Monday, May 25, 2015

A Perfect Mess

For David Freedman


I read somewhere
that if pedestrians didn't break traffic laws to cross
Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible,
    the whole city
would stop, it would stop.
Cars would back up to Rhode Island,
an epic gridlock not even a cat
could thread through. It's not law but the sprawl
of our separate wills that keep us all flowing. Today I loved
the unprecedented gall
of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand
up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.
They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical
as any day laborers. They knew what was coming,
the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black
as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant
it burst. A downpour like a fire hose.
For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled,
paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato.
And it was my pleasure to witness a not
insignificant miracle: in one instant every black
umbrella in Hell's Kitchen opened on cue, everyone
still moving.  It was a scene from an unwritten opera,
the sails of some vast armada.
And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress
to accompany the piano movers,
each holding what might have once been
lace parasols over the grunting men. I passed next
the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled
under the corner awning,
in line for an open call - stork-limbed, ankles
zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette
around. The city feeds on beauty, starves
for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight,
to my deserted block with its famously high
subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure
longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon
opened its mouth to drink on high...

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by Mary Karr, 2012

Monday, May 18, 2015

Instruction

My hands that guide a needle
    In their turn are led
Relentlessly and deftly,
    As a needle leads a thread.

Other hands are teaching
    My needle; when I sew
I feel the cool, thin fingers
    Of hands I do not know.

They urge my needle onward,
    They smooth my seams, until
The worry of my stitches
    Smothers in their skill.

All the tired women,
    Who sewed their lives away,
Speak in my deft fingers
   As I sew today.

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by Hazel Hall, 1921

Monday, May 11, 2015

Midsummer

A green world, a scene of green, deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. One thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene
sitter's face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
                                        And see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. The air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm,  as though
with berries.  We are here.  We are here.
Set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

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by William Bronk, 1955

Monday, May 4, 2015

Sins of Omission

Suppose hell were a room
where the lovers you broke
up with, the spouses you left,
the friends you discarded

all were waiting to question
you, with no time limit ever
but the explanations could last
halfway into eternity. Who

wouldn't sooner leap into
a fire? There is no excuse
for the end of love or for
the fact that it never started

its engine into that lovely
roar but just coughed again
and again until you gave up
and got out and went off.

Some friendships are just not
sturdy enough to bear the daily
wear and weight. How to say,
but simply you bored me.

Then all the people you did
not help, the ones you hung
up on, the letter unanswered,
loans denied, calls not returned

that endless line will be snaking
through the horizon, waiting
to demand what you would
not give, life's unpaid bills.

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by Marge Piercy, 2015