“Fine words from a sailor’s son | Who’s always running away | I don’t want your sympathy” ~ Angus and Julia Stone, from “Choking”

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Two for Tuesday: Billy Collins

Tuesday evening. Sunny, 63 degrees.

I wish that I could say that the days have gotten better, but they have not. I wish that I could say that I have finally found the answers, but I have not. I wish that I could say that forgiveness was easy, but it is not.

                   

Field Guide

No one I ask knows the name of the flower
we pulled the car to the side of the road to pick
and that I point to dangling purple from my lapel.

I am passing through the needle of spring
in North Carolina, as ignorant of the flowers of the south
as the woman at the barbecue stand who laughs
and the man who gives me a look as he pumps the gas

and everyone else I ask on the way to the airport
to return to where this purple madness is not seen
blazing against the sober pines and rioting along the
roadside.

On the plane, the stewardess is afraid she cannot answer
my question, now insistent with the fear that I will leave
the province of this flower without its sound in my ear.

Then, as if he were giving me the time of day, a passenger
looks up from his magazine and says wisteria.

                   

Water Table

It is on dry sunny days like this one that I find myself
thinking about the enormous body of water
that lies under this house,
cool, unseen reservoir,
silent except for the sounds of dripping
and the incalculable shifting
of all the heavy darkness that it holds.

This is the water that our well was dug to sip
and lift to where we live,
water drawn up and falling on our bare shoulders,
water filling the inlets of our mouths,
water in a pot on the stove.

The house is nothing now but a blueprint of pipes,
a network of faucets, nozzles, and spigots,
and even outdoors where light pierces the air
and clouds fly over the canopies of trees,
my thoughts flow underground
trying to imagine the cavernous scene.

Surely it is no pool with a colored ball
floating on the blue surface.
No grotto where a king would have
his guests rowed around in swan-shaped boats.
Between the dark lakes where the dark rivers flow
there is no ferry waiting on the shore of rock
and no man holding a long oar,
ready to take your last coin.
This is the real earth and the real water it contains.

But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain.

                   

Music by Angus and Julia Stone, “Choking”

Lyrics:

Choking on these words
You can leave now
Oh haven’t you heard
You can leave now

We stand there like statues from different cities
Both warriors of the same war
Both victors of our territories
Why do I feel so small?
Oh you’ve got it all figured out
What will be will be

Fine work from a sailor’s hand
Who’s always running away
In between all your complex ideas
Found out how love should be
When you get the time to feel anything
Anything real for me
Oh you’ve got it all figured out
What will be will be

Fine words from a sailor’s son
Who’s always running away
I don’t want your sympathy
Don’t quote me another phrase
I understand all your philosophies
But it hurts me just the same

Choking on these words
You can leave now
Oh haven’t you heard
You can leave now

April is Poetry Month: Poem a Day #25

Taken from the Knopf site; direct link below.

 A poem from the 2009 collection Wheeling Motel, by Pulitzer-prize winner Franz Wright, a poet of extreme reverence and, at the same time, irreverence.

To share the Poem-a-Day experience, pass along this link.

                   

Kyrie

Around midnight he took the oxycodone
and listened to Arvo Pärt’s “I Am the True Vine”

over and over, the snow falling harder now.
He switched off the light and sat without dread

of the coming hours, quietly singing along;
he smoked any number of cigarettes without thinking

once about the horrifying consequence;
he was legibly told what to say and he wrote

with mounting excitement and pleasure,
and sent friendly e-mails to everyone, Lord

I had such a good time and I don’t regret anything —
What happened to the prayer that goes like that?

~ Franz Wright

                   

Music by Arvo Pärt, “I Am the True Vine”

April is Poetry Month: Poem a Day #20

Not many of my own words today, and besides, today’s poem is by Sharon Olds, and how could I possibly compete with that?

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Taken from the Knopf site; direct link below.

Sharon Olds, in her poems across the decades, has carried us through many of her life’s passages, as well as those of her growing children — their milestones are both part of her story and then not, as she sees them emerge into their own separate narratives. Today’s poem ushers us thoughtfully into graduation season, with its partings that are also new beginnings.

To share the Poem-a-Day experience, pass along this link.

                   

High School Senior

For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
— this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever — I try to see
this apartment without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils brown as the mourning cloak’s
wing, but I can’t. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
And saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for
weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me — no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.

~ Sharon Olds

                   

Music by Linda Rondstadt, “Long, Long Time” (best copy I could find)