Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

~ from Collected Poems (Knopf, 2014)

Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi
after the Urgent Care doctor had just said, Well,
sometimes shit happens, I fell good and hard
for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirling
in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken
a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle
with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees
bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics
villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both
a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy,
said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side
grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank,
brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez,
out of the corner of my eye, a girl, maybe half my age,
is dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman.
She struts by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stand to clap (because who wouldn’t),
she bows and poses like she knew I needed the myth,
—a woman, by a river, indestructible

~ from The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018)

I apologize to coincidence for calling it necessity.
I apologize to necessity just in case I'm mistaken.
Let happiness be not angry that I take it as my own.
Let the dead not remember they scarcely smolder in my memory. 
I apologize to time for the muchness of the world overlooked 
  per second.
I apologize to old love for regarding the new as the first. 
Forgive me, far-off wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize to those who cry out of the depths for the minuet-record.
I apologize to people at railway stations for sleeping at five in 
  the morning.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing now and again.
Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing up with a spoonful of water.
And you, O falcon, the same these many years, in that same cage,
forever staring motionless at that self-same spot,
absolve me, even though you are but a stuffed bird.
I apologize to the cut-down tree for the table's four legs.
I apologize to big questions for small answers.
O Truth, do not pay me too much heed.
O Solemnity, be magnanimous unto me.
Endure, mystery of existence, that I pluck out the threads of your 
  train.
Accuse me not, O soul, of possessing you but seldom.
I apologize to everything that I cannot be everywhere.
I apologize to everyone that I cannot be every man and woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can justify me,
because I myself am an obstacle to myself.
Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and later try hard to make them seem light.

~Translated from the Polish by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire, from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry

Everybody said it was useless
Everybody said, "you're trying to lean on sun dust"
that the beloved before whose tree I stand
can't be reached
Everybody said, "you're crazy to throw yourself 
headlong into a volcano and sing"
Everybody said that salty mountain 
won't yield even one glass of wine 
Everybody said, "You can't dance on one foot"
Everybody said there won't be any lights at the party
That's what they all said
but everybody came to the party anyway

translated by: Sharif Elmusa and Charles Doria
~ from The Flag of Childhood, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye (Aladdin Paperbacks, 2002)

The floorboards creak overhead, 
heavy with stars. 
The sound makes you think of the dead, 
as though they’re closer than you knew: 
like the doubled s in essence, 
an extra consonant slipped into the word 
for the very truth of you. 

~ from Heaven’s Thieves (Brick Books, 2016)

9				

I broke your heart.
Now barefoot I tread	
on shards.


17

Why is the word yes so brief
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,
so that upon reflection you could stop
in the middle of saying it.


59

Writing down verses, I got	
a paper cut on my palm.
The cut extended my life line	
by nearly one-fourth.

~ from If There Is Something to Desire (Alfred A Knopf, 2010) Translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
Wonder and grief. the light spraying
Through the lace of fern is as delicate
As the rivers of memory forming their web
Around the knot in my throat. The breeze
Makes the birds move from branch to branch
As this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
In the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
Of the next stranger. In the very Center, under
It all, what we have that no one can take
Away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
By a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

~ From Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness, (Sounds True, 2016)

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.
 
To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
 
And however sharply
you are tested –
this sorrow, that great love –
it too will leave on that clean knife. 	

~ from The October Palace (HarperPerrenial, 1994)

What things are steadfast? Not the birds. 
Not the bride and groom who hurry 
in their brevity to reach one another. 
The stars do not blow away as we do. 
The heavenly things ignite and freeze. 
But not as my hair falls before you. 
Fragile and momentary, we continue. 
Fearing madness in all things huge 
and their requiring. Managing as thin light 
on water. Managing only greetings 
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice 
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand. 
As the lovers quickening, riding time. 
Making safety in the moment. This touching 
home goes far. This fishing in the air.

~ from All of It Singing, New and Selected Poems
(Greywolf Press, 2008)

This awkward speck of dust, 
this universe, time, and every
act and thought  
from mineral to man,
deposited in the library of my marrow.

I do not know what I know
it enters through another door,
disturbs my fragile understandings,
rattles my dinnerware and knocks
all my trophies off their shelves. 

Breathed in loving madness,
revealed beyond the mind
and the shape of things.

Do not be betrayed
by philosophies and enlightenments– 
all there is to be 
was yours before you began. 

~ from Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace 
(Larson Publications, 2007)

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here's the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names. 

~ from Only As The Day Is Long, New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton and Co, 2019)

Some days it’s all fuzzy.
I can’t find the world,
Can’t find the beloved.
Can’t even find the words.

Time to lie back and listen.
Maybe something’s being said,
Something I haven’t heard.

Time to stop talking	
And let the beloved speak.

Time to trust it all;
To stop searching
And let the beloved seek.

~ From Concerning The Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

Our pool is still blue but a few leaves
have fallen, floating on the surface

of summer. The other swimmers
went home last week, tossed

their faded bathing suits aside,
so my daughter and I are alone

in the water which has grown colder
like a man's hand at the end of

a romance. The lifeguard is under
her umbrella but her bags are packed

for college. We are swimming against
change, remembering the endless

shores of June: the light like lemonade,
fireflies inside our cupped hands,

watermelon night. We are swimming
towards the darkness of what

is next, walking away from the sounds
of laughter and splashing, towels

wrapped around the dampness of our loss.

~ from Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011)

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place's name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm:
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
 
~ Public Domain

What could be easier than learning to write?
Novels, poems, fables with and without morals,	
they’re all within you, in the heart, the head,
the bowel, the tip of the pen a diviner’s rod.
Reach inside and there they are, the people	
one knows, their scandalous comments,
the silly things they do, the unforgettable feeling
of a wet eyelash on your burning cheek.
This moment, that, an eruption of violence,	
a glancing away, the grandest of entrances,
the telling gesture, the banal and the beautiful
all conspire with feeling and passion to transport,
to deliver, to inspire.  Story emerges
from this cocoon, a crystalline moment, epiphanies
flashing like lightbulbs above the heads
of cartoon characters.  All this within you	
where you least expect it, not so much in the head
as under the arms, glistening with sweat, stinking
with the knowledge of the body, the writer
neither practitioner nor artisan but miner, digging
within himself for riches unimagined, for salt.

~ from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009 
(Tightrope Books, 2009)

Some summer nights you
can hear them getting all
worked up over this idea
of cheerfulness and song.

Deep in the grasses where
they hide, there is a need
to be heard in the darkness,
even if their voices are

so small they sound
like a door creaking on
its hinge, or the squeak
a drawer makes when

it opens up at last.
It seems as if the damp
air and dew are trying
to hold their song down

out of sheer gravity,
but neither dampness nor
darkness makes them stop.
In fact, the crickets like

to show off their song,
to let it lift up off
the earth the way that
all notes rise to the stars,

and float up through the
thick night, as if their
joy itself were the only light
we needed to follow.
 
~ from The Yellow Shoe Poets: Selected Poems 1964-1999 (Louisiana State University Press, 1999

Low wail of night and its unseen chitterings, sweeps of tail 
        on dead leaves, slow
rustle and creep of ferns.

The dark on it’s own terms and us	
        racked out in a room
reeked with cedar and shaved wood, this handmade cabin.
	Two windows, the pitch		

of hot night, the creaky lean of spruce and fir.  We’re restless,	
        years stacked behind like kindling.
Where have we left to go, together?

	Two shrieks pack the dark; bird call, a human
timbre and panic.  The night endures, slips onward, becomes all sound,
	slick of stream-burrowed branches, rivulets tunnelling
thin-skinned trucks; drip, slide—

	still outside’s parched and brittle, holds its breath,
waiting for rain.

At light, under the rattle and gab of waxwings and crows,	
        we find the river’s source in swells of sawdust
like sugar on the russet floor; carpenter ants, their constant fluid chewing.
	Glossy heads big as thumbnails.

Morning expounds this	
        mystery— but what of those other walls
	        we’ll lean an arm through—

~ from Cityscapes in Mating Season (Signature Editions, 2017)

You want there to be a separate god for owls, for the barred, the burrowing, the saw whet, the spotted, the great-horned, the barn owl whose gaze draws your gaze to his wide face and you see yourself, pale, uncanny. You want this god to keep the owls from harm so the night will be lavishly feathered. Their wings in flight will row through the waters of your sleep and you’ll sense the dip and rise of them, the sky riddled with eyes. You want this god to instruct them not to scoop a cat into the sky, or a family’s only chicken. You want the slow unrolling of the owls’ vowels to slip into your speaking. So much, so little they have to say. You want the owls’ silence to be this god’s silence, one that doesn’t mean there’s no one there, but a refined and honed attention, a keen listening high above you, and a steady looking down.

~ from God of Shadows (McClelland and Stewart, 2018)

I was sitting cross-legged one morning         

in our sunny new meditation room

wondering if it would be okay

to invite our out-of-town guest

to Frank’s dinner party next weekend

when it occurred to me

that I wasn’t really meditating at all.

In fact, I had never meditated            

in our sunny new meditation room.

I had just sat cross-legged     

now and then for 15 or 20 minutes

worrying about one thing or another,

how the world will end

or what to get Alice for her birthday.

It would make more sense                 

to rename the meditation room

our new exercise room

and to replace all the candles,

incense holders, and the little statues

with two ten-pound hand weights

and a towel in case I broke a sweat.

Then I pictured the new room
with nothing in it but a folded white towel,
and a pair of numbered hand weights –
an image of such simplicity
that the sustaining of it
as I sat cross-legged under a tall window,
my palms open weightlessly on my bare knees,

made me wonder if I wasn’t actually,
meditating for a moment then and there
in our former meditation room,

where the sun seemed to be brightening

as it suffused with light the grain

in the planks of that room’s gleaming floor.

~ from The Rain in Portugal (Random House, 2016)

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

~from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1998)