Poem for the Day: December 6th, 2021

For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday by Ellen Bass

When they laid you in the crook
of my arms like a bouquet and I looked
into your eyes, dark bits of evening sky,
I thought, of course this is you,
like a person who has never seen the sea
can recognize it instantly.

They pulled you from me like a cork
and all the love flowed out. I adored you
with the squandering passion of spring
that shoots green from every pore.

You dug me out like a well. You lit
the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me
to the earth with the points of stars.

I was sure that kind of love would be
enough. I thought I was your mother.
How could I have known that over and over
you would crack the sky like lightning,
illuminating all my fears, my weaknesses, my sins.

Massive the burden this flesh
must learn to bear, like mules of love.

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Poem for the Day: November 12th, 2021

This Room and Everything in It by Li-Young Lee

Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment.

I am making use
of the one thing I learned
of all the things my father tried to teach me:
the art of memory.

I am letting this room
and everything in it
stand for my ideas about love
and its difficulties.

I’ll let your love-cries,
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance.

Your scent,
that scent
of spice and a wound,
I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly
is the daily cup
of milk I drank
as a boy before morning prayer.
The sun on the face
of the wall
is God, the face
I can’t see, my soul,

and so on, each thing
standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater idea.
And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
Now I’ve forgotten my
idea. The book
on the windowsill, riffled by wind . . .
the even-numbered pages are
the past, the odd-
numbered pages, the future.
The sun is
God, your body is milk . . .

useless, useless . . .
your cries are song, my body’s not me . . .
no good . . . my idea
has evaporated . . . your hair is time, your thighs are song . . .
it had something to do
with death . . . it had something
to do with love.

Poem for the Day: September 19th, 2021

*When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities* (Winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize) by Chen Chen

In the Hospital by Chen Chen

My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend.
But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short
skeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday.
My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend.
Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable
pigeons. No one had the tie & our solution to it
was to buy shinier watches. We were enamored with
what our wrists could declare. My mother was in the hospital
& I didn’t want to be her friend. Typical son. Tall latte, short tale,
bad plot, great wifi in the atypical café. My mother was in the hospital
& she didn’t want to be her friend. She wanted to be the family
grocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn’t trust my father
to be it. You always forget something, she said, even when
I do the list for you. Even then.

The language in this poem exposes both the terror and banality accompanying seeing someone you love ill. Small details become our refuge and religion.

I thought today’s poem would be apropos for the world we currently live in, where so much of our collective existence is focused on (the avoidance of needing to go to) hospitals. I’ve been enamored with Chen Chen’s poetry for years now, and his collection (pictured above) that includes “In the Hospital” was in my opinion one of the best of the 2010s. The language in this poem exposes both the terror and banality accompanying seeing someone you love ill. Small details become our refuge and religion.

In the end, we cannot do the thing that needs doing the most, which is healing, a return to vitality, a restoration to order.

We pick minutiae that can be controlled, or at least reasonably assessed, and make that our focus. We grapple with our incompetencies and make lists of all the things we can do and all the things we can’t. In the end, we cannot do the thing that needs doing the most, which is healing, a return to vitality, a restoration to order. That is always thanklessly out of our hands.

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was released in 2017 by BOA Editions, Ltd. and is available to order wherever books are sold.