873 Life poems

Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the Culprit -Life!

I don't want to teach you anything or show you my wound or have you taste the amazing thing I made this morning with only what we had left in the fridge before you came home with new groceries. I’m as tired as you are of genius. Hey, do you know where we put the sky? I haven’t seen it for months. When I was in New Mexico last week all I did was push the baby in her stroller and worry about the sun on her legs and think about coming home. Now I’m home and I’m thinking of the way the light came in off the runway while I was waiting in the airport for the return flight, feeding the baby a hundred Cheerios, one by one, thinking, I don’t even know how to visit New Mexico anymore, thinking, I guess there isn’t going to be a time when I live like I lived that summer in Santa Fe, that summer-into-fall I’ve for so long told myself I will someday return to, that place I’ve kept, that ace in the hole, that life with mornings and afternoons that I am still holding back with the very tip of my fingernail. After all, this afternoon is the afternoon I’ve been waiting for all my life: running the vacuum over the rugs while you walk the baby around the block and my breasts heat and tingle as they fill again with milk and someone with the wrong number calls my cell again and again, refusing to take there is no Phillip here for an answer. This is, after all, the exact life I take with me to bed each night, digging deeper and deeper into its blood-dark soil, waking some mornings from dreams that shake me and leave me with a thirst for the past or the future, a distance I can never reach—dreams of a house I don’t recognize but know I have lived in all my life, someone I’ve never seen saying,Reach under your shoulder blade and feel with your fingers the place where I pierced you. Oh, that summer: Why did I have to leave it cracked open behind me as I went? How did I even do that? How did I get that one sky to stay wedged there, blue as the sky and just as big?

We aren’t the solid men. We bend like the number seven. Dig at corners, eat cobwebs, we are barefoot and bare-legged. We hang like leaves in autumn. We aren’t the stolid men. We scribble in familiar ink about sunfalls and night. We see the white in the sky, and sigh. We lie with penciled grins. We aren’t the men, any men. We rip at the neck and wonder why while rattlers roll in. Bent as a number, crooked, sundered, we aren’t the idle lightning if black thunder.

Across a space peopled with stars I am laughing while my sides ache for existence it turns out is profound though the profound because of time it turns out is an illusion and all of this is infinitely improbable given the space, for which I gratefully lie in three feet of snow making a shallow grave I would have called an angel otherwise and think of my own rapturous escape from living only as dust and dirt, little sister.

Not for nothing are we given at least as much sense as God gave a goose, which we have no access to, sensewise. We don’t speak goose nor recognize what body language there may be in a body which is mostly neck and dollop. But down, now there is something to build dreams on. We have recourse and in the morning the feathered snow will have come and closed the roads. Linger. Leave off.

The problems of a working girl Are more than meet the naked eye; And life becomes a dizzy whirl At times—and dizzy, too, am I. I have not found the answer yet, And this is just a working plan: I shove along and do not fret, Nor yet depend on any man. To be a mother and a wife, I'm often urged by all my kith And kin—but as for husbands, life Is easier without than with.

Once we liked the conspicuous but constrained, the push-up bra under the shirt-waist, a small bow at the throat, the appearance of a struggle toward the diminutive, the punctum. • The slender second hand jerking forward as if helpless, making its same sound. • We might stand in a thicket where a battle had taken place and be thrilled by the far-off roar of traffic

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations This youth too long has heard the break Of waters in a land of change. He goes to see what suns can make From soil more indurate indurate hardened and strange. He cuts what holds his days together And shuts him in, as lock on lock: The arrowed vane announcing weather, The tripping racket tripping racket either a paradox: light and easy din, or, light and easy motion (as of a dance) of a clock; Seeking, I think, a light that waits Still as a lamp upon a shelf, — A land with hills like rocky gates Where no sea leaps upon itself. But he will find that nothing dares To be enduring, save where, south Of hidden deserts, torn fire glares On beauty with a rusted mouth, — Where something dreadful and another Look quietly upon each other.

Listen, nephew. When I opened the cantina At noon A triangle of sunlight Was stretched out On the floor Like a rug Like a tired cat. It flared in From the window Through a small hole Shaped like a yawn. Strange I thought And placed my hand Before the opening, But the sunlight Did not vanish. I pulled back The shutters And the room glowed, But this pyramid Of whiteness Was simply brighter. The sunlight around it Appeared soiled Like the bed sheet Of a borracho. Amazed, I locked the door, Closed the windows. Workers, in from The fields, knocked To be let in, Children peeked Through the shutters, But I remained silent. I poured a beer, At a table Shuffled a pack Of old cards, And watched it Cross the floor, Hang on the wall Like a portrait Like a calendar Without numbers. When a fly settled In the sunlight And disappeared In a wreath of smoke, I tapped it with the broom, Spat on it. The broom vanished. The spit sizzled. It is the truth, little one. I stood eye to blank eye And by misfortune This finger This pink stump Entered the sunlight, Snapped off With a dry sneeze, And fell to the floor As a gift To the ants Who know me For what I gave.

It hangs from heaven to earth. There are trees in it, cities, rivers, small pigs and moons. In one corner the snow falling over a charging cavalry, in another women are planting rice. You can also see: a chicken carried off by a fox, a naked couple on their wedding night, a column of smoke, an evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk. What is behind it? —Space, plenty of empty space. And who is talking now? —A man asleep under his hat. What happens when he wakes up? —He’ll go into a barbershop. They’ll shave his beard, nose, ears, and hair, To make him look like everyone else.