Don't lock me in wedlock, I want
marriage, an
encounter --

I told you about
the green light of
May

(a veil of quiet befallen
the downtown park,
late

Saturday after
noon, long
shadows and cool

air, scent of
new grass
fresh leaves,

blossom on the threshold of
abundance --

and the birds I met there,
birds of passage breaking their journey,
three birds each of a different species:

the azalea-breasted with round poll, dark,
the brindled, merry, mousegliding one,
and the smallest, golden as gorse and wearing
a black Venetian mask

and with them the three deuce hen-birds
feathered in tender, lively brown --

I stood
a half-hour under the enchantment
no-one passed near,
the birds saw me and

let me be
near them.)

It's not irrelevant:
I would be
met

and meet you
so,
in a green

airy space, not
locked in.

Levertov, Denise. Poems of Denise Levertov, 1960-1967. United States, New Directions, 2013.

It is done by us all, as God disposes, from
the least cast of worm to what must have been
in the case of the brontosaur, say, spoor
of considerable heft, something awesome.
We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are.
I think these things each morning with shovel
and rake, drawing the risen brown buns
toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were,
or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled
in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed
to take a serviceable form, as putty does,
so as to lift out entire from the stall.
And wheeling to it, storming up the slope,
I think of the angle of repose the manure
pile assumes, how sparrows come to pick
the redelivered grain, how inky-cap
coprinus mushrooms spring up in a downpour.
I think of what drops from us and must then
be moved to make way for the next and next.
However much we stain the world, spatter
it with our leavings, make stenches, defile
the great formal oceans with what leaks down,
trundling off today’s last barrow-full,
I honor shit for saying: We go on.

Kumin, Maxine. The retrieval system: poems. New York, Viking, 1978.

Babies do not want to hear about babies;
they like to be told of giants and castles.
—Dr. Johnson

No one keeps a secret so well as a child
—Victor Hugo

My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.  
“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.  
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air

like a hollyhock, I’m so proud to be loved  
like this. The air is tight to my nervous body.
I use new clothes and shoes the way the corn-studded  

soil around here uses nitrogen, giddily.
Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Often I sing
to myself all day like a fieldful of August  

insects, just things I whisper, really,
a trance in sneakers. I’m learning
to read from my mother and soon I’ll go to school,

I hate it when anyone dies or leaves and the air                  
goes slack around my body and I have to hug myself,
a cloud, an imaginary friend, the stream in the road-

side park. I love to be called for dinner.  
Spot goes out and I go in and the lights
in the kitchen go on and the dark,

which also has a body like a cloud’s,
leans lightly against the house. Tomorrow
I’ll find the sweatstains it left, little grey smudges.

.       .       .

      Here’s a sky no higher than a streetlamp,
and a stack of morning papers cinched by wire.  
It’s 4:00 A.M. A stout dog, vaguely beagle,  

minces over the dry, fresh-fallen snow;
and here’s our sleep-sodden paperboy  
with his pliers, his bike, his matronly dog,  

his unclouding face set for paper route
like an alarm clock. Here’s a memory
in the making, for this could be the morning  

he doesn’t come home and his parents  
two hours later drive his route until
they find him asleep, propped against a streetlamp,

his papers all delivered and his dirty paper-
satchel slack, like an emptied lung,
and he blur-faced and iconic in the morning

air rinsing itself a paler and paler blue
through which a last few dandruff-flecks  
of snow meander casually down.  

The dog squeaks in out of the dark,
snuffling me too me too. And here he goes  
home to memory, and to hot chocolate

on which no crinkled skin forms like infant ice,
and to the long and ordinary day,
school, two triumphs and one severe

humiliation on the playground, the past
already growing its scabs, the busride home,
dinner, and evening leading to sleep

like the slide that will spill him out, come June,  
into the eye-reddening chlorine waters  
of the municipal pool. Here he goes to bed.

Kiss. Kiss. Teeth. Prayers. Dark. Dark.  
Here the dog lies down by his bed,  
and sighs and farts. Will he always be

this skinny, chicken-bones?  
He’ll remember like a prayer
how his mother made breakfast for him

every morning before he trudged out  
to snip the papers free. Just as  
his mother will remember she felt

guilty never to wake up with him  
to give him breakfast. It was Cream
of Wheat they always or never had together.


It turns out you are the story of your childhood  
and you’re under constant revision,  
like a lonely folktale whose invisible folks

are all the selves you’ve been, lifelong,  
shadows in fog, grey glimmers at dusk.  
And each of these selves had a childhood

it traded for love and grudged to give away,  
now lost irretrievably, in storage  
like a set of dishes from which no food,

no Cream of Wheat, no rabbit in mustard  
sauce, nor even a single raspberry,  
can be eaten until the afterlife,

which is only childhood in its last  
disguise, all radiance or all humiliation,  
and so it is forfeit a final time.

In fact it was awful, you think, or why  
should the piecework of grief be endless?  
Only because death is, and likewise loss,

which is not awful, but only breathtaking.  
There’s no truth about your childhood,  
though there’s a story, yours to tend,

like a fire or garden. Make it a good one,  
since you’ll have to live it out, and all
its revisions, so long as you all shall live,

for they shall be gathered to your deathbed,  
and they’ll have known to what you and they
would come, and this one time they’ll weep for you.


The map in the shopping center has an X
signed “you are here.” A dream is like that.  
In a dream you are never eighty, though  

you may risk death by other means:
you’re on a ledge and memory calls you  
to jump, but a deft cop talks you in

to a small, bright room, and snickers.
And in a dream, you’re everyone somewhat,  
but not wholly. I think I know how that

works: for twenty-one years I had a father  
and then I became a father, replacing him  
but not really. Soon my sons will be fathers.

Surely, that’s what middle-aged means,  
being father and son to sons and father.  
That a male has only one mother is another

story, told wherever men weep wholly.  
Though nobody’s replaced. In one dream  
I’m leading a rope of children to safety,

through a snowy farm. The farmer comes out  
and I have to throw snowballs well to him  
so we may pass. Even dreaming, I know

he’s my father, at ease in his catcher’s  
squat, and that the dream has revived  
to us both an old unspoken fantasy:

we’re a battery. I’m young, I’m brash,  
I don’t know how to pitch but I can  
throw a lamb chop past a wolf. And he

can handle pitchers and control a game.  
I look to him for a sign. I’d nod
for anything. The damn thing is hard to grip

without seams, and I don’t rely only
on my live, young arm, but throw by all  
the body I can get behind it, and it fluffs

toward him no faster than the snow  
in the dream drifts down. Nothing
takes forever, but I know what the phrase

means. The children grow more cold  
and hungry and cruel to each other
the longer the ball’s in the air, and it begins

to melt. By the time it gets to him we’ll be  
our waking ages, and each of us is himself  
alone, and we all join hands and go.

.       .       .

      Toward dawn, rain explodes on the tin roof  
like popcorn. The pale light is streaked by grey
and that green you see just under the surface

of water, a shimmer more than a color.  
Time to dive back into sleep, as if into  
happiness, that neglected discipline ....

In those sixth-grade book reports
you had to say if the book was optimistic  
or not, and everyone looked at you

the same way: how would he turn out?  
He rolls in his sleep like an otter.  
Uncle Ed has a neck so fat it’s funny,

and on the way to work he pries the cap
off a Pepsi. Damn rain didn’t cool one weary  
thing for long; it’s gonna be a cooker.

The boy sleeps with a thin chain of sweat  
on his upper lip, as if waking itself,  
becoming explicit, were hard work.

Who knows if he’s happy or not?  
A child is all the tools a child has,  
growing up, who makes what he can.

Matthews, William. Search Party: Collected Poems. United States, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005.

Any fool can get into an ocean  
But it takes a Goddess  
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming  
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
   water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

Spicer, Jack. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Ukraine, Wesleyan University Press, 2010.

Why I chose this poem

I ran across this in an email search, and I don't remember reading it or sending it, but I can clearly see why I would have. I have a thing for

And so, it's not lost on me  that I was searching because I had gone into the labyrinth of a fractured family relationship. And there's something, too, about the metaphor of water. The first poem here, for example:

    I want them to waterski
    across the surface of a poem
    waving at the author’s name on the shore.

Not sure if I'm just less cynical or what, but it makes me sad, the way the speaker pronounces to his dear, "Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural / You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown . . .  it takes a hero to get out of one." Perhaps that's just a little piece of why The Heroine's Journey was so important to me.

Voracious, yes. But when you see it,
shy blue flowers blaring like trumpets in spite of themselves,
center star shaped and yellow; when it startles you,
early in the morning, all over a white picket fence, say,
in Massachusetts, you might think “triumphal,” “prodigal,”
“awake.”

Of course you don’t want it in your rose garden
among all the pruned, the decorous bushes. You don’t want it
in the vegetables, for it will romp through the tomatoes,
beans and peas, will leave no room on the ground, or even
in the air, for the leafy lettuces and cabbages soberly
queueing up in their furrows. It will hog all the sky it can get
knowing as it does what enormous thirst is satisfied by blue.

Father Michael says Follow the God of abundance
Says we hurry from the moment’s wealth
for fear it will be taken. Think of this:

the morning glory has been blossoming for so long
without permission that in some gardens it is no longer censored.
What does that tell you? See how it opens its tender throats
to a world that can sting it, how, without apology for its excess,
it blooms and blooms, though even yet
it seems surprised.

Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women's Spirituality. United States, Beacon Press, 1991

What is a wound but a flower
dying on its descent to the earth,
bag of scent filled with war, forest,
torches, some trouble that befell
now over and done. A wound is a fire
sinking into itself. The tinder
serves only so long, the log holds on
and still it gives up, collapses
into its bed of ashes and sand. I burned
my hand cooking over a low flame,
that flame now alive under my skin,
the smell not unpleasant, the wound
beautiful as a full-blown peony.
Say goodbye to disaster. Shake hands
with the unknown, what becomes
of us once we’ve been torn apart
and returned to our future, naked
and small, sewn back together
scar by scar.

Copyright © 2018 by Dorianne Laux. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 17, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

today we are possible.

the morning, green and laundry-sweet,
opens itself and we enter
blind and mewling.

everything waits for us:

the snow kingdom
sparkling and silent
in its glacial cap,

the cane fields
shining and sweet
in the sun-drenched south.

as the day arrives
with all its clumsy blessings

what we will become
waits in us like an ache.

Clifton, Lucille. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. United States, BOA Editions Limited, 2015.

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.
She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.
Let's face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter's wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,
done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.
She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.
I give you back your heart.
I give you permission —
for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound —
for the burying of her small red wound alive —
for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother's knee, for the stocking,
for the garter belt, for the call —
the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.
She is so naked and singular
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

Sexton, Anne. Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. United States, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Why I chose this poem

I have loved this since I first read it as a teenager, the way the narrator,  an "other" woman, draws this portrait of the wife with such tenderness and finesse. I loved later, how she recognizes the woman herself, naked and singular, and the projection: the wife as the sum of his self, his dreams.  And the juxtaposition of the monument and the watercolor. One so solid, one so fleeting.  

Current me feels this as a poetic stepping off point for pondering attachment styles and mental health.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Oliver, Mary. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2020.

Why I chose this poem

So many things to love. As with so many of my Mary Oliver favorites, this articulates and resonates with desires I don't necessarily know how to put words. By experiencing the poetic articulation, I feel an internal clarity of that desire that allows me to open more fully and to live differently. Sometimes a little differently. Sometimes dramatically.

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

Collins, Billy. Nine Horses: Poems. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2011.

Why I chose this poem

Well, the poem stands on its own on this sunny day in December as one I appreciate, but there are some other layers. A friend pointed me at a video from a Mae Martin stand-up comedy routine. So I can't read the poem without thinking of the video.  And feeling grateful for days like today that do encourage releasing, not just the inhabitants, but the whole contents of a snow globe or two of my own.

It wasn't bliss. What was bliss
but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours
in patter, moving through whole days
touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite
housekeeping in a charmed world.
And yet there was always

more of the same, all that happiness,
the aimless Being There.
So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor,
lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror.
He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize
what was clearly someone else's chaos.

That's when she found the tree,
the dark, crabbed branches
bearing up such speechless bounty,
she knew without being told
this was forbidden. It wasn't
a question of ownership—
who could lay claim to
such maddening perfection?

And there was no voice in her head,
no whispered intelligence lurking
in the leaves—just an ache that grew
until she knew she'd already lost everything
except desire, the red heft of it
warming her outstretched palm.

Dove, Rita. Collected Poems: 1974-2004. United States, W. W. Norton, 2016.

I adore re-mything in general and there's just so much to love about this. What really delights me is the moment where she describes where Adam was when she found the tree, "probably off cataloging the universe, probably, pretending he could organize / what was clearly someone else's chaos."

I have reached a time when words no longer
help:
Instead of guiding me across the moors
Strong landmarks in the uncertain out-of-doors,
Or like dependable friars on the Alp
Saving with wisdom and with brandy kegs,
They are gravel-stones, or tiny dogs which yelp
Biting my trousers, running round my legs.
Description and analysis degrade,
Limit, delay, slipped land from what has been;
And when we groan My Darling what we mean
Looked at more closely would too soon evade
The intellectual habit of our eyes;
And either the experience would fade
Or our approximations would be lies.
The snarling dogs are weight upon my haste,
Tons which I am detaching ounce by ounce.
All my agnostic irony I renounce
So I may climb to regions where I rest
In springs of speech, the dark before of truth:
The sweet moist wafer of your tongue I taste,
And find right meanings in your silent mouth.

Gunn, Thom. The Sense of Movement. United Kingdom, Faber & Faber, 2010.

There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.
Each time I think “this,” it answers “that.”
Answers hard, in the heart-grammar’s strictness.

If I then say “that,” it too is taken away.

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
When the cat waits in the path-hedge,
no cell of her body is not waiting,
this is how she is able so completely to disappear.

I would like to enter the silence portion as she does.

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,
one shadow fully at ease inside another.

Hirshfield, Jane. After: Poems. United States, HarperCollins, 2010.

How again today our patron star
whose ancient vista is the long view

turns its wide brightness now and here:
Below, we loll outdoors, sing & make fire.

We build no henge
but after our swim, linger

by the pond. Dapples flicker
pine trunks by the water.

Buzz & hum & wing & song combine.
Light builds a monument to its passing.

Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps,
hoopskirt blossoms

on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads
hop, lazy—

Apex. The throaty world sings ripen.
Our grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.

We dress.
We head home in other starlight.

Our earthly time is sweetening from this.

Tess Taylor. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 19, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

Why I chose this poem

It's such a sweet counterpart to one of my first and favorite Margaret Atwood poems!

When you were born, all the poets I knew
were men, dads eloquent on their sleeping
babes and the future: Coleridge at midnight,
Yeats' prayer that his daughter lack opinions,
his son be high and mighty, think, and act.
You've read the new father's loud eloquence,
fiery sparks written in a silent house
breathing with the mother's exhausted sleep.

When you were born, my first, what I thought was
milk: my breasts sore, engorged, but not enough
when you woke. With you, my youngest, I did not
think: my head unraised for three days, mind-dead
from waist-down anesthetic labor, saddle
block, no walking either.
Your father was then
the poet I'd ceased to be when I got married.
It's taken me years to write this to you.

I had to make a future, willful, voluble,
lascivious, a thinker, a long walker,
unstruck transgressor, furious, shouting,
voluptuous, a lover, a smeller of blood,
milk, a woman mean as she can be some nights,
existence I could pray to, capable of
poetry.
Now here we are. You are men,
and I am not the woman who rocked you
in the sweet reek of penicillin, sour milk,
the girl who could not imagine herself
or a future more than a warm walled room,
had no words but the pap of the expected,
and so, those nights, could not wish for you.

But now I have spoken, my self, I can ask
for you: that you'll know evil when you smell it;
that you'll know good and do it, and see how both
run loose through your lives; that then you'll remember
you come from dirt and history; that you'll choose
memory, not anesthesia; that you'll have work
you love, hindering no one, a path crossing
at boundary markers where you question power;
that your loves will match you thought for thought
in the long heat of blood and fact of bone

Words not so romantic nor so grandly tossed
as if I'd summoned the universe to be
at your disposal.
can only pray:

That you'll never ask for the weather, earth,
angels, women, or other lives to obey you;

that you'll remember me, who crossed, recrossed you,
as a woman making slowly toward
an unknown place where you could be with me,
like a woman on foot, in a long stepping out.