#npm2021

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 29

—C.P. Cavafy

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 28

Monet Refuses the Operation Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers. What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don’t know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent.  The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and change our bones, skin, clothes to gases.  Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end. —Lisel Mueller

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 25

Nights in the Neighborhood I carry joy as a choir sings, but quietly as the dark carols. To keep the wind away so the hidden ones will come out into the street and add themselves to this array of stars, constellations and moon. I notice the ones in pain shine more than the others. It’s so they can be found, I think. Found and harbored. —Linda Gregg

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 24

Any Common Desolation can be enough to make you look up at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few that survived the rains and frost, shot with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird would rip it like silk. You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive. The sound of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger. The ruby neon of the liquor store sign. Warm socks. You remember your mother, her precision a ceremony, as she gathered the white cotton, slipped it over your toes, drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard, the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves and, like a needle slipped into your vein— that sudden rush of the world. —Ellen Bass

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 23

Mrs Schofield’s GCSE You must prepare your bosom for his knife, said Portia to Antonio in which of Shakespeare’s Comedies? Who killed his wife, insane with jealousy? And which Scots witch knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy? Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt’s death? To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why? Something is rotten in the state of Denmark - do you know what this means? Explain how poetry pursues the human like the smitten moon above the weeping, laughing earth; how we make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing: speak again. Said by which King? You may begin. —Carol Ann Duffy

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 22

Language Silence is one part of speech, the war cry of wind down a mountain pass another. A stranger’s voice echoing through lonely valleys, a lover’s voice rising so close it’s your own tongue: these are keys to cipher, the way the high hawk’s key unlocks the throat of the sky and the coyote’s yip knocks it shut, the way the aspens’ bells conform to the breeze while the rapids’ drums define resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon with another. Rock, wind her hand, water her brush, spells and then scatters her demands. Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes gather: the bank we map our lives around. —Camille T. Dungy

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 21

VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you     could be cured with a hot bath, says God through the manhole covers,     but you want magic, to win the lottery you never bought a ticket for.     (Tenderly, the monks chant, embrace the suffering.) The voice never     panders, offers no five-year plan, no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy     white beard hooked over ears. It is small and fond and local. Don’t look for     your initials in the geese honking overhead or to see through the glass even     darkly. It says the most obvious shit, i.e. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich. —Mary Karr

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 20

Portage We carry the dead in our hands. There is no other way. The dead are not carried in our memories. They died in another age, long before this moment. We shape them from the wounds they left on the inanimate, ourselves, as falling water will turn stone into a bowl. There is no room in our hearts for the dead, though we often imagine that there is, or wish it to be so, to preserve them in our warmth, our sweet darkness, where their fists might beat at the soft contours of our love. And though we might like to think that they would call out to us, they could never do so, being there. They would never dare to speak, lest their mouths, our names, fill quietly with blood. We carry the dead in our hands as we might carry water – with a careful, reverential tread. There is no other way. How easily, how easily their faces spill. —John Glenday