The Pot Watcher

The water eventually boils.

[missedstations]

“The Happiest Day” - Linda Pastan

It was early May, I think a moment of lilac or dogwood when so many promises are made it hardly matters if a few are broken. My mother and father still hovered in the background, part of the scenery like the houses I had grown up in, and if they would be torn down later that was something I knew but didn’t believe. Our children were asleep or playing, the youngest as new as the new smell of the lilacs, and how could I have guessed their roots were shallow and would be easily transplanted. I didn’t even guess that I was happy. The small irritations that are like salt on melon were what I dwelt on, though in truth they simply made the fruit taste sweeter. So we sat on the porch in the cool morning, sipping hot coffee. Behind the news of the day– strikes and small wars, a fire somewhere– I could see the top of your dark head and thought not of public conflagrations but of how it would feel on my bare shoulder. If someone could stop the camera then… if someone could only stop the camera and ask me: are you happy? perhaps I would have noticed how the morning shone in the reflected color of lilac. Yes, I might have said and offered a steaming cup of coffee.

[thepotwatcher]

The cat’s song Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness. My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts. Let us walk in the woods, says the cat. I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents, to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt. Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat. You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends, says the cat, although I am more equal than you. Can you leap twenty times the height of your body? Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs? Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch. My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard. My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings walking round and round your bed and into your face. Come I will teach you to dance as naturally as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long. I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers. Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Marge Piercy

A word of fur. i miss my girl so much. 

[thepotwatcher]

Wen everything is crazy make a giant ass cornbread discus/pancake and eat it slowly, piece by piece, like a clock, with every manner of honey and butter.

[thepotwatcher]

Dad- who was that girl you were standing with? Me- a friend I made on the train. But not a girl Dad- oh. didn't seem like a guy. Me- I think they were gender non conforming. Dad- wait there were two people? Me- no just one. "They" is just a neutral pronoun. Dad- ah. Ok...So where... was....them... going? Me- good effort dad! Dad- I think I'm too old to leave the house at this point.

-convo with my dad today. Love that man.

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

What if the terror stays without the meaning?

Adrienne Rich, from Collected Poems; 1950 - 2012; “What Ghosts Can Say” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[thepotwatcher]

Hand dream

In the dream I'm grasping and letting go of strangers' hands, the way a gaze glances off of an unfamiliar face, one after another. And then I come upon yours. I know it is your hand without looking. Our fingers lock. I can feel the webbing and the joints of your knuckles, the sweat in your palm, the lines I used to trace. I smile. This time I do not let go.

[thepotwatcher]

Returning

It would just be a rock if it weren’t the last place I told him I loved him. Distracted, obliged, I called -So glad surgery went well have to get back to work but- It would just be rough hewn granite more of what separates heaven and earth I would pass it today. Or maybe I'd think of him. Maybe i’ll give him a call.

-the pot watcher

[thepotwatcher]

Wanting

The house is quiet except for the gurgle of rain hitting the roof, the gutter, the stones below. Just wanting to fall. The dog paws at me, searches my face, moves closer. Just wanting to be touched. The bee, dead on the ground below the coffee table. Just wanted to gather. And I stare into the glow of my phone- scroll, swipe, like, love. I just want to know how to want one thing well. -The Pot Watcher

[thepotwatcher]

Rhododendron and dark wildflower honey found in dads cupboard, bought years ago from an alpine beekeeper. We drove into fog so thick we couldn't see the road, so high the GPS lost its mind, insisting we should drive off the mountain, and almost miss the tiny wooden sign directing us to a shack. If the honey hadn't been so damn good dad might have killed me. It tastes like that sweet time. It makes me miss the gorgeous headstrong Piedmont cheese that went so well with this wild stuff.

[thepotwatcher]

When I went back to the sea it wasn’t waiting. Neither had it gone away. All its musics were safe and sound; the circling gulls were still a commonplace, the fluted shells rolled on the shore more beautiful than money – oh, yes, more beautiful than money! The thick-necked seals stood in the salted waves with their soft, untroubled faces gazing shoreward – oh bed of silk, lie back now on your prairies of blackness your fields of sunlight that I may look at you. I am happy to be home. 2. I do not want to be frisky, and theatrical. I do not want to go forward in the parade of names. I do not want to be diligent or necessary or in any way heavy. From my mouth to God’s ear, I swear it; I want only to be a song. To wander around in the fields like a little reed bird. To be a song.                                 3. Two eggs rolled from the goose nest down to the water and halfway into the water. What good is hoping? I went there softly, and gathered them and put them back into the nest of the goose who bit me hard with her lovely black beak with the pink tongue-tip quivering, and beat my arms with her lovely long wings and beat my face with her lovely long wings, what good is trying? She hissed horribly, wanting me to be frightened. I wasn’t frightened. I just knew it was over, those cold white eggs would never hatch, the birds would forget, soon, and go back, to the light-soaked pond, what good is remembering? But I wasn’t frightened. 4. Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life a little. 5. When I found the seal pup alone on the far beach, not sleeping but looking all around, I didn’t reason it out, for reason would have sent me away, I just went close but not too close, and lay down on the sand with my back toward it, and pretty soon it rolled over, and rolled over until the length of its body lay along the length of my body, and so we touched, and maybe our breathing together was some kind of heavenly conversation in God’s delicate and magnifying language, the one we don’t dare speak out loud, not yet. 6. Rumi the poet was a scholar also. But Shams, his friend, was an angel. By which I don’t mean anything patient and sweet, When I read how he took Rumi’s books and threw them into the duck pond, I shouted for joy. Time to live now, Shams meant. I see him, turning away casually toward the road, Rumi following, the books floating and sinking among the screeching ducks, oh, beautiful book-eating pond! 7. The country of the mockingbird is where I now want to be, thank you, yes. The days when the snow-white swans might pass over the dunes are the days I want to eat now, slowly and carefully and with gratitude. Thank you. The hours fresh and tidal are the hours I want to hold in the palm of my hand, thank you, yes. Such grace, thank you! The gate I want to open now is the one that leads into the flower-bed of my mind, thank you, yes. Every day the slow, fresh wind, thank you, yes. The wing, in the dark, that touches me. Thank you. Yes.

Mary Oliver, The Return

“Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life a little.”

[thepotwatcher]

Song for the Festival At the May Day parade, my mask made of moss and bark, my hair full of flowers, my friend beside me, her pretty red mouth under the hawk’s beak of her mask of green sage. At the children’s pageant, music died in the speakers. The shadow of a crow passed over. My hair a crown of flowers, yellow and red roses large as fists, flowers on which I’d spent my last $20 at the mercado. But beauty wasn’t enough. Being admired by strangers was not enough. I saw a girl, wandering, looking for her mother. I knelt down, lowered my mask, showed her my face. She’s looking for you too, I say. She tries to spot her mother’s yellow dress. A gold dog passes, happy and white-faced, wearing pink nylon fairy wings. The girl points and laughs; the hard part of her day is over. The people I’m looking for—I don’t know where they are. I don’t know the color of their clothing. From across the park I see the dark windows of my apartment. Spring has arrived. Let me not despair.

Gretchen Marquette via Poem of the Day

[exceptindreams]

Morning Poem | Robin Becker

“Morning Poem” Robin Becker Listen. It’s morning. Soon I’ll see your hand reach for my watch, the water will agitate in the kettle, but listen. Traffic. I want your dreams first. And to slide my leg beneath yours before the day opens. Wait. We slept late. You’ll be moody, the phone will ring, someone wanting something. Let me put my hands in your hair. Who I was last night I would be again. This is how the future holds me, how depression wakes with us; my body shelters it. Let me put my head on your breast. I know nothing lasts. I would try to hold you back, not out of meanness but fear. Oh my practical, my worldly-wise. You know how the body falters, falls in on itself. Tell me that we will never want from each other what we cannot have. Lie. It’s morning.

[exceptindreams]

The Purge | Marge Piercy

“The Purge” Marge Piercy

Beware institutions begun with a purge, beware buildings that require the bones of a victim under the cornerstone, beware undertakings launched with a blood sacrifice, watch out for marriages that start with a divorce.

To break a champagne bottle over the prow of a boat is prodigal but harmless; to break a promise, a friendship much more exciting (champagne doesn’t squeal); but doesn’t the voyage require a lot of sightseeing and loot to justify the splatter?

Give it up for me, she says, give him up, give her up, look only in my eyes and let me taste my power in their anguish. How much do you love me? Let me count the corpses as my cat brings home mangled mice to arrange on my doormat like hors d'oeuvres.

But you know nobody dies of such executions. Your discarded friends are drinking champagne and singing off key just as if they were happy without you.  One person’s garbage is another’s new interior decorating scheme. If she is your whole world, how quickly the sun sets now.  

[thepotwatcher]

what if i was wrong? 

[missedstations]

“Staking a Claim” - Erika Meitner

It seems a certain fear underlies everything. If I were to tell you something profound it would be useless, as every single thing I know is not timeless. I am particularly risk-averse. I choose someone else over me every time, as I’m sure they’ll finish the task at hand, which is to say that whatever is in front of us will get done if I’m not in charge of it. There is a limit to the number of times I can practice every single kind of mortification (of the flesh?). I can turn toward you and say yes, it was you in the poem. But when we met, you were actually wearing a shirt, and the poem wasn’t about you or your indecipherable tattoo. The poem is always about me, but that one time I was in love with the memory of my twenties so I was, for a moment, in love with you because you remind me of an approaching subway brushing hair off my face with its hot breath. Darkness. And then light, the exact goldness of dawn fingering that brick wall out my bedroom window on Smith Street mornings when I’d wake next to godknowswho but always someone who wasn’t a mistake, because what kind of mistakes are that twitchy and joyful even if they’re woven with a particular thread of regret: the guy who used my toothbrush without asking, I walked to the end of a pier with him, would have walked off anywhere with him until one day we both landed in California when I was still young, and going West meant taking a laptop and some clothes in a hatchback and learning about produce. I can turn toward you, whoever you are, and say you are my lover simply because I say you are, and that is, I realize, a tautology, but this is my poem. I claim nothing other than what I write, and even that, I’d leave by the wayside, since the only thing to pack would be the candlesticks, and even those are burned through, thoroughly replaceable. Who am I kidding? I don’t own anything worth packing into anything. We are cardboard boxes, you and I, stacked nowhere near each other and humming different tunes. It is too late to be writing this. I am writing this to tell you something less than neutral, which is to say I’m sorry. It was never you. It was always you: your unutterable name, this growl in my throat.

[lifeinpoetry]

There is a kind of pressure in humans to take whatever is most beloved by them / and smash it.

Anne Carson, from “Book of Isaiah,” Glass, Irony, and God  (via lifeinpoetry)

[thepotwatcher]

The Cossacks For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming. Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate New Year’s Eve by counting my annual dead. My mother, when she was dying, spoke to her visitors of books and travel, displaying serenity as a form of manners, though I could tell the difference. But when I watched you planning for a life you knew you’d never have, I couldn’t explain your genuine smile in the face of disaster. Was it denial laced with acceptance? Or was it generations of being English— Brontë’s Lucy in Villette living as if no fire raged beneath her dun-colored dress. I want to live the way you did, preparing for next year’s famine with wine and music as if it were a ten-course banquet. But listen: those are hoofbeats on the frosty autumn air.

Linda Pastan, The Cossacks