipses
not just a gang of periods
a trail of possibilities
or give me the sweet interrupting dash
the running leaping joining dash all the voices
gleeing out over one another
oh if I must
punctuate
give me the YIPPEE
of the exclamation point
give me give me the curling
cupping curve mounting the period
with voluptuous uncertainty
-----
Elizabeth Austen, from The Girl Who Goes Alone. Seattle: Floating Bridge Press, 2010.

"Long Term"

On this they were in agreement
everything that can happen between two people
happens after a while

or has been thought about so hard
there's almost no difference
between desire and deed.

Each day they stayed together, therefore,
was a day of forgiveness, tacit,
no reason to say the words.

It was easy to forgive, so much harder
to be forgiven. The forgiven had to agree
to eat dust in the house of the noble

and both knew this couldn't go on for long.
The forgiven would need to rise;
the forgiver need to remember the cruelty

in being correct.
Which is why, except in crises,
they spoke about the garden,

what happened at work,
the little ailments and aches
their familiar bodies separately felt.
-----
by Stephen Dunn, published in New and Selected Poems 1974-1994, New York: Norton, 1994.

Birthday!

Not mine, but the 158th birthday of one Miss Emily Dickinson, poet, enigma, and Mount Holyoke dropout. See this article from the NYT on a way that she continues to be awesome. (A new multimedia work that incorporates her poetry and music...)
-----
Wild nights--wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port--
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden--
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor, tonight,
In thee!

Emily Dickinson #249 from edition edited by R. W. Franklin

Poem

I Am Learning to Abandon the World

I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.
-----
by Linda Pastan, from PM/AM: New and Selected Poems. New York: Norton, 1982.

Still Relishing the Election

From Salon and Garrison Keillor:

"Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn't gloating, it's satisfaction at a job well done. ... He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!! ... The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment. ... It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he's going to see "United States of America" and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian. ... Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. ... So enjoy the afterglow of the election a while longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails -- imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes the First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now. The mind reels."

Read it all.
-----
Looking for a Rest Area

I've been driving for hours,
it seems like all my life.
The wheel has become familiar,
I turn it

every so often to avoid the end
of my life, but I'm never sure
it doesn't turn me
by its roundness, as women have

by the space inside them.
What I'm looking for
is a rest area, some place where
the old valentine inside my shirt

can stop contriving romances,
where I can climb out of the thing
that has taken me this far
and stretch myself.

It is dusk, Nebraska,
the only bright lights in this entire state
put their fists in my eyes
as they pass me.

Oh, how easily I can be dazzled--
where is the sign
that will free me, if only for moments,
I keep asking.
------
Stephen Dunn, from Looking for Holes in the Ceiling. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974.

Grumpy

Today started well, but the grading is getting intense and starting to aggravate. A friend guessed that I may be having post-Mountain Day blues, so I choose to blame that rather than losing my Zen due to grading. Somehow, that's a better reason than work being slightly overwhelming. I'll get it all under control tomorrow and feel better before the weekend, hopefully. With any luck, I'll also be able to go car shopping on Saturday to look for something snazzy to replace the 20 year old car... Methinks it's time. At any rate, since I can think of nothing else, here's a song lyric and a poem that have resonated in recent days:

-----
"...it's a dirty trick I play on myself, imagining [he] might call, just because I've waited patiently..." --We're About 9, "Telephone Booth"
-----

Summer Nocturne

Let us love this distance, since those
who do not love each other are
not separated. --Simone Weil

Night without you, and the dog barking at the silence,
no doubt at what's in the silence,
a deer perhaps pruning the rhododendron
or that raccoon with its brilliant fingers
testing the garbage can lid by the shed.

Night I've chosen a book to help me thing
about the long that's in longing, "the space across
which desire reaches." Night that finally needs music
to quiet the dog and whatever enormous animal
night itself is, appetite without limit.

Since I seem to want to be hurt a little,
it's Stan Getz and "It Never Entered My Mind,"
and to back him up Johnnie Walker Black
coming down now from the cabinet to sing
of its twelve lonely years in the dark.

Night of small revelations, night of odd comfort.
Starting to love this distance.
Starting to feel how present you are in it.
-----
Stephen Dunn, from Everything Else in the World. New York: Norton, 2006.

Traveling

I'm back in NH this weekend, for the briefest of moments. I arrived on Friday evening and go back to MD on Sunday morning. Purpose of my trip? My friend Stacy's memorial gathering. It was good that I came, but it was a weird gathering, to me. So different from the Greek approach, with TONS of people, food, conversation about the person who is missing. This was very sterile in some ways.

I was sad, cried, and it made me think about how so much of life is such a crapshoot. You live your life, hoping that you're doing the right thing, hopefully doing something that makes you happy. With any luck, you find someone to share it with you who is good to you and to whom you are good. And hopefully you get to spend a lot of years with that person.

It's not fair that Stacy only got three years with her husband, 30 years on earth to do her thing. I know that some people get far less and others waste the time they have, but still, it's just not fair.
-----
Back to Mary Oliver I go, for some insight:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Waiting... another poem

Optimism

My friend the pessimist thinks I'm optimistic
because I seem to believe in the next good thing.
But I see rueful shadows almost everywhere.
When the sun rises, I think of collisions and AK-47s.
It's my mother's fault, who praised and loved me,
sent me into the dreadful world as if
it would tell me a story I'd understand. The fact is
optimism is the enemy of happiness.
I've learned to live for the next good thing
because lifelong friends write goodbye letters,
because regret follows every timidity.
I'm glad I know that all great romances are fleshed
with failure. I'll take a day of bitterness and rain
to placate the gods, to get it over with.
My mother told me I could be a great pianist
because I had long fingers. My fingers are small.
It's my mother's fault, every undeserved sweetness.
-----
by Stephen Dunn, from Different Hours. New York: Norton, 2002.

Literary Moment: Quotes & More Poetry

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too."
--Voltaire, Essay on Tolerance

-----

"If, in the past few years, you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead."
--Gelette Burgess

-----

"From the Manifesto of the Selfish" by Stephen Dunn

Because altruists are the least sexy
people on earth, unable
to say "I want" without embarrassment,

we need to take from them everything
they give,
then ask for more,

this is how to excite them, and because
it's exciting
to see them the least bit excited

once again we'll be doing something
for ourselves,
who have no problem taking pleasure,

always desirous and so pleased to be
pleased, we who above all
can be trusted to keep the balance.
-----
In the poem, I see myself as one of the altruists, not one of the selfish. *sigh* I'm feeling very Stephen Dunn these days.

Poem

The Lost Thing

The truth is
it never belonged to anybody.
It's not a music box or locket;
it doesn't bear our initials.
It has none of the tragic glamour
of a lost child, won't be found
on any front page. It's like
the river that confuses
search dogs, like the promise
on the far side of the ellipsis.
Look for it in the margins,
is the conventional wisdom.
Look for it as late afternoon light
dips below the horizon.
But it's not to be seen.
Nor does it have a heart
or give off any signal.
It's as if. . . is how some of us
keep trying to reach it.
Once, long ago, I felt sure
I was in its vicinity.
-----
by Stephen Dunn, from Everything Else in the World. New York: Norton, 2006.

Still Nothing

Although my doctor's secretary did tell me today that the report was in and "I shouldn't worry."

But, here's something else to tide us over, a poem.

"What We Want" by Linda Pastan

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

Some Poems

Machines by Micheal Donaghy

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver (one of my favorites ever, especially the end...)