#npm2020

[stineographer]

Quiet, by Marjorie Pickthall

It’s Canada’s annual Poem in your Pocket Day, and this is the poem I’ve chosen. It was written in 1922. 

Come not the earliest petal here, but only

Wind, cloud, and star,

Lovely and far,

Make it less lonely.

Few are the feet that seek her here, but sleeping

Thoughts sweet as flowers

Linger for hours,

Things winged, yet weeping.

Here in the immortal empire of the grasses,

Time, like one wrong

Note in a song,

With their bloom, passes.

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 29

Characteristics of Life A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists. —BBC Nature News Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you I speak for the snail.                          speak of underneathedness and the welcome of mosses,                                        of life that springs up, little lives that pull back and wait for a moment. I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk, the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.                                                        I speak from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon. Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you                        one thing today and another tomorrow        and I will be as consistent as anything alive on this earth.                        I move as the currents move, with the breezes. What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day. Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful and useless if that's all you know to ask of me. Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances        between meadows of night-blooming flowers.                                                        I will speak                        the impossible hope of the firefly.                                                You with the candle burning and only one chair at your table must understand        such wordless desire.                                To say it is mindless is missing the point. —Camille T. Dungy

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 28

That the Science of Cartography is Limited —and not simply by the fact that this shading of forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam, the gloom of cypresses is what I wish to prove. When you and I were first in love we drove to the borders of Connacht and entered a wood there. Look down you said: this was once a famine road. I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass rough-cast stone had disappeared into as you told me in the second winter of their ordeal, in 1847, when the crop had failed twice, Relief Committees gave the starving Irish such roads to build. Where they died, there the road ended and ends still and when I take down the map of this island, it is never so I can say here is the masterful, the apt rendering of the spherical as flat, nor an ingenious design which persuades a curve into a plane, but to tell myself again that the line which says woodland and cries hunger and gives out among sweet pine and cypress, and finds no horizon will not be there. —Eavan Boland

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 27

Eclipse with Object There is a spectacle and something is added to history. It has as its object an indiscretion: old age, a gun, the prevention of sleep. I am placed in its stead and the requisite shadow is yours. It casts across me, a violent coat. It seems I fit into its sleeve. So the body wanders. Sometime it goes where light does not reach. You recall how they moved in the moon dust? Hop, hop. What they said to us from that distance was stupid. They did not say I love you for example. The spectacle has been placed in my room. Can you hear its episode trailing, pretending to be a thing with variegated wings? Do you know the name of this thing? It is a rubbing from an image. The subject of the image is that which trespasses. You are invited to watch. The body in complete dark casting nothing back. The thing turns and flicks and opens. —Ann Lauterbach

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 26

How It Is Shall I say how it is in your clothes? A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.   The dog at the center of my life recognizes   you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic. In the left pocket, a hole. In the right, a parking ticket delivered up last August on Bay State Road.   In my heart, a scatter like milkweed, a flinging from the pods of the soul. My skin presses your old outline. It is hot and dry inside. I think of the last day of your life, old friend, how I would unwind it, paste   it together in a different collage, back from the death car idling in the garage,   back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,   reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish   into a ceremony of sandwich, running the home movie backward to a space   we could be easy in, a kitchen place with vodka and ice, our words like living meat. Dear friend, you have excited crowds with your example. They swell like wine bags, straining at your seams.   I will be years gathering up our words,   fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, leaning my ribs against this durable cloth to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death. —Maxine Kumin

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 25

Instructions on Not Giving Up More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. —Ada Limón

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 24

Orchids Are Sprouting From the Floorboards Orchids are sprouting from the floorboards.   Orchids are gushing out from the faucets.   The cat mews orchids from his mouth.   His whiskers are also orchids. The grass is sprouting orchids.   It is becoming mostly orchids.   The trees are filled with orchids.   The tire swing is twirling with orchids.   The sunlight on the wet cement is a white orchid. The car’s tires leave a trail of orchids.   A bouquet of orchids lifts from its tailpipe. Teenagers are texting each other pictures   of orchids on their phones, which are also orchids.   Old men in orchid penny loafers   furiously trade orchids.   Mothers fill bottles with warm orchids   to feed their infants, who are orchids themselves.   Their coos are a kind of orchid.   The clouds are all orchids.   They are raining orchids.   The walls are all orchids,   the teapot is an orchid,   the blank easel is an orchid,   and this cold is an orchid. Oh, Lydia, we miss you terribly.       —Kaveh Akbar

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 22

Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America             —Southern Pines, NC Tell me what it’s like to live without curiosity, without awe. To sail on clear water, rolling your eyes at the kelp reefs swaying beneath you, ignoring the flicker of mermaid scales in the mist, looking at the world and feeling only boredom. To stand on the precipice of some wild valley, the eagles circling, a herd of caribou booming below, and to yawn with indifference. To discover something primordial and holy. To have the smell of the earth welcome you to everywhere. To take it all in, and then, to reach for your knife. —Matthew Olzmann