Poem Therapy: Grief's Weird Sister, Gratitude - Jennifer Michael Hecht.

 

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born - Njideka Akunyili Crosby

How to read a tome of Collected Poems?
Read one that pivotally changes you
and lose track of the page and title.
How to clean a house? Lose your ring in it.
Milosz not having to make peace one day
because the people are dead, nor revisit
some cities of his blood, because they are
razed. I’m still reading for that one.
If I wince that I got cuppy, said too much,
maybe years ago, sometimes the sudden
knowledge that my auditor is no longer
will come in as wistful relief, if with grief.
So I’d like to find it. This “how” isn’t
an engineering question, but angle,
here alchemically
translated to hope by way of loss.

***

Grief is a savage sister to Gratitude. The last few years have been lessons in loss. Loss of all kinds. I won't go into it, that's what poetry is for, to show rather than tell. What I will say is that I am grateful to be on this side of it.  

These Hands, If Not Gods - Natlie Diaz

Sainte Genevieve - Kiki Smith

Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?

And wasn’t that good?
Them at your hips—

isn’t this what God felt when he pressed together
the first Beloved: Everything.
Fever. Vapor. Atman. Pulsus. Finally,
a sin worth hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a
You are mine.

It is hard not to have faith in this:
from the blue-brown clay of night
these two potters crushed and smoothed you
into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—

atlas of bone, fields of muscle,
one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,
both Morning and Evening.

O, the beautiful making they do—
of trigger and carve, suffering and stars—

Aren’t they, too, the dark carpenters
of your small church? Have they not burned
on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?

Haven’t they riveted your wrists, haven’t they
had you at your knees?

And when these hands touched your throat,
showed you how to take the apple and the rib,
how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,
didn’t you sing out their ninety-nine names—

Zahir, Aleph, Hands-time-seven,
Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,
Rubidium, August, and September—
And when you cried out, O, Prometheans,
didn’t they bring fire?

These hands, if not gods, then why
when you have come to me, and I have returned you
to that from which you came—bright mud, mineral-salt—
why then do you whisper O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
My hundred-handed one?

-----------
I wonder what my own dark carpenters, bulders of my small church, think of their creation. And further, who is the hundred-handed one who will overthrow them?

What is Broken is What God Blesses - Jimmy Santiago Baca

Hurt - Cheyenne Randall

   The lover's footprint in the sand
   the ten-year-old kid's bare feet
in the mud picking chili for rich growers,
not those seeking cultural or ethnic roots,
but those whose roots
have been exposed, hacked, dug up and burned
   and in those roots
   do animals burrow for warmth;
what is broken is blessed,
 not the knowledge and empty-shelled wisdom
 paraphrased from textbooks,
  not the mimicking nor plaques of distinction
  nor the ribbons and medals
but after the privileged carriage has passed
 the breeze blows traces of wheel ruts away
 and on the dust will again be the people's broken
       footprints.
What is broken God blesses,
 not the perfectly brick-on-brick prison
 but the shattered wall
 that announces freedom to the world,
proclaims the irascible spirit of the human
rebelling against lies, against betrayal,
against taking what is not deserved;
 the human complaint is what God blesses,
 our impoverished dirt roads filled with cripples,
what is broken is baptized,
 the irreverent disbeliever,
 the addict's arm seamed with needle marks
  is a thread line of a blanket
 frayed and bare from keeping the man warm.
We are all broken ornaments,
  glinting in our worn-out work gloves,
  foreclosed homes, ruined marriages,
from which shimmer our lives in their deepest truths,
blood from the wound,
    broken ornaments—
when we lost our perfection and honored our imperfect sentiments, we were
blessed.
Broken are the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks where gangs duel to death,
yet through the wretchedness a woman of sixty comes riding her rusty bicycle,
   we embrace
   we bury in our hearts,
broken ornaments, accused, hunted, finding solace and refuge
  we work, we worry, we love
  but always with compassion
  reflecting our blessings—
   in our brokenness
   thrives life, thrives light, thrives
    the essence of our strength,
     each of us a warm fragment,
     broken off from the greater
     ornament of the unseen,
     then rejoined as dust,
     to all this is.

***

All the children of a lesser god, not the god revered in cathedrals or temples,
but the dusty god of our ancient ancestors, remembers and blesses us,
the broken, yet still unbowed.  

Poem Therapy 25 April 2013: Postcard: Advice to a Young Poet - Carl Phillips

Postcard: Advice To A Young Poet
Carl Phillips


This is excellent advice not only for writing, but for living life following your own bent of mind.

Poem Therapy 16 April 2013 2:57 PM: Elegy in Limestone - CJ Evans

boston

Elegy in Limestone
CJ Evans

If the water, everywhere, and if she is. If ghosts, like water, like if all rivers and oceans and rains are one ghost, surrounding and throughout. If she is, like if the lakes and bays of Seattle define Seattle, if the ices Of Mars and Massachusetts, hidden in their deep stones, define Mars and Massachusetts; if she is. A thirst unmet, alkaline or saline, the water not touching that thirst, if my thirst wants something else entirely. If she is. Water, if it is in and is blood. If invisible until exhale. If science lies and water doesn’t reflect sky but sky this water. If she is the sound, if it isn’t essential until its lack. If she is the sound of. Waves. If in the body, the dew in morning, and the moon. If she is the sound of the water. If rising, if breaking, if throughout. Everyone of us is made of water, and flesh. We are all born of woman. In a way, we are all one flesh. The older I get, the more I begin to understand the meaning behind the Golden Rule, the laws of Karma, the teachings of sages and prophets, the scripture that what is done to the least is done to all.

War and Words - Story & Poetry

 short stories from the long war

It is not you who will speak: let the disaster speak in you.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

 

Ten years.
 

Not even poetry can rock this disaster to sleep.

 

I Was In A Hurry

Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn't notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.
Please, if anyone passes by
and stumbles across it,
perhaps in a suitcase
open to the sky,
or engraved on a rock
like a gaping wound,
or wrapped
in the blankets of emigrants,
or canceled
like a losing lottery ticket,
or helplessly forgotten
in Purgatory,
or rushing forward without a goal
like the questions of children,
or rising with the smoke of war,
or rolling in a helmet on the sand,
or stolen in Ali Baba's jar,
or disguised in the uniform of a policeman
who stirred up the prisoners
and fled,
or squatting in the mind of a woman
who tries to smile,
or scattered like the dreams
of new immigrants in America.
If anyone stumbles across it,
return it to me, please.
Please return it, sir.
Please return it, madam.
It is my country...
I was in a hurry
when I lost it yesterday.

"I Was in a Hurry" by Dunya Mikhail, translated by Elizabeth Winslow, from The War Works Hard, copyright 1993, 1997, 2000, 2005 by Dunya Mikhail. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

 

More:

Revisiting Iraq Through The Eyes Of An Exiled Poet

 

Iraq War – 10 Years Later

 

Writing the War Out: How One Veteran Has Used Writing to Confront Trauma - Nina Porzucki

Fire and Forget: Stories from the Long War -

 

Credible Information, 1999 - 2003 - Mark Pawlak
Dear George Bush - Kristin Prevallet

Poem Therapy 12:10 PM 13 March 2013: Immortality - Craig Morgan Teicher

Immortality

I feel like Emily Dickinson did, running her pale finger over each blade of grass, then caressing each root in the depths of the earth's primeval dirt, each tip tickling heaven's soft underbelly. I feel like Emily alone in her room, her hands folded neatly in her lap, waiting forever for one of those two daguerreotypes to embalm her precious soul.          At my most attuned, the present is a pair of wings stretching forever in all directions, flapping calmly, calmly flapping. But as soon as I notice how happy I am, how close to the sun, there I go plummeting into the background of the same damn painting as ever.         If I could reach my hand out to you now, would you take it? How do you think it would feel? Warm and soft and certain? Or like Emily's: clammy and brittle as hardened paste? Is that not how you imagine her hands? Look again—they were like that, otherwise she could never, would never, have written those poems. --- Dear Craig Morgan Teicher, I imagine Emily's hands would be cool and small, the tiny bones prisoners, wrapped inside my own warm hand. Although the image of Emily's hands as clammy and brittle as hardened paste is stark in its desert bone beauty, I respectfully suggest that you take another look at the poet's hands, folded into each other like sleeping birds in the folds of her skirts. Emily's hands are innocent. Her eyes reveal the ice chip pressed into her heart. By whom? it is uncertain. Yes, her eyes and the faint pressure of lips pressing into each other communicates her unapologetic capacity to send us, her readers, plummeting like Icarus into Breughel's green ocean, with her unflinching words and criminal dashes. But those hands, those unblemished, supple hands wrote hope is a thing with feathers. Sincerely, Danna P.S. I am curious which other poets you have pulled their flayed skins up over your own and walked around inside.

Poem Therapy: Back - Beckian Friz Goldberg

back to earth   micah ofstedahl

Back

The god of the back
must be a lonely god,
god in the shape of man-headed hawk.

Long ago
a man had been sailing the river
and the hawk had been flying beside him 
for days. Mornings,

the man would wake and look,
yes, there it was, dark tip-to-tip, the hawk.
His hawk, he began to think of it.
And after a time

he forgot the point of the journey, 
he only woke each morning to see
if the hawk was there, to move if the hawk
moved with him, to not rest

if the hawk did not rest.  And all of this love
was done in silence, between animal
and animal.  There

beside him in the air and there
beside him in the water, the yoke
of the hawk.  Once he had a family.  Once
he had a city to go to and something

to bring back.  More and more 
he began to see his life
as a story the hawk was telling

holding the rat of the field in its claw, meaning
There is another world
and I will take you in it. 
This

is when he became the god,
god of the back, the beautiful
brow of leaving.

---
I have read this poem before, and may have even posted it here. I am rereading as someone else, as in, rereading as another incarnation of my current self and all my former selves. 

Have you ever revisite yourself as a child, or a teenager, or a new parent, or who you were just last year? Can you remember the thoughts of your former self?

I recognized my current self in "more and more/he began to see his life/as a story the hawk was telling".

There is another world. It is just before us. The world in which we become ourselves, again and again.

 

Poem Therapy 16 January 2013: Who Is God? So Asked Our Dog - Dara Weir

Who Is God? So Asked Our Dog

How many seasons are there?
Where was God born?
How many stars?
Who discovered every single one of the Americas and all of the other places?
Do some dwarves live in caves?
Is your mother singing in church tonight?
Is your father setting his hat on his head?
Do those goldfish belong to you?
Why did their God rise from the dead?
Could it be because of a forgotten pencil?
Do you like to study history?
Is this your book?
Where does cotton grow?
Why did the Holy Family go to Egypt. What is the Holy Family?
Do you see frightened ghosts on the streets sometimes?
I see the dog in your eye.
How would you like this to end?
Gone was a dog off to where a dog wants to go.
Who needed some help from old friends?
Do you see the question mark at the end of this sentence?
Somewhat maligned Pandora remains a curious person.
---
It's been two weeks since my old dog Ellie died.

We humans like to believe we are mighty. But it is the beasts who see the dog in our eyes, who sees us as we truly are.

And loves us anyway.

Poem Therapy 10 January 2013: Somewhere Else - Matthew Shenoda

somewhere else coll hamilton

Somewhere Else

It is here on this ridge 
exposed to the orange dusk 
of mountain autumn 
that the story begins. 

Buck wood for the stove 
feel the heat of shoulder to tendon 
greet the mule deer 
and water the garden again. 

In rhythm, with song 
when the ax begins to blend with wind
carry on to warmer days 
on the river’s open banks 
where the fervor of healing is found in water. 
Flow from one origin to another--
there is never a place where we cannot begin 
where the current is ancient, the wind is young 
teaching each other like the ax and the wood. 

Carve a place for dignity 
plant a seed and pray for rain 
for sun 
for understanding outside your self. 

There will come a day when they say: 
who do you think you are 
and another day will come 
for you to tell. 

On that day the story will appear 
but do not tell of yourself 

tell the story of the staff that blossomed in the desert
or the one about your enemy’s greatest victory

tell the story of somewhere else
---

the story of somewhere else
Danna

when they asked
who do you think you are
it was not for me to tell

it is for you to tell
the story of somewhere else
that other time

is is for you to tell
in secret code
disguised as language
that your enemy died
an old man
in his own soft bed 

Poem Therapy: Famous - Naomi Shihab Nye

Famous

Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.   The loud voice is famous to silence,   which knew it would inherit the earth   before anybody said so.     The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   watching him from the birdhouse.     The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.     The idea you carry close to your bosom   is famous to your bosom.     The boot is famous to the earth,   more famous than the dress shoe,   which is famous only to floors.   The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.     I want to be famous to shuffling men   who smile while crossing streets,   sticky children in grocery lines,   famous as the one who smiled back.   I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   but because it never forgot what it could do.   ---   In our look at me! celebrity culture where we post and tweet and status update endlessly, I think it is more than enough to be famous for never forgetting what it is that we can do, and to be famous for our small kindnesses. I write. I make art. I am a mother bear mother. I am a loyal friend. It is enough that I am famous to my daughter, my family, my friends, acquaintances and colleagues. Sometimes, I forget what it is that I can do, but then I remember. I am back to my writing. I have published the first chapter from my novel in a literary journal. When I am finished writing the novel, I want it published. And read. I want it to be good. Better than good. I don't need to be famous. It will be enough for my novel to be good. And to be read.

Poem Therapy 11 December 2012 9:17 P. M. : Syria Regna & Morning News - Marilyn Hacker

Syria Regna
Marilyn Hacker

Morning News

Marilyn Hacker

 

Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread
and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches,
repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war.
A cinder-block wall shared by two houses
is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen
sink and a cupboard, on the other was
a bed, a bookshelf, three framed photographs.

Glass is shattered across the photographs;
two half-circles of hardened pocket bread
sit on the cupboard. There provisionally was
shelter, a plastic truck under the branches
of a fig tree. A knife flashed in the kitchen,
merely dicing garlic. Engines of war
move inexorably toward certain houses

while citizens sit safe in other houses
reading the newspaper, whose photographs
make sanitized excuses for the war.
There are innumerable kinds of bread
brought up from bakeries, baked in the kitchen:
the date, the latitude, tell which one was
dropped by a child beneath the bloodied branches.

The uncontrolled and multifurcate branches
of possibility infiltrate houses'
walls, windowframes, ceilings. Where there was
a tower, a town: ash and burnt wires, a graph
on a distant computer screen. Elsewhere, a kitchen
table's setting gapes, where children bred
to branch into new lives were culled for war.

Who wore this starched smocked cotton dress? Who wore
this jersey blazoned for the local branch
of the district soccer team? Who left this black bread
and this flat gold bread in their abandoned houses?
Whose father begged for mercy in the kitchen?
Whose memory will frame the photograph
and use the memory for what it was

never meant for by this girl, that old man, who was
caught on a ball field, near a window: war,
exhorted through the grief a photograph
revives. (Or was the team a covert branch
of a banned group; were maps drawn in the kitchen,
a bomb thrust in a hollowed loaf of bread?)
What did the old men pray for in their houses

of prayer, the teachers teach in schoolhouses
between blackouts and blasts, when each word was
flensed by new censure, books exchanged for bread,
both hostage to the happenstance of war?
Sometimes the only schoolroom is a kitchen.
Outside the window, black strokes on a graph
of broken glass, birds line up on bare branches.

"This letter curves, this one spreads its branches
like friends holding hands outside their houses."
Was the lesson stopped by gunfire? Was
there panic, silence? Does a torn photograph
still gather children in the teacher's kitchen?
Are they there meticulously learning war-
time lessons with the signs for house, book, bread? 

---             

Over forty-thousand and more. Gone.

Poem Therapy 6 December 2012 8:04 P.M.: Footprint on Your Heart - Gary Lenhart

Footprint on Your Heart
Gary Lenhart

Someone will walk into your life,
Leave a footprint on your heart,
Turn it into a mudroom cluttered
With encrusted boots, children's mittens,
Scratchy scarves—
Where you linger to unwrap 
Or ready yourself for rough exits 
Into howling gales or onto 
Frozen car seats, expulsions
Into the great outdoors where touch
Is muffled, noses glisten,
And breaths stab,
So that when you meet someone
Who is leaving your life
You will be able to wave stiff
Icy mitts and look forward
To an evening in spring
When you can fold winter away
Until your next encounter with
A chill so numbing you strew
The heart's antechamber
With layers of rural garble.

---
If you are very lucky, you will have many footprints imprinted on your heart, even if they shred you or strew your antechamber with rural garble.
 

Poem Therapy 28 November 2012 5:55 P.M.: The Kite and The Hawk - Lorenzo Thomas

The Kite and The Hawk
Lorenzo Thomas

Man is no longer alone in the universe! The day I found the hieroglyphic formula For happiness for all mankind I had to promise to give it away. It is we have to find a way For everyone to have one more of something Than your neighbor has For you--here is a dollar! And for you, I feel warm brotherhood And love intense Beyond what anyone has ever felt before. You didn't think I'm going around And giving everybody money? For me The syllable of antique power To shift the Light above Enough to cast the second or third shadow The Grand Prize In the lottery of loneliness. ---  So, the solution to outwitting loneliness is to shift the sun's light and cast it on someone other than yourself. Warm brotherhood. Warm sisterhood. That is how I am choosing to read this poem. On first reading, I fully intended to write about the six-million dollar lottery frenzy going on around the country, but after the second and third reading, my thoughts went in an entirely different bent. (Incidentally, I have a stake in lottery tickets from Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, and Oregon. What will I do if we win? I will travel everywhere, write and make art all the livelong day, lallygag, fiddle dee dee, and la di da. That is what I will do). Back to my entirely non-lottery bent: Making certain my neighbor has a little more or shifting the light reminds me of the advice I received from my gentle, very sweet, non-judgemental, totally Mormon, non-confrontational sister: pray for my enemies. I know when she told me this I rolled my eyes and probably covered my phone and said pfft! You know what? It worked. At first you better believe I prayed for my enemy: to have a biblical plague descend upon her, to exit the bathroom with a trail of toilet paper tucked in the waist of her pants and for no one to tell her, for Monty Python's paper cutout finger of god to come out of the heavens and wag at her, for Karma to circle round and be a mighty bitch and just get her and get her again, to... and to... and to... You get the idea. After I cooled down and grew up and stopped praying for an apocalypse to befall her, I tried wishing for very specific good things to happen for her. I saw her happy. I saw her apologize and mean it. And then suddenly I couldn't remember the specifics of the problem, exactly. The story had gone cold. And then suddenly, I didn't think about her. Ever.  The next time I saw her, four years later, I greeted her like we were still friends, because I had forgotten she was my enemy. I remember she was shocked. She said she didn't know why she did what she did. It was nice to receive an apology, but I had already seen it in my wish. And that was real enough for me to move on. So, it just may be that the solution is to shift the light.

Poem Therapy: Butter - Elizabeth Alexander

Butter
Elizabeth Alexander

My mother loves butter more than I do,

more than anyone. She pulls chunks off

the stick and eats it plain, explaining

cream spun around into butter! Growing up

we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon

and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,

butter melting in small pools in the hearts

of Yorkshire puddings, butter better

than gravy staining white rice yellow,

butter glazing corn in slipping squares,

butter the lava in white volcanoes

of hominy grits, butter softening

in a white bowl to be creamed with white

sugar, butter disappearing into

whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,

butter melted and curdy to pour

over pancakes, butter licked off the plate

with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture

the good old days I am grinning greasy

with my brother, having watched the tiger

chase his tail and turn to butter. We are

Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite  

historical revision, despite

our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside

out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

 

---

When my daughter was a toddler, she would eat an entire stick of butter if I let her. She loved butter on absolutely everything. Now that she's older and more health conscious, she eats butter sparingly. All of the food I am preparing for dinner tomorrow require generous portions of butter.

 

Butter makes everything better.

 

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the United States day of thanks. I have so much that many times I take it for granted and forget to be grateful.

 

I am grateful for my daughter, my step children and grandbabies, my family and friends, my dogs, my imagination, my health, my too big home, my freedoms too numerous to count, my possessions that at times possess me, my work, my talents that I sometimes ignore until they rebel and demand attention, for second chances to remake the world according to me, for possibilities.

 

What are you grateful for?

 

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Poem Therapy: Sonnetesque - Lynn Emmanuel

28 October 2012 3:14 P.M.

Sonnetesque

I love its smallness: as though our whole town were a picture postcard and our feelings were on vacation: ourselves in mini- ature, shopping at tiny sales, buying the newspapers—small and pale and square as sugar cubes—at the fragile, little curb. The way the streetlight is really a table lamp where now we sit and where real night, (which is very tall and black and at our backs), where for a moment the night is forced to bend down and look through these tiny windows, forced to come closer and put its hand on our shoulder and stoop over the book to read the fine print. ---

abab cdcd efef gg. Blank verse. Iambic pentameter. 14 lines.

And that's it, the not so secret formula to one of the most beautiful forms of poetry.

Without Shakespeare's sonnets, how would we speak of love? Would we speak of love?

Lynn Emmanuel is one of my favorite poets. If you haven't read her, google and read everything. I'm not kidding.

Her "sonnet" is not traditional, other than it adheres to 14 lines. So what. It's sonnetesque. It is also beautiful. 

Poem Therapy: Telling - Elisabeth Frost

Telling
Elisabeth Frost

They keep telling me why I do what I do. I do it so that one day

someone will do for me what I'm doing for her. They're saying, then,

that my motivation is to be, down the line, the recipient of the

doing. According to their logic, I buy her the Times and irises for the

bed table, renew the nitroglycerin and Cardia, throw in the

chocolate that isn't allowed, and, back home, scour the tub, scrub

the toilet—I do these things in order to have them done for me, if

not by her, who can't do them (let's be honest), then, second best,

by someone else. They say that's the reason I study so closely her

happiness, her lack of happiness. And their gentleness in the

telling, the lowered chin and eyes, the slow enunciation, the hand

reaching toward my wrist—it all tells me that things won't end

where I think they will, that what I do isn't like a mitral valve (thrust

open, clamp shut), an act without volition, but is, like the refusal

finally to turn away, something chosen, which may or may not do

anything like what one hopes it will.
---
Could be the heart won't let itself do what the head knows is best.
Could be that what you do isn't about what you want done for yourself.
Could be it is just doing what has to be done, right at that moment.

Perhaps out of obligation. Perhaps out of the knowledge there is no one else to do it. Perhaps from the same impulse that drives you to right a bee spinning on its back, or to throw a stranded crustacean back into the ocean.

It is difficult to turn your back, even on an enemy.

Poem Therapy 2:34 27 September 2012: I Had Just Hung Up from Talking to You - Jessica Greenbuam

I Had Just Hung Up from Talking to You

Jessica Greenbaum

I had just hung up from talking to you

and we had been so immersed in the difficulty

you were facing, and forgive me,

I was thinking that as long as we kept talking,

you in your car in the parking lot of the boys’ school

as the afternoon deepened into early evening,

and me in the study, all the books around

that had been sources of beauty to us,

as long as we stayed in the conversation

padded with history like the floor of the pine forest,

as long as I thought out loud, made a joke

at my own expense, you would be harbored in that exchange,

but the boys were leaving the track

and after we hung up I looked out the window

to see the top of the bare January trees spotlit to silvery red,

massive but made from the thinnest

twigs at the ends of the branches at the ends of the limbs

they were waving and shining in a light

like no other and left only to them.

---

Listening is important.

For the past few months, I have been paying someone to listen to me talk about the frayed edges of my life. I've had the impulse to apologize for talking about myself so much, but then remember that is the point. I spend a lot of the time there laughing. He laughs too. Otherwise, it would just be uncomfortable.

I know I couldn't do his job. I wonder how he deals with the litany of woe, real and imagined, his clients bring him every day.

It's very hard for me to listen and not act. I have to fight the impulse to enter the story, fix things, lay the enemy of my friend down, set the problem aright. Sometimes, I lose that fight.

When my husband had his first heart attack, I was certain I could keep him alive by cooking clean and getting him to exercise. After a few months, turkey bacon was the straw that broke the camel's back, and he complained that life wasn't worth living if he had to eat like this. It took me a very long time to figure out that his health was his business.

What I know for sure is that the only life I have authority over is my own. The only life I can save is my own.

I only have this one, and precious life.

So do you.

Poem Therapy 2:57 P.M. 24 September 2012: effect shrewd preferences - Evie Shockley

effect shrewd preferences
Evie Shockley

the screed seen here blesses
        the sweet, the meek, the gentle,
                the serene. let eyes ensembled
peep the news sheets: ere
        december descends, we'll elect
                the next pres, reps, etc. when
we welter, cede the wheel,
        we let greed-questers enter
                (well-dressed jerks!). they send
themselves the green we need,
        help themselves fleece the sheep
                we be. we're the perfect prey!
the press sleeps the sleep we
        deserve, then bleeds berserk
                text between celeb tweets. we'd
best reject the mess, steer
        the fleet between these repellent
                hells. veer! swerve! reverse!
here's the pledge: we'll expect
        better press. elect the decent
                men, the keenest shes. revere
sense. never feed spleen lest
        we weep endless weeks, red-
                eyed, bereft. let excellent pens
represent the experts' ken, help
        peeps remember key elements.
                let's select well. we'll revel yet.

---

Can it just be over yet?

Here's the thing, after last week, I don't want to hear another word. Not. One. Word.

But, that is wishful thinking. Both sides are ratcheting up their game plan, resetting, polling, texting, emailing, tweeting, Facebooking, calling.  

It really feels like we're getting sprayed with perfume by those annoying sales clerks who stand at the entrance of department stores with decanters, squeezing and squeezing, chasing after us when we try to avoid them.

Hang on. One month and one week left.  

Poem Therapy at 8:35 20 September 2012: Palea -Tory Dent

Palea
Tory Dent

Only my mouth taking you in, the greenery splayed deep green. Within my mouth, your arm inserted, a stem of gestures, breaking gracefully. Into each other we root arbitrarily, like bushes, silken, and guttural. Palaver, we open for the thrill of closing, for the thrill of it: opening. The night was so humid when I knelt on the steps, wet and cold, of prewar stone. A charm bracelet of sorts we budded, handmade but brazen, as if organic. I cannot imagine the end of my fascination, emblazoned but feather-white too. The gold closure of this like a gold coin is, of course, ancient. Why can't experience disseminate itself, be silken and brazen yet underwater? A miniature Eiffel Tower, an enameled shamrock, a charm owned by its bracelet. --- The language of this poem is beautiful. I can accept the possibility that I am a charm owned by its bracelet. The title brought to mind the image that each of us are encased in the other, in all those we love, those we detest, those we pass on the street, just as a simple bud of wheat is encased in the chaff. Even our experiences and perceptions are bundled in layers of emotion, thought, filter, perspective. Language itself, the words, are layered with multiple meaning, and then how the words are spoken, the intent behind the word, even the voice adds a new depth. Truly, how can experience disseminate itself?