Maggie Nelson reads tonight at the Poetry Center!

From Bluets

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.

2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will tryto explain this.

Maggie Nelson

If You Knew

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

Ellen Bass

To the Harvest Moon, the Fall Equinox, and with love to my mom on her 80th birthday!

Autumn Grasses

In fields of bush clover and hay-scent grass

the autumn moon takes refuge

The cricket's song is gold

Zeshin's loneliness taught him this

Who is coming?

What will come to pass, and pass?

Neither bruise nor sweetness nor cool air

not-knowing

knows the way

And the moon?

Who among us does not wander, and flare

and bow to the ground?

Who does not savor, and stand open

if only in secret

taking heart in the ripening of the moon?

(Shibata Zeshin, Autumn Grasses, two-panel screen)

Margaret Gibson

The Presence In Absence

Poetry is not made of words.

I can say it's January when

it's August. I can say, "The scent

of wisteria on the second floor

of my grandmother's house

with the door open onto the porch

in Petaluma," while I'm living

an hour's drive from the Mexican

border town of Ojinaga.

It is possible to be with someone

who is gone. Like the silence which

continues here in the desert while

the night train passes through Marfa

louder and louder, like the dogs whining

and barking after the train is gone. 

Linda Gregg

Seamus Heaney you will be dearly missed ~

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Seamus Heaney

1939-2013

For Shiloh - Magnificent Border Collie ~ 1997-2013

I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life

Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.

Mary Oliver


 ***

Pear Dreams

 for Shiloh

From the cool shade of the porch

I toss my half-eaten pear
out into the vast landscape

of desert backyard,
and watch as our border collie
snaps for it.

It is hers

forever.

She sends an artful glance
to our german shepherd,

a few feet away,
who, now,
can only dream
of tasting the sweet mushy meat
and chewing on the small funny stem.

ECS
As read on W.B.U.R's  Here & Now, in 2004.