May 2023 – Fourteen Lines

The Life You’ve Chosen

I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list
Linda Pastan

Faith

by Linda Pastan

For Ira

With the seal of science

emblazoned

on your forehead,

like the old Good Housekeeping

Seal of Approval,

I believe what you tell me

about cells and molecules,

though I can’t see them.

And though the language you speak

is full of numbers and symbols

I’ll never understand;

though your tie is askew

and your hair unruly, still I believe

what you say about the size of the universe,

which is either expanding or contracting,

I’ve forgotten which already.

So if tomorrow you tell me

you made a small miscalculation,

that God indeed created the world

in 6 short days, then rested on the 7th,

that it was Eve who landed us

in all this trouble, I would believe you.

I would believe you

as I’ve always done before.

The God Who Loves You

By Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you

To ponder how much happier you’d be today

Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.

It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings

Driving home from the office, content with your week—

Three fine houses sold to deserving families—

Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened

Had you gone to your second choice for college,

Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted

Whose ardent opinions on painting and music

Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.

A life thirty points above the life you’re living

On any scale of satisfaction. And every point

A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.

You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you

Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments

So she can save her empathy for the children.

And would you want this god to compare your wife

With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?

It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation

You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight

Than the conversation you’re used to.

And think how this loving god would feel

Knowing that the man next in line for your wife

Would have pleased her more than you ever will

Even on your best days, when you really try.

Can you sleep at night believing a god like that

Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives

You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is

And what could have been will remain alive for him

Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill

Running out in the snow for the morning paper,

Losing eleven years that the god who loves you

Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene

Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him

No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend

No closer than the actual friend you made at college,

The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight

And write him about the life you can talk about

With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,

Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

It Might Have Been Otherwise

Jane Kenyon

You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.
Donald Hall

Otherwise

by Jane Kenyon (1947 – 1995)

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.”

Happiness

by Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.”

Crimsoned With Joy

And a bird overhead sang Follow,

And a bird to the right sang Here;

And the arch of the leaves was hollow,

And the meaning of May was clear.
Algernon Charles Swinburne

Petals

by Amy Lowell

Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.

Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

After a long winter, there is something magical with the speed with which Minnesota transforms from brown to green. Two weeks ago I would have bet that the crab apple trees would not be blooming by Mother’s Day and then, viola, magic happens. All the fruit trees burst out in blossom, the linden’s perfume places you would never expect and in general I pinch myself every morning in how beautiful it is in May in Minnesota. All of the fruit trees I planted this year came through the drought and then the record snowfall. They are ready to grow this year. May in Minnesota is darn near perfect, perfect temperatures, first half virtually no mosquitoes and every day a new flower blooming in the yard. The lilacs will be up next, then the iris, then on and on.

Smell is the Last Memory To Go

by Fatimah Asghar

on my block, a gate

on my block, a tree smelling

of citrus & jasmine that knocks

me back into the arms of my dead

mother. i ask Ross how can a tree

be both jasmine & orange, on my block

my neighbors put up gates & stare

don’t like to share, on my block

a tree I can’t see, but can smell

a tree that can’t be both but is

on my block, my mother’s skirt twirls

& all i smell is her ghost, perfume

on my block, a fallen orange

smashed into sidewalk

its blood pulped on asphalt on my

block, Jordan hands me a jasmine

by the time i get home

all its petals are gone

Were It Not For The Way You Taught Me To Look At The World

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Mark Twain

Song for Nobody

by Thomas Merton

A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.

A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.

(No light, no gold, no name, no colour
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)

A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.

Mother (An Excerpt)

by Ted Kooser

The meadowlarks are back, and the finches
are turning from green to gold. Those same
two geese have come to the pond again this year,
honking in over the trees and splashing down.
They never nest, but stay a week or two
then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts
burning in circles like birthday candles,

for this is the month of my birth, as you know,
the best month to be born in, thanks to you,
everything ready to burst with living.
There will be no more new flannel nightshirts
sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card
addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.
You asked me if I would be sad when it happened

and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house
now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots
green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,
as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.
Were it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything,
I would have to be lonely forever.

Write A Poem About This

“Let’s feed out tears to the dragons of misery, but let’s never crawl in their mouths.”
Cristin O-Keefe Aptowicz

My Mother Wants To Know If I’m Dead

by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

RE YOU DEAD? is the subject line of her email.
The text outlines the numerous ways she thinks
I could have died: slain by an axe-murderer, lifeless
on the side of a highway, choked to death by smoke
since I’m a city girl and likely didn’t realize you needed
to open the chimney flue before making a fire (and,
if I do happen to be alive, here’s a link to a YouTube
video on fireplace safety that I should watch). Mom
muses about the point of writing this email. If I am
already dead, which is what she suspects, I wouldn’t
be able to read it. And if I’m alive, what kind of daughter
am I not to write her own mother to let her know
that I’ve arrived at my fancy residency, safe and sound,
and then to immediately send pictures of everything,
like I promised her! If this was a crime show, she posits,
the detective might accuse her of sending this email
as a cover up for murder. How could she be the murderer,
if she wrote an email to her daughter asking if she was murdered?
her defense lawyers would argue at the trial. In fact,
now that she thinks of it, this email is the perfect alibi
for murdering me. And that is something I should
definitely keep in mind, if I don’t write her back
as soon as I have a free goddamn second to spare.

Sleeping in Late with My Mother

by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

She apologizes. It’s not like her. She’s usually up by six.
But it’s the weekend, you tell her, there is no need to rush!

The plan for the day is breakfast somewhere and walking
somewhere else. I’m happy, but Mom can’t believe that

she forgot to bring conditioner, or that she slept so late.
The housekeeper at the discount hotel knocks. We’re still here,

we’re still here! she shouts back. Girls’ weekend, just us two,
and still we have to remind each other it’s okay to take our time.

No rush, we say to each other, firmly. I’m writing two poems
a day all summer: one every morning and again every night.

It is morning and my mom tells me, Write a poem about this,
but don’t mention I slept in so late! Just put down that your mother

is taking it easy, that your mother is taking her time for once!So I do
what she says, sort of. And the housekeeper knocks again.

But this time, my mother doesn’t jump. Instead, she leans back,
comfortable, and shouts: Still here, Still here! We are still here!

To My Mother

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
Edgar Allan Poe

To My Mother

By Edgar Allan Poe

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,

The angels, whispering to one another,

Can find, among their burning terms of love,

None so devotional as that of “Mother,”

Therefore by that dear name I long have called you—

You who are more than mother unto me,

And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you

In setting my Virginia’s spirit free.

My mother—my own mother, who died early,

Was but the mother of myself; but you

Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,

And thus are dearer than the mother I knew

By that infinity with which my wife

Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

Sonnets Are Full of Love

By Christina Rossetti

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come

And so because you love me, and because
I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honoured name:
In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
Of time and change and mortal life and death.

Joy’s Perfect Wholeness

“Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense.”
e. e. cummings

if there are any heavens

by e. e. cummings

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my
(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my
(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)

your homecoming will be my homecoming

by e. e. cummings

your homecoming will be my homecoming-

my selves go with you, only i remain;
a shadow phantom effigy or seeming
(an almost someone always who’s noone)

a noone who, till their and your returning,
spends the forever of his loneliness
dreaming their eyes have opened to your mourning

feeling their stars have risen through your skies:

so, in how merciful love’s own name, linger
no more than selfless i can quite endure
the absence of that moment when a stranger
takes in his arms my very lifes who’s you

-when all fears hopes beliefs doubts disappear.
Everywhere and joy’s perfect wholeness we’re

Holding Hands In Our Sleep

Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.
Galway Kinnell

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

By Galway Kinnell

For I can snore like a bullhorn

or play loud music

or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman

and Fergus will only sink deeper

into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,

but let there be that heavy breathing

or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house

and he will wrench himself awake

and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,

after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,

familiar touch of the long-married,

and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,

the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—

and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,

his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other

and smile

and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,

sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,

this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Why Regret?

by Galway Kinnell

Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
“The perfected lover does not eat.”
As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn’t it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

The Sleepless Toads Are Murmuring

Poetry is the art of imaginary gardening with real toads.
Marianne Moore

April Night

by Archibald Lampman

How deep the April night is in its noon,
The hopeful, solemn, many-murmured night!
The earth lies hushed with expectation; bright
Above the world’s dark border burns the moon,
Yellow and large; from forest floorways, strewn
With flowers, and fields that tingle with new birth,
The moist smell of the unimprisoned earth
Come up, a sigh, a haunting promise. Soon,

Ah, soon, the teeming triumph! At my feet
The river with its stately sweep and wheel
Moves on slow-motioned, luminous, gray like steel.
From fields far off whose watery hollows gleam,
Aye with blown throats that make the long hours sweet,
The sleepless toads are murmuring in their dreams.

Spring on the River

by Archibald Lampman

O sun, shine hot on the river;
For the ice is turning an ashen hue,
And the still bright water is looking through,
And the myriad streams are greeting you
With a ballad of life to the giver,
From forest and field and sunny town,
Meeting and running and tripping down,
With laughter and song to the river.

Oh! the din on the boats by the river;
The barges are ringing while day avails,
With sound of hewing and hammering nails,
Planing and painting and swinging pails,
All day in their shrill endeavor;
For the waters brim over their wintry cup,
And the grinding ice is breaking up,
And we must away down the river.

Oh! the hum and the toil of the river;
The ridge of the rapid sprays and skips:
Loud and low by the water’s lips,
Tearing the wet pines into strips,
The saw mill is moaning ever.
The little grey sparrow skips and calls
On the rocks in the rain of the water falls,
And the logs are adrift in the river.

Oh! restlessly whirls the river;
The rivulets run and the cataract drones:
The spiders are flitting over the stones:
Summer winds float and the cedar moans;
And the eddies gleam and quiver.
O sun; shine hot, shine long and abide
In the glory and power of the summer tide
On the swift longing face of the river.

And Then Time Passes

Life is like riding a bicycle, you must keep moving forward.
Albert Einstein

Einstein’s Happiest Moment

By Richard M. Berlin

Einstein’s happiest moment

occurred when he realized

a falling man falling

beside a falling apple

could also be described

as an apple and a man at rest

while the world falls around them.

And my happiest moment

occurred when I realized

you were falling for me,

right down to the core, and the rest,

relatively speaking, has flown past

faster than the speed of light.

Einstein’s Divorce

by T. A. Fry

No one can disprove Einstein’s theory of special relativity,
theoretical physics requires trust, as do all physical relationships.

E = mc² equals;
Energy = married couple²Energy = married* (Me and You, which together raises us to the power of two)
The gravity and electromagnetism of our attraction, distorting our time and space continuum.

The eloquence of this theory can be better understood, through a series of calculations, proving the universal theory of love, for all who confuse momentum with energy.

Energy = married* Me*You
Energy/Me = Married* You
Job(Energy/me) = Job(Married*You)
Job(energy/me)/(mortgage)=Job(Married*You)/(Monthly Bills)
Since mortgage and monthly bills are equivalent.

(Job(Energy/me)/(mortgage)) + Child A= (((Job/Child care Bills)*(Married*You))/(Monthly Bills)) + Child A

Then it happens:

(Job(Energy/me)/(mortgage) + Child A = Momentum

Which allows us to rewrite it following child 2 as:

(Momentum) + (Child A² + Child B²/Childcare Bills) = (((Job/Child Care Bills) * (Married*You) + (Child A²+ Child B²),

Because everyone knows having a second child changes the stress level to a new logarithmic scale.

(Job/Child Care Bills) = 1, Which allows us to rewrite as:

(Momentum) + (Child A² + Child B²) = (Married*You)+ (Child A²+ Child B²)

And then time passes.
Time is measured differently when the black hole of middle age sucks in the light. The theorem can now be re-written as:

(((Momentum) + ((Child A² graduates and moves out = 0))+ (Child B²*Tuition))) / extended family drama = (Married*You)+(Child A² Graduates and moves out = 0) + (Child B²* Tuition))/ extended family drama

Which can be rewritten as:

(((Momentum) + (Child B² *college tuition))/Squabble over inheritance = ((Married*You)+ (Child B²*college tuition)/feud over family cabin.

With momentum declining, the equation in a few years can be rewritten again:

((Job(Energy/me)/(mortgage))/college tuition²* (Being laid off)) = ((Married*You)/college tuition²)) * (Health scare)

(((Job/me=1)*(Energy)/(mortgage)/college tuition² /(knee replacement + Type II Diabetes)) = ((Married*You)/college tuition²)/(Fibromyalgia + Menopause).

Dividing resentment and weight gain on both sides of the equation derives the following:

Energy/debts = Married*You
(Energy/debts)/Married) = You

Which can be rewritten as:
Divorce Lawyer + (Energy/debts)/Married) = You+ Divorce Lawyer

Divorce Lawyer +(Energy/debts *Married)= 0

which equals:

0 = You + Divorce Lawyer