national poetry month, day 16

Oh you most beautiful inside of a vegetable! I want to rid myself of these tender thoughts: the red cabbage I sliced through, the inside half shining like an Italian bathroom; the baroque feeling of a recent pineapple after I chopped off its crown and, for a moment, wore it as a hat. How can I live my life when even a radish transforms into a trinket grief? It is impractical to attach oneself to anything edible. Now I find myself separating the leaves of a blowsy English lettuce, leaves I want to press to my cheek like a cool flannel on a childhood fever. —Amy Key

national poetry month, day 12

I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean I stood at the lip of it, dressed in down, praying for snow I know, I’m strange, too much light makes me nervous at least in this land where the trees always bear green. I know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful. Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California? The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror all demanding to be the sun too, everything around you is light & it’s gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you & it’s so sad, you know? You’re the only warm thing for miles & the only thing that can’t shine. —Danez Smith

national poetry month, day 23

Downhearted Six horses died in a tractor-trailer fire. There. That’s the hard part. I wanted to tell you straight away so we could grieve together. So many sad things, that’s just one on a long recent list that loops and elongates in the chest, in the diaphragm, in the alveoli. What is it they say, heart-sick or downhearted? I picture a heart lying down on the floor of the torso, pulling up the blankets over its head, thinking this pain will go on forever (even though it won’t). The heart is watching Lifetime movies and wishing, and missing all the good parts of her that she has forgotten. The heart is so tired of beating herself up, she wants to stop it still, but also she wants the blood to return, wants to bring in the thrill and wind of the ride, the fast pull of life driving underneath her. What the heart wants? The heart wants her horses back. —Ada Limón

national poetry month, day 14

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart. Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all the things you did and could have done. Remember treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes pointing again and again down, down into the black depths. —Dan Albergotti

national poetry month, day 13

How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River how you can never reach it, no matter how hard you try, walking as fast as you can, but getting nowhere, arms and legs pumping, sweat drizzling in rivulets; each year, a little slower, more creaks and aches, less breath. Ah, but these soft nights, air like a warm bath, the dusky wings of bats careening crazily overhead, and you’d think the road goes on forever. Apollinaire wrote, “What isn’t given to love is so much wasted,” and I wonder what I haven’t given yet. A thin comma moon rises orange, a skinny slice of melon, so delicious I could drown in its sweetness. Or eat the whole thing, down to the rind. Always, this hunger for more. —Barbara Crooker

national poetry month, day 30

“What Does Poetry Save You From?” From the pale silence of morning and the din of afternoon. From the flight into darkness of those I continue to love. From my inarticulate body and the syllables that clog my mouth. From having to say “nothing,” when a stranger asks me what I do. From my worst sins. From the failure of any other absolution. —Linda Pastan

national poetry month, day 10

Intelligence How easily the deer move between the field and the woods. Only we know a thing by its periphery: the meadow edged with trees. Or happiness with its horizon of pain. From inside the house I watch them grazing, their pooled memory guiding them into the shade, then into the grass again. —Jenny George

national poetry month, day 9

No The children have brought their wood turtle into the dining hall because they want us to feel the power they have when they hold a house in their own hands, want us to feel alien lacquer and the little thrill that he might, like God, show his face. He’s the color of ruined wallpaper, of cognac, and he’s closed, pulled in as though he’ll never come out; nothing shows but the plummy leather of the legs, his claws resembling clusters of diminutive raspberries. They know he makes night anytime he wants, so perhaps he feels at the center of everything, as they do. His age, greater than that of anyone around the table, in a room from which they are excluded, though they don’t mind, since they can carry this perfect building anywhere. They love that he might poke out his old, old face, but doesn’t. I think the children smell unopened, like unlit candles, as they heft him around the table, praise his secrecy, holding to each adult face his prayer, the single word of the shell, which is no. —Mark Doty

national poetry month, day 8

God for Ada Limón Look, it’s not that I believe in him. Nor he in me. We have moved beyond all that. I just like having someone there in the dark. Usually we sit in silence, waiting for passing headlights to glide across the ceiling and knock stray prayers loose from where they got stuck on their way out, so many years ago. It’s almost like finding old piñata candy, says God, picking one from the floorboards. He unwraps it, takes a quick taste. Winces. Nods like he’s just remembered something for the thousandth, thousandth time. What is it? I ask. It’s kind of like chewing tinfoil, he says. All that aching naked hope. —Michael Bazzett

national poetry month, day 21

After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair. The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don’t have the virus, it’s a bitch. The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE STORAGE. My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things have been, and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only to the dead, someone tells me—to comfort, I assume, or inspire, but I take it literally, as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck and let’s cook tonight, those are for you, Stephen. You won’t come to me in my dreams, so I must communicate by other avenues. A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam” —a red bloom, the words “like a fire that consumes all before it”— and asks: Have you seen this? It’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. If I have, I can’t remember, though I did visit with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room as guards jostled in, and I—though charged with keeping you from trouble—joined the game, and the whole time we never laughed, not till we were released into the grand air we couldn’t touch and could. You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for my keys, buy kale and radishes, in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son. Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labelled SIGNS SIGNS. I’ve studied the mug shot of the man who killed you; I can imagine his hands. Of course I would. Each finger, even. To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows what I am capable of. If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt, sheen behind caution tape. Homer’s similes, I’ve been told, are holes cut in the cloth between the world of war and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even there, a man kills his neighbor. “Let Achilles cut me down, / as soon as I have taken my son into my arms and have satisfied my desire for grief”—this, my mind’s new refrain in the pharmacy queue, in the train’s rattling frame. The same friend and I discuss a line by Zbigniew Herbert “where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad.” It’s nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability of reference: The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire. We see double. You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash. Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames, one black, one a gauzy red, only to learn the title is “Boats at Sea.” It’s like how sometimes I forget you’re gone. But it’s not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes carry us nowhere. And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased— Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother. Listen to me plead for your life though even in the dream I know you’re already dead. How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priam’s ever? I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn. —Elisa Gonzalez

national poetry month, day 15

The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings. The home I’ve been making inside myself started with a razing, a brush clearing, the thorn and nettle, the blackberry bush falling under the bush hog. Then I rested, a cycle fallow. Said winter. Said the ground is too cold to break, pony. Said I almost set fire to it all, lit a match, watched it ghost in the wind. Came the thaw, came the melting snowpack, the flooded river, new ground water, the well risen. I stood in the mud field and called it a pasture. Stood with a needle in my mouth and called it a song. Everything rushed past my small ears: whir in the leaves, whir in the wing and the wood. About time to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw. —Donika Kelly

national poetry month, day 3

In A Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed, the mushroom scent lingers. As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale. As a person who’s once loved completely, a country once conquered, does not release that stunned knowledge. They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels, clownish puffballs. Lichens have served as a lamp-wick. Clean-burning coconuts, olives. Dried salmon, sheep fat, a carcass of petrel set blazing: light that is fume and abradement. Unburnable mushrooms are other. They darken the air they come into. Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken. —Jane Hirshfield

national poetry month, day 24

On a Train The book I’ve been reading rests on my knee. You sleep. It’s beautiful out there – fields, little lakes and winter trees in February sunlight, every car park a shining mosaic. Long, radiant minutes, your hand in my hand, still warm, still warm. —Wendy Cope

national poetry month, day 29

Today and Two Thousand Years from Now The job is over. We stand under the trees waiting to be told what to do, but the job is over. The darkness pours between the branches above, but the moon’s not yet on its walk through the night sky trailed by stars. Suddenly a match flares, I see there are only us two, you and me, alone together in the great room of the night world, two laborers with nothing to do, so I lean to the little flame and light my Lucky and thank you, comrade, and again we are in the dark. Let me now predict the future. Two thousand years from now we two will be older, wiser, having escaped the fleeting incarnations of workingmen. We will have risen from the earth of southern Michigan through the tangled roots of Chinese elms or ancient rosebushes to take the tainted air into our leaves and send it back, purified, down the same trail we took to escape the dark. Two thousand years passed in a flash to shed no more light than a wooden match gave under the trees when you and I were lost kids, more scared than now, but warm, useless, with names and different faces. —Philip Levine

national poetry month, day 26

The Armadillo for Robert Lowell This is the time of year when almost every night the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint still honored in these parts, the paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes, like hearts. Once up against the sky it’s hard to tell them from the stars— planets, that is—the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars, or the pale green one. With a wind, they flare and falter, wobble and toss; but if it’s still they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous. Last night another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down. We saw the pair of owls who nest there flying up and up, their whirling black-and-white stained bright pink underneath, until they shrieked up out of sight. The ancient owls’ nest must have burned. Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene, rose-flecked, head down, tail down, and then a baby rabbit jumped out, short-eared, to our surprise. So soft!—a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes. Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky! —Elizabeth Bishop

national poetry month, day 22

Summer Leaving the house, I went out to see The frog, for example, in her satiny skin; and her eggs like a slippery veil; and her eyes with their golden rims; and the pond with its risen lilies; and its warmed shores dotted with pink flowers; and the long, windless afternoons; and the white heron like a dropped cloud, taking one slow step then standing awhile then taking another, writing her own soft-footed poem through the still waters. —Mary Oliver