SOMETIMES

Sometimes things don't go, after all,

From bad to worse. Some years, muscadel

Faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,

Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;

Elect an honest man; decide they care

Enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they are born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

Amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

That seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you.

- Sheenagh Pugh

Vinegar and Oil

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul,
right solitude oils it.
How fragile we are,
between the few good moments.
Coming and going unfinished,
puzzled by fate,
like the half-carved relief
of a fallen donkey,
above a church door in Finland.

- Jane Hirschfield
Published in Atlantic Magazine, May 2008

Grief

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the checkout line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other

- Matthew Dickman
Published in New Yorker, May 5, 2008

If thou of fortune be bereft,
and in thy store there be but left two loaves,
sell one, and with the dole,
buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

- John Greenleaf Whittier

The Coffin Store

I was lugging my death from Kampala to Kraków.
Death, what a ridiculous load you can be,
like the world atremble on Atlas’s shoulders.

In Kampala I’d wondered why the people, so poor,
didn’t just kill me. Why don’t they kill me?
In Kraków I must have fancied I’d find poets to talk to.

I still believed then I’d domesticated my death,
that he’d no longer gnaw off my fingers and ears.
We even had parties together: “Happy,” said death,

and gave me my present, a coffin, my coffin,
made in Kampala, with a sliding door in its lid,
to look through, at the sky, at the birds, at Kampala.

That was his way, I soon understood, of reverting
to talon and snarl, for the door refused to come open:
no sky, no bird, no poets, no Kraków.

Catherine came to me then, came to me then,
“Open your eyes, mon amour,” but death
had undone me, my knuckles were raw as an ape’s,

my mind slid like a sad-ankled skate, and no matter
what Catherine was saying, was sighing, was singing,
“Mon amour, mon amour,” the door stayed shut, oh, shut.

I heard trees being felled, skinned, smoothed,
hammered together as coffins. I heard death
snorting and stamping, impatient to be hauled off, away.

But here again was Catherine, sighing, and singing,
and the tiny carved wooden door slid ajar, just enough—
the sky, one single bird, Catherine—just enough.


- C.K. Williams
Published in New Yorker, November 17, 2008
Photo by Thomas Froese