This poem, all my life.

By Frank O’Hara:

Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then

when we were still first rate

and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

It’s not use worrying about Time

but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves

and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal

we didn’t need speedometers

we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster

or greener than now if you were with me O you

were the best of all my days

[1950]

Wild horses, Shackleford Banks © Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams 2016

Surfacing

with Brigit Pegeen Kelly (1951-2016).

. . . They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother's call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

from “Song”

An Overlay of Foxes

Yesterday at dusk, out on a walk, I saw another fox. The roads were empty, and the fox stopped in the center lane to look at me. I watched as it turned and limped into the treeline. Perhaps it was hurt, or perhaps foxes always appear to be limping prettily and daintily to me. In any case, a red-tailed hawk swooped low over my shoulder and vanished after it. I could have reached up and grazed the bird's belly with my fingertips. That hawk ate an opossum a few evenings ago. My neighbor made a film of it. Maybe all this is why, today, I have been in three places: Lia Purpura's "Red: an Invocation," Margaret Atwood's "Red Fox," and the overlay of these two pieces in my own puttering brain. The overlay, I'm coming to understand, is memory: my fox underpinned by theirs. Like shadows behind these two works are all the other foxes I've read about, and isn't it something how many worlds we carry and lay down for our own feet to walk again and again.

I first read Purpura's flash essay in the Seneca Review years and years ago. It begins:

"I remember the fox in the light I drove forth. It was just before dawn. The headlights lit the fox's eyes, who did not blink but passed the light back, so it shone between us. Two beams of dust in the colloidal silence spread and touched the dark brush by the side of the alley. The fox was ember-colored, fresh-snapped, and already cooling."

And here is Atwood's poem:

Red Fox

The red fox crosses the ice
intent on none of my business.
It's winter and slim pickings.

I stand in the bushy cemetery,
pretending to watch birds,
but really watching the fox
who could care less.
She pauses on the sheer glare
of the pond. She knows I'm there,
sniffs me in the wind at her shoulder.
If I had a gun or dog
or a raw heart, she'd smell it.
She didn't get this smart for nothing.

She's a lean vixen: I can see
the ribs, the sly
trickster's eyes, filled with longing
and desperation, the skinny
feet, adept at lies.

Why encourage the notion
of virtuous poverty?

It's only an excuse
for zero charity.
Hunger corrupts, and absolute hunger
corrupts absolutely,
or almost. Of course there are mothers,
squeezing their breasts
dry, pawning their bodies,
shedding teeth for their children,
or that's our fond belief.
But remember - Hansel
and Gretel were dumped in the forest
because their parents were starving.
Sauve qui peut. To survive
we'd all turn thief

and rascal, or so says the fox,
with her coat of an elegant scoundrel,
her white knife of a smile,
who knows just where she's going:

to steal something
that doesn't belong to her -
some chicken, or one more chance,
or other life.

The World Offers Itself

Late last night, at around midnight, we rode bikes far out into the marsh over the rain-slicked wood jetties. Heat lightning over the sound and the ocean, and the tall grass lit and the sea did too and it all went on forever.

 

 

Here's a poem's been on my mind lately. 'Wild Geese' by Mary Oliver...

 
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
 

Up late with John Yau's Borrowed Love Poems

My mind is restless and sluggish as this slow-moving storm. I've been trying to edit an essay, turning over and over a line Woolf jotted down in her diary. Pacing inside that one sentence for over a week, I realized I had misunderstood it. But I need time to fix my mistake, so I'm sleepless, listening to the rain, the tree limbs fall, the transformers blow, and smashing myself against these lines. Read them yourself and feel the flutter of your fragile heart.

Borrowed Love Poems

1.

What can I do, I have dreamed of you so much

What can I do, lost as I am in the sky

 

What can I do, now that all

the doors and windows are open

 

I will whisper this in your ear

as if it were a rough draft

 

something I have scribbled on a napkin

I have dreamed of you so much

 

there is no time left to write

no time left on the sundial

 

for my shadow to fall back to the earth

lost as I am in the sky

 

2.

What can I do all the years that we talked

and I was afraid to want more

 

What can I do, now that these hours

belong neither to you nor me

 

Lost as I am in the sky

What can I do, now that I cannot find

 

the words I need

when your hair is mine

 

now that there is no time to sleep

now that your name is not enough

 

3.

What can I do, if a red meteor wakes the earth

and the color of robbery is in the air

 

Now that I dream of you so much

my lips are like clouds

 

drifting above the shadow of one who is asleep

Now that the moon is enthralled with a wall

 

What can I do, if one of us is lying on earth

and the other is lost in the sky

 

4.

What can I do, lost as I am in the wind

and lightning that surrounds you

 

What can I do, now that my tears

are rising toward the sky

 

only to fall back

into the sea again

 

What can I do, now that the sky

has shut its iron door

 

and bolted clouds

to the back of the moon

 

now that the wind

has diverted the ocean's attention

 

now thata red meteor

has plunged into the lake

 

now that I am awake

now that you have closed the book

 

6.

Now that the sky is green

and the air is red with rain

 

I never stood in

the shadow of the pyramids

 

I never walked from village to village

in search of fragments

 

that had fallen to earth in another age

What can I do, now that we have collided

 

on a cloudless night

and sparks rise

 

from the bottom of a thousand lakes

 

7.

To some, the winter sky is a blue peach

teeming with words

 

and the clouds are growing thick

with sour milk

 

What can I do, now that the fat black sea

is seething

 

Now that I have refused to return

my borrowed dust to the butterflies

 

their wings full of yellow flour

 

8.

What can I do, I never believed happiness

could be premeditated

 

What can I do, now that I have sent you

a necklace full of dead dried bees

 

and now that I want to

be like the necklace

 

and turn flowers into red candles

pouring from the sun

 

9.

What can I do, now that I have spent my life

studying the physics of good-bye

 

every velocity and particle in all the waves

undulating through the relapse of a moment's fission

 

now that I must surrender this violin

to the sea's foaming black tongue

 

now that January is almost here

and I have started celebrating a completely different life

 

10.

Now that the seven wonders of the night

have been stolen by history

 

Now that the sky is lost and the stars

have slipped into a book

 

Now that the moon is boiling

like the blood where it swims

 

Now that there are no blossoms left

to glue to the sky

 

What can I do,

I who never invented anything

 

and who dreamed of you so much

I was amazed to discover

 

the claw marks of those

who preceded us across this burning floor

 

*John Yau's collection by the same name (Borrowed Love Poems) can and should be purchased. We are all found in every line.