Stationery by Agha Shahid Ali

I have been going through a lot of letters. I said to someone just now: It takes time for me to get back to people. That is the only excuse I have, really, and I hope you don’t think me too terrible.

I want to make it up to you. Send me something, if you can?

Stationery
Agha Shahid Ali

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.

Write to me.

Reality Demands by Wisława Szymborska

1.
Almost all my letters the other day began this way: I am not sure of the geography of things—

Some friends I haven’t written in awhile. Their previous letters I haven’t yet answered. I said: this is a letter I must write right now. I needed to write it.

2.
Apparently I am the person who stays up at past four in the morning, making a sandwich, barefoot in the kitchen, listening to the news.

When did I become her? When the planes hit the towers? When the floods kept coming, submerging towns, washing away houses? When earthquakes moved local governments to issue tsunami warnings? When someone went on a shooting rampage on an island? When an active pursuit for two bombers becomes a manhunt that put a city under lockdown?

3.
My letters were uncertain. Sometimes embarrassed. While I was writing I was telling myself what a complete fool I must sound like. I am a thousand miles away. How can I possibly care? And why would I?

But I needed to ask: Are you okay? Are you safe?

4.
Death and loss and grief. And all that blood.

Days pass and it will be all I can think of, all I can feel: the weight of that. On my chest. Here. To feel the heart beating, and to feel the weight upon it, the terrible, inescapable weight of the empty space where something beautiful once was.

5.
To think of what I have, and what was lost.

How indulgent, sneers another self. This is the kind of navel-gazing that nobody wants to hear.

Because elsewhere, the world turns. Elsewhere, more deaths. Elsewhere, everything you want me to turn my gaze to because don’t they deserve my attention, too?

6.
There is always someone dying.

An acquaintance ripped off an air conditioner from the wall. He and his family then climbed out of that tiny hole, onto the roof, and waited until help came, shivering under the rain. Elsewhere there’s a baby being carried in a bucket. Elsewhere water bottles were being used as rafts. Elsewhere another family was being swept in the flood, passing under a bridge, and afterward you see the roof of their house floating, with no people on top of them.

I watched my grandfather breathed his last and I didn’t demand the rain. I stood under a staircase, in a dark corner, and buried my face in my hands. Then I walked around the hospital, chased doctors, and asked for them to sign the forms, my voice trembling, my cheeks wet. Elsewhere someone is buried alive and starts to decompose. Elsewhere journalists are slain, caught in the middle of a clan war. Elsewhere people walk home with ashes in their hair.

There is always someone dying.

7.
In a particular letter, I wrote: I keep thinking how close it is to where you live, how it could’ve easily been you. How dangerous the world is. How nobody is really that safe. How, at any given day, it could’ve been me, in a wrong time, at a wrong place.

In another: I thought of you precisely because you loved to run.

In another: I just had to check.

I said, I’ve been watching the news. I said, It’s all horrifying.

I said, I wish we aren’t vulnerable to violence or terror.

8.
It is painful, to be made aware, and to realise again and again how life is fleeting, how it is all borrowed. It also cuts deeper to know that sometimes it is we who make it so—people make it so.

9.
There is always someone dying. And yet every day is a chance to live. I risk a cliche, but it’s the truth, isn’t it.

Every day reality demands that we must live.

10.
Each letter ends with: I’m glad you weren’t there. Though I hurt for all the people who were there.

I hurt, and this is all I can write—what I needed to write. Perhaps someone else can say it better. This— life— the world— it is “perhaps worthy of a better poet,” as Szymborska said in another poem.

Perhaps this is a letter, too.

Reality Demands
Wisława Szymborska
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Reality demands
that we also mention this:
Life goes on.
It continues at Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There’s a gas station
on a little square in Jericho,
and wet paint
on park benches in Bila Hora.
Letters fly back and forth
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a moving van passes
beneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea,
and the blooming orchards near Verdun
cannot escape
the approaching atmospheric front.

There is so much Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
Music pours
from the yachts moored at Actium
and couples dance on the sunlit decks.

So much is always going on,
that it must be going on all over.
Where not a stone still stands,
you see the Ice Cream Man
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been
Hiroshima is again,
producing many products
for everyday use.
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.

The grass is green
on Maciejowice’s fields,
and it is studded with dew,
as is normal grass.

Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten:
the birch forests and the cedar forests,
the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps
and the canyons of black defeat,
where now, when the need strikes, you don’t cower
under a bush but squat behind it.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.
Only that blood flows, drying quickly,
and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.

On tragic mountain passes
the wind rips hats from unwitting heads
and we can’t help
laughing at that.

Living by C.D. Wright

This poem is so much of my life lately. I wish I could tell you where I’ve gone.

Living
C.D. Wright

         If this is Wednesday, write Lazartigues, return library books, pick up passport form, cancel the paper.

         If this is Wednesday, mail B her flyers and K her shirts. Last thing I asked as I walked K to her car, “You sure you have everything?” “Oh yes,” she smiled, as she squalled off. Whole wardrobe in front closet.

         Go to Morrison’s for paint samples, that’s where housepainter has account (near Pier One), swing by Gano St. for another bunch of hydroponic lettuce. Stop at cleaners if there’s parking.

         Pap smear at 4. After last month with B’s ear infections, can’t bear sitting in damn doctor’s office. Never a magazine or picture on the wall worth looking at. Pack a book.

         Ever since B born, nothing comes clear. My mind like a mirror that’s been in a fire. Does this happen to the others.

         If this is Wednesday, meet Moss at the house at noon. Pick B up first, call sitter about Friday evening. If she prefers, can bring B to her (hope she keeps the apartment warmer this year).

         Need coat hooks and picture hangers for office. Should take car in for air filter, oil change. F said one of back tires low. Don’t forget car payment, late last two months in a row.

         If this is Wednesday, there’s a demo on the green at 11. Took B to his first down at Quonset Point in August. Blue skies. Boston collective provided good grub for all. Long column of denims and flannel shirts. Smell of patchouli made me so wistful, wanted to buy a woodstove, prop my feet up, share a J and a pot of Constant Comment with a friend. Maybe some zucchini bread.

         Meet with honors students from 1 to 4. At the community college I tried to incite them to poetry. Convince them this line of work, beat the bejesus out of a gig as gizzard splitter at the processing plant or cleaning up after a leak at the germ warfare center. Be all you can be, wrap rubber band around your trigger finger until it drops off.

         Swim at 10:00 before picking up B, before demo on the green, and before meeting moss, if it isn’t too crowded. Only three old women talking about their daughters-in-law last Wednesday at 10:00.

         Phone hardware to see if radon test arrived.

         Keep an eye out for a new yellow blanket. Left B’s on the plane, though he seems over it already. Left most recent issue of Z in the seat. That will make a few businessmen boil. I liked the man who sat next to me, he was sweet to B. Hated flying, said he never let all of his weight down.

         Need to get books in the mail today. Make time pass in line at the P.O. imagining man in front of me butt naked. Fellow in the good-preacher-blue-suit, probably has a cold, hard bottom.

         Call N for green tomato recipe. Have to get used to the Yankee growing season. If this is Wednesday, N goes in hospital today. Find out how long after marrow transplant before can visit.

         Mother said she read in paper that Pete was granted a divorce. His third. My highschool boyfriend. Meanest thing I could have done, I did to him, returning a long-saved-for engagement ring in a Band-Aid box, while he was stationed in Da Nang.

         Meant to tell F this morning about dream of eating grasshoppers, fried but happy. Our love a difficult instrument we are learning to play. Practice, practice.

         No matter where I call home anymore, feel like a boat under the trees. Living is strange.

         This week only; bargain on laid paper at East Side Copy Shop.

         Woman picking her nose at the stoplight. Shouldn’t look, only privacy we have anymore in the car. Isn’t that the woman from the colloquium last fall, who told me she was a stand-up environmentalist. What a wonderful trade, I said, because the evidence of planetary wrongdoing is overwhelming. Because because because of the horrible things we do.

         If this is Wednesday, meet F at Health Department at 10:45 for AIDS test.

         If this is Wednesday, it’s trash night.

This Morning by Raymond Carver

The old house is still on my mind. Mostly what lingers is my reaction to a place where I didn’t even live. I mean—I’ve visited countless times. I am thinking: each time I go, I probably leave a part of myself behind. Maybe that’s why it hurts. Knowing I’ll never return.

Later that day, I found myself laughing with my sisters over a small thing. I thought, look at us: how we manage to recover from a harrowing morning, how we can move on from sadness and memory, to laughter—that resilience, and what it means. How our hearts work, how it lives.

To realise that I’ve grown up and that I can’t always protect the ones I love, nor preserve things just the way are—the incredible ache of that.

This Morning
Raymond Carver

This morning was something. A little snow
lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear
blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,
as far as the eye could see.
Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went
for a walk — determined not to return
until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.
Crossed a field strewn with rocks
where snow had drifted. Kept going
until I reached the bluff.
Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and
the gulls wheeling over the white beach
far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure
cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts
began to wander. I had to will
myself to see what I was seeing
and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what
mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,
for a minute or two!) For a minute or two
it crowded out the usual musings on
what was right, and what was wrong — duty,
tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat
with my former wife. All the things
I hoped would go away this morning.
The stuff I live with every day. What
I’ve trampled on in order to stay alive.
But for a minute or two I did forget
myself and everything else. I know I did.
For when I turned back i didn’t know
where I was. Until some birds rose up
from the gnarled trees. And flew
in the direction I needed to be going.

The Day the Tree Fell Down by Jack LaZebnik

1.
I said goodbye to an old house today (well, yesterday, as it is now past midnight). It was my father’s best friend’s ancestral home. I used to spend a lot of my childhood days there. It was a sad experience. Everywhere I look, everywhere I walk—everything, for the last time.

2.
Driveway: that time when I played with dogs. We were strangers to each other and I had to introduce myself first, then wait to be acknowledged. I was a child—sometimes I forget that I am human, and that I have dominion over the land. I approached the dogs the way I approached any object I’m curious about, and want to get to know: with respect, explaining who I was, and asking if it wants some company.

Driveway: here, for the last time.

3.
Balcony: that time when all the adults would be sharing stories, enjoying the cool evening breeze. I often run around with my sisters in the small space, my father keeping an eye out because a sharp turn to the right reveals a flight of stairs. One particular night, I wore a white dress and white shoes. I was fascinated with the spaces in between the pillars, and I tried to fit my head in there. I went home grimy, but successful.

Balcony: here, for the last time.

4.
The bar, where I first learned what a Bloody Mary was. What whiskey was. What scotch was. The round table with the spinning top, which I thought to be the best dining table in the world. The wooden floors, honest-to-goodness wooden floors that gleam and echo the movements of your feet. The living room, once full of laughter and music. The bedrooms, that at one time reeked of sickness.

The comings and goings of sons. A daughter. Uprooting, the parents say. Flying away. The children wrote: growing up, following paths. Husband and wife dying within weeks of each other. A tragedy, the housekeeper cries. A love story, I whisper.

This house: everything, for the last time.

5.
Goodbye, old girl.

The Day the Tree Fell Down
Jack LaZebnik

crumbling. It died of old age,
I tell you, like a man. We wept.
We had worn our time upon it, put
our arms around to touch fingertips
and we measured ourselves, our feelings
on the years. We made our calculations
pay, then. Now, the fears, age,
daily mathematics. The tree held
the green. Birds, squirrels, coons
made memory there until the day it fell.
They got out. It groaned for twenty minutes.
I tell you, it sighed as it bent,
its branches catching the dull fall,
the soft turning in wet dissolution.
The body lay exposed: a gut of grubs,
a lust of hollowness. We wept,
as I say, more than it was called for.

So by Philip Booth

1.
So, it is midnight. You are now twenty-seven (I checked). Definitely.

2.
This another beginning. You are scared (I also checked). But not as scared as you imagined yourself to be. Excited, yes, and quite nervy. But hopeful. I think we should admit that, at least.

3.
The past year hasn’t been all that kind. Not particularly generous either. But only if you are counting and looking for the wrong things. Because, really, if anything, it gave you your life back, and isn’t that enough?

4.
Some of the things you were thankful for:

• Cheap pens that write beautifully
• Basmati rice
• Laughing at the dinner table
• Dancing to Broadway songs
• Things that make you cry at two in the morning, which tells you that you still have a heart
• Writing, receiving (and reading) long letters
• Old loves
• Waking up early
• Washing the dishes
• Correct subtitles
• Blankets

5.
You are older. Not sure about the wiser part (hah!). But here are some things to wish for: to be stronger, to be happier, to be healthier. Most of all: to be kinder. Not just to the world around you, but to yourself, love. To yourself.

6.
What you learned:

• It takes courage to live.
• You can do it.

7.
It is poetry that has, again and again, saved your life. You owe it everything.

8.
Louise Glück says, “Why love what you will lose? / There is nothing else to love.”

9.
Here is a waltz. You are barefoot now. Listen. Spin and spin and spin around your room. Embrace your self. You are here. Celebrate.

10.
So, this is it. Happy birthday, T., you old fool.

So
Philip Booth

So, there’s no way to be sure. Not
about much of anything. No more about
anyone else than ourselves. Perhaps
not even of death, except that it’s bound
to happen. To you, yes; to me, us: the lot
of humankind, given how humankind sees it
from this near side. So what.

So nothing that we here and now
can perfectly know. Save, though the lens
our eyes raise, the old here and now.
The this, the already-going that moves us.
The red-shift we’re constantly part of.
And why not? Between what we were, and
are going to be, is who and how we best love.

The Patience of Ordinary Things by Pat Schneider

I said the other day, I need to learn how to wait again. To wait well, that is. It’s not so much as the art of delayed gratification (adjusting my expectations in exchange for personal satisfaction, i.e. what might I gain for this, which is selfish, really), but understanding that the universe has its own pace, and that it is not always in sync with mine. It is patience. Forbearance. Faith that it will happen, that it will fall into place, and if it doesn’t, to believe anyway, because the act of waiting is a journey in itself, where one gathers strength.

How do I say this—I suppose, I want to be able to temper my restlessness, to turn that energy into something useful. I think waiting is, in the most fundamental sense, not a lack of action, but a respect for time. One can still do things, be busy, live, and still wait. Lately I’ve found that my inability to keep still, to stay put, has had a negative influence. I wait, and yet I say, hurry hurry hurry dammit. What does one lose, after a long wait?

To think of oneself as Ida, Hammershøi’s wife and muse, with her back turned, or her head bowed, perhaps reading a book or a letter. Think of the stillness, how the space around her arranges itself. She is waiting and yet: solitude. To be able to stand by the window, or sit near an open door, in between the shadows and what little light is left, and be quiet. To have that peace, and be thoroughly possessed of your self, to listen to your heart and hear that it is fine, that it is happy, that it is waiting and yet so alive: yes, that is what I want.

The Patience of Ordinary Things
Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

Science by Ursula Le Guin

I am listening to Handel’s Sarabande (Suite in D minor), and thinking about monsters. I remember an evening in November, six years ago, when I drew a creature in my notebook. He had commas in his hair, which is styled like Elvis’s, a large mouth, which is always open, as if a curse, or an urge he cannot control. He also had a large head, and awfully thin legs, and no body. I didn’t think he deserved one. I drew him with sleeves though, and gave him nice shoes (with laces tied), as well as striped socks up to his knees. I thought, if only you exist in real life. Then I would worry about you instead, and not of my future, nor my present.

That’s what I do these days. Mulling things over. When I’m working. When I’m writing. When I’m eating. The more I seek for answers, the more I unearth questions.

Science
Ursula Le Guin

What little we have ever understood
is like an offering we make beside the sea.
It is pure worship when pursued
as its own end, to find out. Mystery,
the undiminishable silent flood,
stretches on out from where we pray
round the clear altar flame. The god
accepts the sacrifice and turns away.

Advertisement for the Mountain by Christina Davis

I think I am starting to accept who I really am. I know I have said that before. Long ago. Days ago. What I mean: I am starting to accept that I am changing. Constantly. Often. Who I was yesterday might not be who I am today, and yet, it is still me. It is as if I am a book: you turn a page, and then another, and the story continues. Yesterday I am page 42. Today I am page 76. Tomorrow I am an Introduction, the next day I might be the last paragraph, on the last page. Or: I am another book entirely. But the story is the same. Does that make sense to you?

The thing is, I am always in the middle of changing, in the thick of it, that’s why maybe I don’t notice, or I forget. I often frown upon the world, and life, because why must it be so unpredictable, and difficult, and fleeting? Lately though I realise that that is also me. I wonder now if I will ever catch up, or if I should. I worry when I feel I’m being left behind, that I start running and running, but until when? And at what cost? And by doing that am I also not losing things, giving up things, for this?

Advertisement for the Mountain
Christina Davis

There are two versions of every life.

In the first one, you get a mother, a father,
your very own room.

You learn to walk, which is only done by walking.
You learn the past tense of have, which is hunger.

You learn to ask almost anything
is to ask it to be over,
as when the lover asks the other

“Are you sleeping? Are you beginning
to go away?”

(And whether or not you learn it, life does not penetrate
more than five miles above the earth
or reach more than three miles beneath the sea.

Life is eight miles long.

You could walk it, and be there before sundown.
Or swim it, or fall it, or crawl it.)

The second is told from the point
of view of the sky.

Your Pilgrimage by Ko Un

Ah, March. Everything comes alive at this time, it seems. So much promise: things to be, things to do.

Here’s a note for myself to keep on going. For you, too.

Your Pilgrimage
Ko Un

A slower pace, a somewhat slower pace will do.
Of a sudden, should it start to rain,
let yourself get soaked.
An old friend, the rain.

One thing alone is beautiful: setting off.
The world’s too vast
to live in a single place,
or three or four.

Walk on and on
until the sun sets,
with your old accomplice,
shadow, late as ever.
If the day clouds over,
go on anyway
regardless.

Kyrie by Tomas Tranströmer

1.
Yesterday was—

Perhaps it’s better not talk to about it.

2.
My manuscript is home now, all the way from Edinburgh. I look at your notes, M., and—

You should see me here. Clutching the papers to my chest.

3.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, and perhaps I’ll never tire of saying it—

Thank you.

4.
Because, how did I get so lucky? How was it that you found me? How—

I am so grateful I don’t think I deserve all of this.

5.
Maybe we are one person. In another universe. In another life. To have them split us—

I spent years without you. And now you are my friend. My sister. My kindred spirit.

6.
I said, the world doesn’t give answers—

But it leaves me mysteries, and light, and grace, and you.

Kyrie
Tomas Tranströmer

At times my life suddenly opens its eyes in the dark.
A feeling of masses of people pushing blindly
through the streets, excitedly, toward some miracle,
while I remain here and no one sees me.

It is like the child who falls asleep in terror
listening to the heavy thumps of his heart.
For a long, long time till morning puts his light in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.

Postcard From Home by Al Zolynas

Dear MJ,

A year ago, you followed your heart (has it really been that long?). You were a thousand miles from home. I imagined you were scared. But I also thought, this is what they meant by being brave. (Yes, you were the brave one, between the two of us.)

It has been quite a few months after that, and lots of letters. Lots of getting drunk, too, you and me, come to think of it. Also: postcards that I treasure as they arrive on my door.

It is midnight now, where I am. I’m thinking of you. Today you are beginning a new chapter in your life. Things are changing. Can you feel it?

Here’s what I know: there are some wounds that would take some time to heal. Some pieces of yourself that will remain lost. Some aches that will always be there. But there will be days, too, when joy finds you unexpectedly. When you turn the pages of a book, or when you are flying your kite, or when you are sitting on your porch holding a cold bottle—you’ll find that life is actually good, and it’s worth it, all that hurt, just to be here. Now. (And when it isn’t—well, you know that I have your back, yeah?)

My dear friend. Here is something you told me once: “The world is still a beautiful place, even if it is too strong for us at times.”

I am glad you are in my life. Happy birthday.

Yours,
T.

Postcard From Home
Al Zolynas

Sitting on the deck, bare feet
on the railing, I watch and listen to
this day spilling out its myriad flow of details, one
after another, one on top of another, seamlessly,
with no apologies, not the slightest backing off:
two ruby-throated humming birds
drinking their sugar water, distant dogs
barking, the sudden shriek
of wood surrendering to a neighbor’s power saw,
those boulders poking out of the hillside, another subdivision
materializing on the stripped land across the valley.
Each detail says “This!”
and has always and ever only said “This!”
Wish I were here.