Ode to Poetry: The Philosopher

The Philosopher

And what are you that, wanting you,

I should be kept awake

As many nights as there are days

With weeping for your sake?

And what are you that, missing you,

As many days as crawl

I should be listening to the wind 

And looking at the wall?

I know a man that’s a braver man

And twenty men as kind,

And what are you, that you should be

The one man in my mind?

Yet women’s ways are witless ways,

As any sage will tell--

And what am I, that I should love

so wisely and so well?

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ode to Poetry: Mrs. Darwin

Mrs Darwin

7 April 1852.

Went to the Zoo.

I said to him –

Something about that chimpanzee over there

reminds me of you.

-Carol Ann Duffy

Ode to Poetry: Having a Coke with You

Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it.

-Frank O'Hara

Ode to Poetry: Trading for Heaven

I saw you at the top of the stairs.
Now I live a secret life.

I saw you holding open the door.
Now I’m filling pages with
 

things I can’t tell anyone.
Now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been.
 

I traded every beyond, every someday,
for heaven in my lifetime. Now I’m dying
 

of my life. Now I’m alive
inside my death.
 

Do you see the space between our bodies?
Barely a hand, hardly a breath,
 

it is the space mountains and rivers are made of.
It is the beginning of oceans, the space
 

between either and or, both and neither,
the happiness of forgetting
 

our names and the happiness of hearing them
for the first time. I heard you
 

singing yourself to sleep.
It was a song from both of our childhoods.
 

And now I don’t know if singing
is a form of helplessness,
Time’s architecture revealed,
 

or some inborn motive all blood
and breath obey
to enact a savage wheel.
 

I found you at dawn
sitting by the open kitchen window.
You were sorting seeds in a plate.
 

And if you were praying out loud,
I’ll never tell.

And if you were listening to the doves,
and if their various whoo-ing, and coo-ing,
and dying in time,
are your earliest questions blown back to you
through the ragged seasons,
 

and if you’ve lived your life
in answer to those questions,
I’ll never tell.
 

Your destiny is safe with me.
Your childhood is safe with me.
What you decide to bury is safe with me.

-Li-Young Lee

Ode to Poetry: Love Poems from Yehuda Amichai

Songs for a Woman (Excerpt)

wherever you love 

furniture must be removed from the room 

trees, mountains, seas—all of it
gone from the narrow world.

4.
When you smile
serious ideas suddenly get drowsy 

all night the mountains keep silent at your side—
at morning, the sand goes out with you, to sea 

when you do nice things to me
all heavy industry shuts down

Advice for Good Love

Advice for good love: Don’t love

those from far away.  Take yourself one

from nearby.

The way a sensible house will take

local stones for its building,

stones which have suffered in the same cold

and were scorched by the same sun.

Take the one with the golden wreath

around her dark eye’s pupil, she

who has a certain knowledge

about your death.  Love also inside

a ruin, like taking honey out of 

the lion’s carcass that Samson killed.

And advice for bad love: With

the love left over

from the previous one

make a new woman for yourself,

then with what is left of that woman

make again a new love,

and go on like that

until nothing remains.

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned 
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little. 

Roam: Minneapolis and Mankato, Minnesota

As many of you may be aware, I'm spending the summer teaching in Denver for the Institute of Reading Development, the same program I worked for two years ago in Seattle. I love this job because though I'm certainly not called to be a teacher, the program spouts all the same ideals about the formative power of the written word that I've been spouting for years. In other words, it's my corporate kindred spirit.

The other reason I love this job is my other passion: travel. The program takes place in cities all across the nation, and I can choose a new city I've never lived in (hence my current placement in Denver) to work. They also have a habit of calling their teachers up and asking them to fly across the nation to teach extra classes. My summer in Seattle, they sent me to North Carolina for four weeks: perhaps one of the best months of my life. I met the wonderful Williams family on one of my flights, and before I knew it, I was staying at their beach house on the NC coast, eating hush puppies and teasing Blackbeard's ghost...

This summer I accepted their offer to be a Substitute Teacher in Denver, and soon enough, last week I was off to Minneapolis, MN with just a few days notice. I couldn't be more excited, for one particular reason:

Betsy. 

It's no secret that I love to read. It's no secret that reading was practically my whole life as a child. And it's also no secret that there are some characters in some books that become such a part of yourself you can't even remember where you leave off and your favorite character begins...

In the tradition of Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) and L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables), Maud Hart Lovelace wrote 10 books chronicling her life in Mankato, Minnesota during the turn of the 20th Century in fictional style. I first read the Betsy-Tacy Books in third grade. Betsy is short, stout, brown-haired and bossy. She loves to read, wants to be a writer and loves her family more than anything. Sound familiar? Tacy Kelly is Betsy's best friend. She's red-haired, shy, beautiful and gets married first. (My sister-in-law and best friend Kelley Dawson is so the Tacy to my Betsy, trust me). The books grow as Betsy does: the first 4 are the stories of Betsy and Tacy as young girls, the next 4 are accounts of Betsy's High School years and the last 2 cover Betsy's trip around Europe and her first year of marriage. The books are beautifully written and heartbreakingly honest. I've reread these books a hundred times, learning more and more from them as I grow older and older. Betsy has never felt like a woman living a century ago to me. Betsy is everything a young girl could ask for: a companion in struggle, a role model, and wonderfully human. Whether heartbroken or having the time of her life, Betsy is undeniably real. Folks, I'm here to say, if I wasn't such a devout Catholic and didn't believe in reincarnation, I think I was Betsy in my past life.  

Upon landing in Minneapolis, I immediately took the gorgeous hour and a half drive down to Mankato to see the Betsy and Tacy houses, kept up by the Betsy-Tacy Society. The houses were closed, but I didn't care.

I had chills the entire time was I there. I'm surprised I didn't cry. I can never express how much these books mean to me, how much they meant to me as a young girl, how much they mean to me now. This heroine was a comfort, an inspiration, a role model and a friend. I intend on thanking Maud Hart Lovelace just as soon as I get to heaven.

Everything in Mankato is just how she described it: down to the layout of her neighborhood, the bench she and Tacy used to sit on, and the Big Hill behind her yellow house that they used to climb. I prowled around the houses looking in the windows, climbed the Big Hill, and snapped more pictures than I had memory space for.

The whole trip was worth it just for that. But good fortune has never come in singular moments for me. I took the beautiful drive back up to Minneapolis, and found the city had its own sights to offer. Each evening after sunset, the northern sky turned a delicate shade of sea-green. There was a crescent moon. I swear that both evenings, no matter where I went in the city, there was the smell of campfire.

Saturday I visited Minnehaha Park and saw Minnehaha Falls at sunset. Afterwards, as I drove home, right by that crescent moon, there were fireworks, just up until the moment I parked my rental car, and went into my hotel, ready to go back to Denver.

Ode to Poetry: I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

-Pablo Neruda

An Ode to the Elephant: My Own Poem

Just for fun...

This is an Ode to the Elephant

It’s not that I did a stint

in India 

or Africa 

that these

gray monstrosities

capture my attention,

my affection,

despite their forgetful 

representation.

No, you see,

it’s their majesty, 

that makes me reply,

to that dull guy,

asking “What animal would you be?”

“A dolphin,” 

says the girl from 

the sorority,

“A jaguar,” 

says the boy from

behind the bar,

“An ELEPHANT!” I cry, 

wide and far.

“Because they’ve got big ears for listening, 

big noses for smelling, 

big eyes for seeing, 

big feet for stomping.

they’re not afraid of being big and fat,

they’re alright with that. 

That means they’ve got more life, 

they’ve got more sense,

they never regret emails just after they’re sent.

They don’t sit it out on the bench, 

No, they’re grand but sweet too, 

fit to carry royalty,

they live in jungles,

I’d like a small one for a pet, 

but that’s silly,

who’d want to clean up after it wet

the floor?

but I like them anyway, 

they’re a cute set,

they’re funny and sweet and dangerous to boot, 

and always trumpeting when it all comes to,

they’re kind of like me

or how I wish to be,

so that’s why I reply

to that dull guy,

asking, “What animal would you be?”

AN ELEPHANT, I cry!