How To Love

How to Love

January Gill O’Neil

After stepping into the world again,

there is that question of how to love,

how to bundle yourself against the frosted morning—

the crunch of icy grass underfoot, the scrape

of cold wipers along the windshield—

and convert time into distance.

What song to sing down an empty road

as you begin your morning commute?

And is there enough in you to see, really see,

the three wild turkeys crossing the street

with their featherless heads and stilt-like legs

in search of a morning meal? Nothing to do

but hunker down, wait for them to safely cross.

As they amble away, you wonder if they want

to be startled back into this world. Maybe you do, too,

waiting for all this to give way to love itself,

to look into the eyes of another and feel something—

the pleasure of a new lover in the unbroken night,

your wings folded around him, on the other side

of this ragged January, as if a long sleep has ended

January Gill O’Neil is the author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press, 2009). She is executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and teaches at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts.

 

I have been away from my blog for nearly a year but I would like to start posting special poems again. Loretta sent this one today that she ran across and it seems appropriate for me to share. My divorce is now final and is no longer a distraction, pulling me away from my love of poetry and this blog. I have been reconnecting with music and have spent several weekends at festivals and with friends playing my dulcimers, guitar and a new ukulele. My spirit is being fed and is pleading for more poetry.  If you have run across some poems you've enjoyed, please send them my way and I will put them up for others to see.

This poem speaks to me in several ways. Aside from the obvious "rebooting" I am experiencing as I leave a marriage of 37 years, there is the irony that I have been seeing wild turkey hens repeatedly the last few weeks, with a few poults scampering to keep up. Have I been "really seeing them?" I don't know, but I do enjoy glimpses of wildlife because it reminds me there is so more to this world than the problems and challenges that consume my days. It helps put things into perspective.

I am not waiting for anything to "give way to love." At least not in a romantic sense. I wouldn't mind learning to love more about life and to love in a deeper way. But for now, I am just enjoying the new found freedom and sense of renewal I am experiencing. Hope the poem is meaningful to you.

This was on Writer's Almanac but it so aptly describes my feelings I just had to post it here too.

Plans

Stuart Dischell

She plans to be a writer one day and live in the City of Paris,
Where she will describe the sun as it rises over Buttes-Chaumont.
"Today the dawn began in small pieces, sharp wedges of light
Broke through the clouds." She plans to write better than this
And is critic enough to know "sharp wedges" sound like cheese.
She plans to live alone in a place that has a terrace
Where she will drink strong coffee at a round white table.
Her terrace will be her cafe and she will be recognized
By the blue-smocked workers of the neighborhood, the concierges,
The locals at the comptoir of the tabac down the block,
And the girl under the green cross of the apothecary shop.
She plans to love her apartment where she will keep
Just one flower in a blue vase. She already loves the word apart-
Ment, whose halves please her when she sees them breaking
The line in her journal. She plans to learn the roots
Of French and English words and will search them out
As if she were hunting skulls in the catacombs.
On her walls she'll hang a timetable of the great events
Of Western History. She will read the same twenty books
As Chaucer. Every morning she will make up stories....
She looks around her Brighton room, at the walls,
The ceiling, the round knob of the rectangular door.
She listens to the voices of the neighbor's children.
A toilet flushes, then the tamp of cigarette on steel,
The flint flash of her roommate's boyfriend's lighter.
When she leaves she plans to leave alone, and every
Article she will carry, each shoe, will be important.
Like an architect she will plan this life, as once
The fortune in a cookie told her: Picture what you wish
To become, if you wish to become that picture.

"Plans" by Stuart Dischell, from Good Hope Road. © Viking, 1993.

Good Fun

I am desperate for some humor, how about you? This was on Writers Almanac. I am not familiar with Ron Padgett but this poem reminds me of Billy Collins, one of my favorites. I love his line "it is interesting not to know something everyone else knows." Makes me feel a whole lot better about myself.

The Swiss Family Robinson

Ron Padgett

I never quite understood who
the Swiss Family Robinson were.
The inversion of their name
confused me at an early age,
just as the name of Mary Baker Eddy
sounded as though she started out
as a woman and turned into
a guy named Eddy. At Walt
Disney World there is an attraction
called Swiss Family Robinson that
involves a tree house, so I assume
they lived in a tree. Why they did
I don't know. It sounds rather
stressful to me, the fear
of falling out. I could look up
the Swiss Family Robinson
in a reference book, but
it's interesting not to know
something that everyone else knows.
However, I would like to know if there
are many people named Robinson
in Switzerland. If there are,
I would know something that
most people don't know. 

"The Swiss Family Robinson" by Ron Padgett, from How to Be Perfect. © Coffee House Press, 2007.

Awesome video

This video by Mojebory, a Polish videographer, is quite moving. I suggest giving the video some time to stream (allow the gray bar to advance at least 3/4 of the way) before you attempt to watch it to avoid breaks.

http://vimeo.com/mojebory/happylife 

The Dali Lama speaks his incredible wisdom through the first half then Dinah Washington sings This Bitter Earth. I have posted here the words to the song.  Enjoy.

This Bitter Earth

Clyde Otis

This bitter earth
Well, what fruit it bears
What good is love
mmmm that no one shares
And if my life is like the dust
oooh that hides the glow of a rose
What good am I
Heaven only knows

Lord, this bitter earth
Yes, can be so cold
Today you’re young
Too soon, you’re old
But while a voice within me cries
I’m sure someone may answer my call
And this bitter earth
Ooooo may not
Oh be so bitter after all

Here's Howe

This poem is very effective in reminding me that life is about today, not those events we look forward to in the future. The outstandingly beautiful experiences and the profound challenges provide a break  in the routine, but to recognize the value of the ordinary,which we experience day in and day out, is the way to get the most out of life. As the Buddhists say, all you really have is the here and now.

Marie Howe was interviewed on Krista Tippet's show On Being. here is the link. I really enjoyed listening to it. click here watch or listen. On Being with Marie Howe





The Gate
Marie Howe

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

from What the Living Do Copyright © 1998 by Marie Howe
  
And here is her poem about the power of words. I have experienced words changing my life, in particular, words of poetry.




The Meadow

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,
and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
from The Good Thief by Marie Howe. Copyright © 1999 by Marie Howe.
http://www.onbeing.org/program/feature/the-meadow-by-marie-howe/5341