Poem of the Day

Yikes! Another zinger from Linda Pastan. She is so amazing!

The Quarrel
By Linda Pastan

If there were a monument
to silence, it would not be
the tree whose leaves
murmur continuously
among themselves;

nor would it be the pond
whose seeming stillness
is shattered
by the quicksilver
surfacing of fish.

If there were a monument
to silence, it would be you
standing so upright, so unforgiving,
your mute back deflecting
every word I say.

I have a houseful of family and I have to work this week (well through tomorrow at least), so I don’t have much spare time for poetry. Luckily, my poetry pal bails me out by sending me great poems to share. This reminds me of an updated version of Interim by ESVM.

The Answering Machine
By Linda Pastan

I call and hear your voice
on the answering machine
weeks after your death,
a fledgling ghost still longing
for human messages.

Shall I leave one, telling
how the fabric of our lives
has been ripped before
but that this sudden tear will not
be mended soon or easily?

In your emptying house, others
roll up rugs, pack books,
drink coffee at your antique table,
and listen to messages left
on a machine haunted

by the timbre of your voice,
more palpable than photographs
or fingerprints. On this first day
of this first fall without you,
ashamed and resisting

but compelled, I dial again
the number I know by heart,
thankful in a diminished world
for the accidental mercy of machines,
then listen and hang up.

I read this one in I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You. I know I’ve probably said it before, but Linda Pastan is amazing. Ever since a wonderful conversation with my poetry pals, I’ve thought about what actually constitutes a poem. In the conventional sense, it’s something someone has written down. But maybe it can also be an object or an event. I like Pastan’s take on it.

Elegy
By Linda Pastan

Somewhere a poem
is waiting for me
to write it: in the jewelry box,
coiled into an old ring
or stopping the hands
of a watch;
in the vanishing barn, risen
to the top of the pail
to be skimmed off;
or in the tree outside
engraved in green ink
on the underside of a leaf.

In my old room
the white curtains blow
like ghosts of themselves
over the sill;
under the bed misplaced words gather
to grab my helpless ankle.
It is a poem
the child I was hides
in the ear of the woman
I have become: a poem
whose lines were the lines
of my father’s face.

This one was shared by one of my poetry pals. I don’t think I’ve read a poem by Linda Pastan that wasn’t amazing.

Gone Missing
By Linda Pastan

At the unmarked border
between sense
and senselessness
one boy steps over
the edge of the world
taking with him a blue
sweater, a razor, and
from the emptied pockets
of those he leaves behind
all certainty. The night

is very still, the only light
a cutting edge of moon.
He leaves his toothbrush,
the abstract letters of his name,
and a vision, photo perfect,
of what we fear the most:
our own loved children loosed
by stealth or by accident
into the beautiful
and unforgiving world.

It’s a good thing that my poetry buddy keeps me supplied with poems for times like this when I’m lazy and would rather lie on my hammock reading a book all evening than look for a poem.

All I Want To Say
By Linda Pastan

“A painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds.” —Edouard Manet

When I pass you this bowl
of Winesaps, do I want to say:
here are some rosy spheres
of love, or lust—emblems
of all the moments after Eden
when a pinch of the forbidden
was like spice on that first apple?
Or do I simply mean: I’m sorry,
I was busy today; fruit is all
there is for dessert.

And when you picked
a single bloom from the fading bush
outside our window,
were you saying that I am somehow
like a flower, or deserving of flowers?
Were you saying
anything flowery at all?
Or simply: here is the last rose
of November, please
put it in water.

As for clouds,
as for those white, voluptuous
abstractions floating overhead,
they are not camels or pillows
or even the snowy peaks
of half-imagined mountains.
They are the pure shapes
of silence, and they are
saying exactly
what I want to say.

This poem was snagged from I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You, and I love the contrast between the man and wife in the poem. Which is more important, the camellia viewing platform, or the grass not drying in the dark cave? (The first sentence in the second stanza makes me laugh every time because I can so vividly picture the grass-lover’s look of dismay at the carefully positioned lawn chair.

Camellias
By Linda Pastan

I drag the lawn chair
to the center of the new lawn
where you have warned
it will ruin the delicate
grass. From here
I have a perfect view
of the pink camellia,
the one with rose-shaped flowers
which you secretly think
I have ignored. This is my camellia
viewing platform
I tell you, remembering
signposts in Japan.

You look at the dark cave
beneath my chair where the grass
will die in architectural stripes.
We look at each other.
This is one of the impasses
a marriage must
make a detour around
or else crash into.
Meanwhile the camellia
opens its flesh-colored petals
with utter unself-consciousness,
releasing its scent
into the dangerous air.

This one was shared by a friend.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1916, The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

Boundaries
By Linda Pastan

In Monet’s Water Lilies,
willows dissolve into
flowers dissolve into water,
and form becomes a dream
in purples and blues
without scent or story.
Consider the death of boundaries,
the way sight dissolves
the moment just before sleep
overtakes us. The way
a man can disappear
inside a woman. I remember
a day of ruffling waters
when we sailed west
in your creaky boat.
We steered for the horizon—
that penciled-in line between
ocean and sky, then watched
as it receded ahead of us.
The night my mother died
there were cells in her body
that didn’t notice. For a while
the moons of her nails kept rising,
the hair kept growing from the apex
of her widow’s peak.
Now by a barbed-wire fence
that divides two countries,
the invisible roots of an old tree
spread their living network
underground, in all directions.

A PotD reader (and awesome book/poetry pal!) sent me this poem. Since it’s fantastic, I’m sharing it with the group!

On Seeing My Poems Translated into Chinese
By Linda Pastan

This is the geometry
of pure design—
the intricate patterns
gulls’ feet leave
on the clean sand;
the flutter of inked eyelashes
on a white cheek;
the coded scrawl
of kindergarten children.

What do these poems mean?
somebody always asks,
and I can open
the book here and point,
thinking of how Li Po once fished
in the river of language,
whose poems still glisten
wetly, even in English,
all the way down the page.

Usually I’m annoyed when there just isn’t enough information about a person or subject (I just want to know some facts), but I kind of like the aura of mystique that shrouds Miss Emily. It’s likely we’ll never really know what went on in her head and I like Pastan’s separation of legend from personal opinion.

Emily Dickinson
By Linda Pastan

We think of hidden in a white dress
among the folded linens and sachets
of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight
sending jellies and notes with no address
to all the wondering Amherst neighbors.
Eccentric as New England weather
the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle,
blew two half imagined lovers off.
Yet legend won’t explain the sheer sanity
of vision, the serious mischief
of language, the economy of pain.

Here’s another one I read with my poetry pals. The second stanza is my favorite, and I certainly hope that there are still wonderful poems to be written!

I also wanted to share this quote (which seems appropriate now) that I think was in the beginning of Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime.

“It’s absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken a mortal wound—that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It hasn’t to await the test of time.”
—Robert Frost

Rereading Frost
By Linda Pastan

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.

I love this poem (which I found in Garrison’ Keillor’s Good Poems), partly because it is in reference to one of my favorite poems.

Bess
By Linda Pastan

When Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed
daughter, waited for her highwayman
in the poem I learned by breathless
heart at twelve, it occurred to me

for the first time that my mild-eyed
mother Bess might have a life
all her own—a secret past
I couldn’t enter, except in dreams.

That single sigh of a syllable
has passed like a keepsake
to this newest child, wrapped now
in the silence of sleep.

And in the dream I enter,
I could be holding my infant mother
in my arms: the same wide cheekbones,
the name indelible as a birthmark.