Two by Mary Szybist - She reads here in Tucson tonight at the Poetry Center!

Happy Ideas

I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel

to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.                  

—duchamp

I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air

and watch them pop.

I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other

all evening.

I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.

Then to call it natural.

Then to call it supernatural.

I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.

I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or

Jesus except in the sense of changing everything.

I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would

know them and feel them,

and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend.

I had the happy idea to call myself happy.

I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in

mold-life.

I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do,

and then the happier idea to buckle myself

into two blue velvet shoes.

I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say

hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.

It was my happiest idea

 ***

In Tennessee I Found a Firefly

Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung   

          to the dark of it: the legs of the spider   

held the tucked wings close,

          held the abdomen still in the midst of calling   

with thrusts of phosphorescent light—

When I am tired of being human, I try to remember

          the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them   

central in my mind where everything else must

          surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.   

There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose

          there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.   

Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.

          When I am tired of only touching,

I have my mouth to try to tell you

          what, in your arms, is not erased.

Mary Szybist

Happy Mama's Day to all! The first poem goes out with love to Micah, and the second poem goes out to my mom with love!

Water Wings

The mornings are his,

blue and white

like the tablecloth at breakfast.   

He’s happy in the house,

a sweep of the spoon

brings the birds under his chair.   

He sings and the dishes disappear.

Or holding a crayon like a candle,   

he draws a circle.

It is his hundredth dragonfly.

Calling for more paper,

this one is red-winged

and like the others,

he wills it to fly, simply

by the unformed curve of his signature.

Waterwings he calls them,   

the floats I strap to his arms.   

I wear an apron of concern,   

sweep the morning of birds.   

To the water he returns,   

plunging where it’s cold,

moving and squealing into sunlight.

The water from here seems flecked with gold.

I watch the circles

his small body makes

fan and ripple,

disperse like an echo

into the sum of water, light and air.   

His imprint on the water

has but a brief lifespan,

the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing.

This is sadness, I tell myself,

the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind,   

because he will not remember

that he and beauty were aligned,

skimming across the water, nearly airborne,   

on his first solo flight.

I’ll write “how he could not

contain his delight.”

At the other end,

in another time frame,

he waits for me—

having already outdistanced this body,

the one that slipped from me like a fish,

floating, free of itself.

Cathy Song

***

Another Poem for Mothers

Mother, I’m trying

to write

a poem to you-

which is how most

poems to mothers must

begin-or, What I’ve wanted

to say, Mother…but we

as children of mothers,

even when mothers ourselves,

cannot bear our poems

to them. Poems to

mothers make us feel

little again. How to describe

that world that mothers spin

and consume and trap

and love us in, that spreads

for years and men and miles?

Those particular hands that could

smooth anything: butter on bread,

cool sheets or weather. It’s

the wonder of them, good or bad,

those mother-hands that pet

and shape and slap,

that sew you together

the pieces of a better house

or life in which you’ll try

to live. Mother,

I’ve done no better

than the others, but for now,

here is your clever failure.

Erin Belieu

About this poem:
“As the poem expresses, there are subjects that seem to baffle poets more than others, the subject of our mothers being very high on that list. What glorious, enraging, most essential beings mothers are. And while I have the moment, let me dedicate this to Margaret Belieu, who once wisely told me ‘I always knew your brother would walk straight down the hallway, but it seemed important to let you bounce off the walls.” - Erin Belieu