Poem of the Day: A Finger, Two Dots, Then Me

My friends Katie and Peter got married on the 4th of July this year, and Katie's brother Evan read this poem. And then I cried. Weddings will do that to you.

A Finger, Two Dots, Then Me
(the poem I’d like my future wife to read
when I finally crap out )

by Derrick Brown

Lying together in the park on Seventh,
our backs smoosh grass and I say
I will love you till I become a child,
when feeding and bathing me is no longer romantic,
but rather necessary.
I will love you till there is no till.
till I die.
And when that electroencephalogram shuts down, baby
that’s when the real lovin’ kicks in.

Forgive me for sounding selfish
but I won’t be able to wait under the earth for you,
(albeit a romantic thought for groundhogs,
gophers and the gooey worms.)
I will not be able to wait for you...

but I will meet up with you
and here’s where you will find me:
get a pen-

Hold your finger up
(two fingers if your hands are frail by now)
and count two stars directly to the left
of the North American moon.
You will find me there.
You will find me darting behind amazing quasars
Behind flirtatious winks
of bright and blasting boom stars!

Sometimes charging so far into space,
the darkness goes blue.
I will be there chasing sound waves
riding them like 2 dollar pony ride horses
that have finally broken free and wild.
I will be facing backwards, lying sideways,
no hands, sidesaddle, sometimes standing
sometimes screaming zip zang zowie!
My God, it’s good to be back in space... Where is everybody?

You will recognize my voice.
You will see the flash of a fire trail
burning off the back of me
burning like a gasoline comet Kerosene Sapphire.
This is my voice.
Don’t look for my body or a ghost.
I’ll resemble more a pilot light than a man now.

I’m sure some will see
this cobalt star white light from earth
and cast me a wish like a wonderbomb.
And I’ll think “Hmmph. people still do that?”

I’m sure I’ll take the light wonderbombs
to the point in the universe
where sound does end.
The back porch of God’s summer home.

It’s so quiet, you float
it feels the way cotton candy tastes.
He let’s me in through the back porch.
St. Peter’s busy in the front
building a catfish pond and swimmin’ hole
for sea-drowned-gray-green souls to enter up from.
I don’t mind his stories
I just get tired of his voice

So you should know what to look for
and exactly where to go...

Take your time and don’t worry about getting lost.
You’ll find me. Up there, a finger and two dots away.
If you're wondering if I’ll still be able to hold you
...I honestly don’t know

but I do know that I could still fall in love
with the swish of light that comes barreling
and cascading towards me
It will resemble your sweet definite hands.
The universe will bend.
The planets will bow.
And I will say “O, there ya are. I been waitin’ for ya. Now we can go.”

And the two pilot lights go zoooooooom
into the black construction paper night

as somewhere else
two other lovers lie down on their backs and say
“What the hell was that?”

And for good measure, here's the light saber duel that was part of the ceremony:

Breathe

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:

Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

wage peace - judyth hill - september 12, 2001

A Poem for You

“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?"
~Ron Koertge

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.

from Fever, 2006
Red Hen Press

Poem of the Day

Pic is of the board at Mountain Sun a month or so back. Makes me want to learn to fly an old plane.

This poem was in last week's Writer's Almanac, and I like it very much. Although it makes me very sad too. It really fits my dad, except that thankfully he is still around to talk about ratchet wrenches. And thingamabobs.

Hardware

My father always knew the secret
name of everything--
stove bolt and wing nut,
set screw and rasp, ratchet
wrench, band saw, and ball
peen hammer. He was my
tour guide and translator
through that foreign country
with its short-tempered natives
in their crew cuts and tattoos,
who suffered my incompetence
with gruffness and disgust.
Pay attention, he would say,
and you'll learn a thing or two.

Now it's forty years later,
and I'm packing up his tools
(If you know the proper
names of things you're never
at a loss) tongue-tied, incompetent,
my hands and heart full
of doohickeys and widgets,
watchamacallits, thingamabobs.
~ Ronald Wallace

The Writer's Almanac

I subscribe to the podcast of Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, where he gives a bit of history about writers and this day in literary history and then reads a poem. They're all fantastic, but I liked today's especially. The image is by one Paul living in London. It popped up on Google image search, and I loved it too much to not use it. You can see more of Paul's work at his Livejournal.



The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?