I will keep broken
things:
the big clay pot
with raised iguanas
chasing their
tails; two
of their wise
heads sheared off;
I will keep broken things: the old slave market basket brought to
my door by Mississippi a jagged
hole gouged
in its sturdy dark
oak side.
I will keep broken things:
The memory of
those long delicious night swims with you;
I will keep broken things:
In my house
there remains an honored shelf
on which I will keep broken things.
Their beauty is
they need not ever be "fixed."
I will keep your wild
free laughter though it is now missing its
reassuring and
graceful hinge.
I will keep broken things:
Thank you
So much!
I will keep broken things.
I will keep you:
pilgrim of sorrow.
I will keep myself.
8 Jan: "Beverly’s Dancing Shack for Alice" by Alice Walker
Someone who knew me well
And that I’d lived
In many a gray shack
My mother transformed
With flowers
Took me to your house
To meet you:
To see the shacks
You rescued from our shame
And transformed with your wit,
Small nails, old boards,
And paint.
I was enchanted to see
My mother’s magic
Emerge
From the end
Of your brush.
Now you have left us. The streaming
Light through all your shacks’
Cracks
Like the streaming genius
Of your own obsessed mind.
How do we make new
And restorative of soul
The old pain? How do we learn
To carry with grace and humor
All that has happened to us?
Buchanan, for instance. Whose name
Was that before it was slapped across
The memory of the enslaved?
Your ancestors
In Africa were not Buchanans
And may have been esteemed artists
Every one of them,
For all we know.
Ah, Beverly,
All of us in our age clan
Are in the homestretch now.
We will not be far behind you.
Trailing our chalk, our pencil sticks
With which we wrote and drew in the dirt,
Our paints made from berries, barks,
And tears.
With open hands
We have offered our art
Made from whatever scraps
Were left over from our destruction,
Their absence from
The big house table of greed and ignorance
Never missed.
This poem is to say how glad I am
To have the shack
You made for me. Red as a strawberry!
I would never have thought of that; yet
How right it has turned out to be.
For I do not wallow in sadness
Though it visits more often these days
Than I would like;
The world is dying
In so many ugly ways
And humans with it.
And yet, against all odds
I realize
There will always be a Beverly Buchanan
Arising from a virtual “nowhere”
To cobble together the broken pieces
-Left over from the beauty
That is destroyed-
And paint them red
For dancing.
And that I’d lived
In many a gray shack
My mother transformed
With flowers
Took me to your house
To meet you:
To see the shacks
You rescued from our shame
And transformed with your wit,
Small nails, old boards,
And paint.
I was enchanted to see
My mother’s magic
Emerge
From the end
Of your brush.
Now you have left us. The streaming
Light through all your shacks’
Cracks
Like the streaming genius
Of your own obsessed mind.
How do we make new
And restorative of soul
The old pain? How do we learn
To carry with grace and humor
All that has happened to us?
Buchanan, for instance. Whose name
Was that before it was slapped across
The memory of the enslaved?
Your ancestors
In Africa were not Buchanans
And may have been esteemed artists
Every one of them,
For all we know.
Ah, Beverly,
All of us in our age clan
Are in the homestretch now.
We will not be far behind you.
Trailing our chalk, our pencil sticks
With which we wrote and drew in the dirt,
Our paints made from berries, barks,
And tears.
With open hands
We have offered our art
Made from whatever scraps
Were left over from our destruction,
Their absence from
The big house table of greed and ignorance
Never missed.
This poem is to say how glad I am
To have the shack
You made for me. Red as a strawberry!
I would never have thought of that; yet
How right it has turned out to be.
For I do not wallow in sadness
Though it visits more often these days
Than I would like;
The world is dying
In so many ugly ways
And humans with it.
And yet, against all odds
I realize
There will always be a Beverly Buchanan
Arising from a virtual “nowhere”
To cobble together the broken pieces
-Left over from the beauty
That is destroyed-
And paint them red
For dancing.
7 Jan: "Beyond" by Alice Walker
The old experienced ones
Never said
You must marry.
They never said
What will your husband think?
There was always so much
Work to do
Offering advice on this issue
Seems to have slipped their minds.
And so when I did marry,
A few times
By last count
I realized there was something
Called Marriage
That might happen
In a lifetime or in a flash:
But also
Something
Beyond it.
To grow toward,
To come
To understand
And know.
Not only about my beloved(s)
Who oftentimes distracted me
Sweetly, kindly, intelligently,
But about the cosmos
The stars
Tree roots
Tiny sea shells
The roiling waves
And the open door.
6 Jan: " In Late August" by Peter Campion
In a culvert by the airport
under crumbling slag
wine colored water seeps
to this pool the two does
drink from: each sipping as
the other keeps look out.
The skyline is a blur
of barcode and microchip.
Even at home we hold
the narrowest purchase.
No arcs of tracer fire.
No caravans of fleeing
families. Only this
suspicion ripples
through our circles of lamp glow
(as you sweep the faint sweat
from your forehead and flip
another page in your novel)
this sense that all we own
is the invisible
web of our words and touches
silence and fabulation
all make believe and real
as the two does out
scavenging through rose hips
and shattered drywall:
their presence in the space
around them liveliest
just before they vanish.
5 Jan: "Because I could not stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality. We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun – Or rather – He passed us – The Dews drew quivering and chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle – We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground – Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity –
3 Jan: "Passing Time" by Maya Angelou
Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk
One paints the beginning
of a certain end.
The other, the end of a
sure beginning.
One paints the beginning
of a certain end.
The other, the end of a
sure beginning.
2 Jan: "Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda
(translated by Robert Bly)
Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fi
sh made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.
Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad im
pulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.
The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.
Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fi
sh made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.
Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad im
pulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.
The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.
1 Jan: "The thief left it behind" by Ryokan
English version by Stephen Mitchell
The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.
31 Dec: [in Just-] by E. E. Cummings
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
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