Imagination

Because my mother was on a date
with a man in the band, and my father,
thinking she was alone, asked her to dance.
And because, years earlier, my father
dug a foxhole but his buddy
sick with the flu, asked him for it, so he dug
another for himself. In the night
the first hole was shelled.
I’m here because my mother was twenty-seven
and in the ’50s that was old to still be single.
And because my father wouldn’t work on weapons,
though he was an atomic engineer.
My mother, having gone to Berkeley, liked that.
My father liked that she didn’t eat like a bird
when he took her to the best restaurant in L.A.
The rest of the reasons are long gone.
One decides to get dressed, go out, though she’d rather
stay home, but no, melancholy must be battled through,
so the skirt, the cinched belt, the shoes, and a life is changed.
I’m here because Jews were hated
so my grandparents left their villages,
came to America, married one who could cook,
one whose brother had a business,
married longing and disappointment
and secured in this way the future.

It’s good to treasure the gift, but good
to see that it wasn’t really meant for you.
The feeling that it couldn’t have been otherwise
is just a feeling. My family
around the patio table in July.
I’ve taken over the barbequing
that used to be my father’s job, ask him
how many coals, though I know how many.
We’ve been gathering here for years,
so I believe we will go on forever.
It’s right to praise the random,
the tiny god of probability that brought us here,
to praise not meaning, but feeling, the still-warm
sky at dusk, the light that lingers and the night
that when it comes is gentle.

I really love that line, “The feeling that it couldn’t have been otherwise/ is just a feeling.”

One size fits all. The shape or coloration
of the god or high heaven matters less
than that there is one, somehow, somewhere, hearing
the hasty prayer and chalking up the mite
the widow brings to the temple, A child
alone with horrid verities cries out
for there to be a limit, a warm wall
whose stones give back an answer, however faint.

Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs
those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints
whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,
those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books
Moroni etched in tedious detail?
We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.

I envy you. Every moment

You can leave me.

I cannot

leave myself.

(Source: fuckyeahpolishpoets)

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

I want to be a lost poem in a stranger’s coat pocket that conveys the importance of you
To assure you of my desires
To assure you of my dreams.
I want all the possibilities of you in writing.
I want to give you your reflection.
I want your eyes on me.
I want to travel in the lightness with you
And stay there
And I want everything before you to follow us
Like a trail behind me.
I want never to say goodbye to you
Even on the street corner or on the phone.
I want…
I want so much I’m breathless
I want to put my power into a poem
To burn a hole in your pocket
So I can sew it.
I want my words to scream through you.
I want the poem not to mean that much.
And I want to contradict myself by accident
And for you to know what I mean.
I want you to be distant
And for me to feel you close.
I want endless days when it’s day
And the nighttime never to end when it’s night.
I want all the seasons in one day.
I want the sun to set before us
And come up in front of us.
I want water up to our waists
And I want to be drenched by the rain
Up to our ankles with holes in our shoes.
I want to think your thoughts
Because they are mine.
I want only what’s urgent to you.
I want to get in the way of the barriers.
And I want you to be a tough guy
When you’re supposed to
Like you do already.
And I want you to be tender
Like you do already.
And I want us to have met for a reason
And I want that reason to be important.
And I want it to be bigger than us
I want it to take over us.
I want to forget.
I want to remember us.
And when you say you love me I don’t want to think that you really mean New York City
And all the fun we have in it.
And I want your smile always
And your grimaces too.
I want your scar on my lips
And I want your disappointments in my heart.
I want your strength in my soul
And I want your soul in my eyes.
I want to believe everything you say.
And I do.
And I want you to tell me what’s best for me
When I don’t know.
And when you’re lost I want to find you.
And when you’re weary
I want to give you steeples,
And cathedral thoughts,
And coliseum dreams.
I want to drag you from the darkness
And kneel with you exhausted
By the blinding light blaring on us.
And…

I don’t know why so much sweetness hovers around us.
Nor why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoons,
Nor why the earth mutters so much about its children.

We’ll never know why the snow falls through the night,
Nor how the heron stretches her long legs,
Nor why we feel so abandoned in the morning.

We have never understood how birds manage to fly,
Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,
Nor how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.

We don’t know why the rain falls so long.
The ditchdigger turns up one shovel after another.
The herons go on stitching the heavens together.

We’ve never heard about the day we were conceived
Nor the doctor who helped us to be born,
Nor that blind old man who decides when we will die.

It’s hard to understand why the sun rises,
And why our children are mostly fond of us,
And why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoon.

this Valentine’s Day, I intend to stand
for as long as I can on a kitchen stool
and hold back the hands of the clock,
so that wherever you are, you may walk
even more lightly in your loveliness;
so that the weak, mid-February sun
(whose chill I will feel from the face
of the clock) cannot in any way
lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind
(whose subtle insistence I will feel
in the minute hand) cannot tighten
the corners of your smile. People
drearily walking the winter streets
will long remember this day:
how they glanced up to see you
there in a storefront window, glorious,
strolling along on the outside of time.

Folks, I’m telling you
Birthing is hard
and dying is mean -
so get yourself
a little loving
in between 

(Source: mermaidcomplex)