Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

--Jane Hirshfield

The Word

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,
between "green thread"
and "broccoli," you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."
Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend
and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,
and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing
that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,
but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom
still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,
—to any one among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.

-- Tony Hoagland

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

--Billy Collins

What Have I Learned

What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?

The moments
between hard pleasant tasks

To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.

—the first Calochortus flowers
and in all the land,
it's spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs,
to Gen.

Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,

you pass it on.

-- Gary Snyder

attention as a form of ethics [excerpt]

We are mired in matter until we are not
— Ralph Lemon

I thought we were an archipelago
each felt under our own finessed and gilded wing
let’s make an assumption
let’s make an assumption that the lake has a bottom
let’s make an assumption that everyone will mourn
let’s sack a hundred greenbacks
for the sake of acknowledging they mean something
what does it mean to have worth?
who would dream to drain a lake?
I spent my days staring into the eye of the Baltic
it’s because I am also a body of water
it’s not that onerous
I’ve built a muscle memory
it’s not that heavy
let’s talk about erasure I mean
that’s easy
start with a word that you don’t like
start with a people you didn’t know
start with a neighborhood, rank
start with any miasma dispersed
let’s talk about burden
let’s talk about burden for the weight
it lends us
let’s talk about supplication
about my palms — uplift, patience


let’s celebrate our substance
subsistence in
amber rivulets of stilllife
constellations how you molded me
country how we became it
the longitude is a contested border
my longest muscle I named familiar

Copyright © 2020 by Asiya Wadud.

About the poem:
“I wrote this poem while listening to a talk Simone White gave in the spring of 2018 at Savvy Contemporary called ‘Erotic Power/Erotic Punishment.’ I’d also been listening to a performance-lecture that Ralph Lemon gave at UC Berkeley in 2012, and make a conversation of them because they both are filled with stillness and quiet electricity. Okwui Okpokwasili's ‘Poor People’s TV Room’ was also rattling around my head, somewhere (everywhere). I often think about what it means to give any act undivided attention, and what emerges in the space where we enact this kind of seeing. I like to think in threes and thirds and triptychs and trilogies and I try to translate the extension and duration of performance onto the page.”
—Asiya Wadud

About the poet:
Asiya Wadud is the author of Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). She teaches poetry to children at Saint Ann's School and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeds
poking through
our skulls.

Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.

Drunk on music,
who needs wine?

Come on,
Sweetheart,
let's go dancing
while we still
have feet.

-- David Budbill

Lightly

It's dark because you are trying too hard.
Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days.
Lightly, lightly -- it's the best advice ever given me
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you,
sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into
fear and self-pity and despair.

That's why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly, my darling.

--Aldous Huxley, Island

Fear and love

Inhale small fears they turn into doubts into words into ideas
into anger into hatred into violence.

Exhale large fears and large words they tumble back onto you
it’s easy to get buried by our own mirrors.

Inhale small fears and they whisper and travel to your mind
observe them and thank them for trying to protect you.

Exhale acknowledgement of the beauty within your instincts
and the courage to love small fears.

Inhale hard love suck in the smell and reward reap eat chew
swallow devour all the goodness and love that is given to you.

Exhale calmness in acknowledgement of the beauty within the
courage it takes to not fear love.

--Tanya Tagaq
Split Tooth, Viking, Penguin Canada, 2018, p. 10.

If You Knew

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

--Ellen Bass

Report of the Fourteenth Subcommittee on Convening a Discussion Group

This is how things begin to tilt into change,
how coalitions are knit from strands of hair,
of barbed wire, twine, knitting wool and gut,
how people ease into action arguing each inch,
but the tedium of it is watching granite erode.

Let us meet to debate meeting, the day, the time,
the length.  Let us discuss whether we will sit
or stand or hang from the ceiling or take it lying
down.  Let us argue about the chair and the table and
the chairperson and the motion to table the chair.

In the room the fog gathers under the ceiling and thickens
in every brain.  Let us form committees spawning
subcommittees all laying little moldy eggs of reports.
Under the grey fluorescent sun they will crack
to hatch scuttling lizards of more committees.

The Pliocene gathers momentum and fades.
The earth tilts on its axis.  More and more snows
fall each winter and less melt each spring.
A new ice age is pressing the glaciers forward
over the floor.  We watch the wall of ice advance.

We are evolving into mollusks, barnacles
clinging to wood and plastic, metal and smoke
while the stale and flotsam-laden tide of rhetoric
inches up the shingles and dawdles back.
This is true virtue:  to sit here and stay awake,

to listen, to argue, to wade on through the muck
wrestling to some momentary small agreement
like a pinhead pearl prized from a dragon-oyster.
I believe in this democracy as I believe
there is blood in my veins, but oh, oh, in me

lurks a tyrant with a double-bladed axe who longs
to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand
and shriek, You Shall Do As I Say, pig bastards.
No more committees but only picnics and orgies
and dances.  I have spoken.  So be it forevermore.

--Marge Piercy