A much needed message to myself
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities
no doubt have crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely
and with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with
your old nonsense.
This day is all that is
good and fair.
It is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations
to waste a moment on yesterdays.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
(h/t L. Black to whom, along with B. Lawrence, I send my thoughts today)
Found
While wandering through the stunning Salt Lake City Public Library yesterday, I came across a low bookshelf atop which was strewn twenty or thirty small sheets of paper, each with a poem typed on it. A placard invited browsers to choose a poem to take home in her pocket as a celebration of National Poetry Month. The poem I chose lifted my spirits, which were dragging given I’d gone home—if it can really be called that any more—for the memorial service of a very important person in my life.
I think she would have loved it.
They Loved Paperclips
by Lisa Jarnot
They loved harmony they loved ant hills they loved food and cookies and harpoons they loved the sound of laces of the shoes and snow they loved the snow on Thursdays in the rain and when they met they loved that too and igloos and the trees and things to mail and chlorine and they loved the towels for the beach and hot dogs and the pool and also when the wind rose up they loved the ceiling and the tide and then they loved the sky.
I’m putting a bird on it
Because tomorrow’s post is likely to enrage religious folk, a few parents and anyone who doesn’t believe in touching themselves in that certain way, I figured today I’d release a flock of cyber-doves into the World Wide Web as a preemptive balancing act.
Each Tuesday night, before Sam goes out with his friends, I drag myself to a six-o’clock spin class. It’s rarely fun, the dragging or the spinning. But I do it because the very best part of the class—other than being the Tour de France champion every week—happens in my car an hour after the start time, when I listen to Garrison Keillor recite poetry on The Writer’s Almanac.
Below is a recent favorite, a poem offensive only to those who’ve never eaten in a diner or those pitiable souls who have an empty space where the heart is supposed to be. Enjoy.
Daily I Fall In Love With Waitresses
by Elliot Fried
Daily I fall in love with waitresses
with their white bouncing name tags
KATHY MARGIE HONEY SUE
and white rubber shoes.
I love how they bend over tables
pouring coffee.
Their perky breasts hover above potatoes
like jets coming in to LAX
hang above the suburbs—
shards of broken stars.
I feel their fingers
roughened by cube steaks softened with grease
slide over me.
Their hands and lean long bodies
keep moving so…
fumbling and clattering so harmoniously
that I am left overwhelmed, quivering.
Daily I fall in love with waitresses
with their cream-cheese cool.
They tell secrets in the kitchen
and I want them.
I know them.
They press buttons creases burgers buns—
their legs are menu smooth.
They have boyfriends or husbands or children
or all.
They are french dressing worldly—
they know how ice cubes clink.
Their chipped teeth form chipped beef
and muffin syllabics.
Daily I fall in love with waitresses.
They are Thousand Island dreams
but they never stand still long enough
as they serve serve serve.
Book smart vs. Common Sense
On the heels of the “ghetto-party” drama at the esteemed University of California, San Diego this week—which I will be writing about shortly, believe you me, oh yes I will—my husband’s business partner found a note on the ground, lost by, presumably, one of the University’s fine, over-achieving students. It concerns me how this individual is managing in life and more so, how she/he is going to get through tomorrow without the lost memo.
Hand written in pencil on a postcard-size piece of paper with violins and cats on it (see? Already, I question the functional capacity of this person), is the To Do list:
- 7:10am = Sleep
- 7:40 = Get ready
- 7:45 = Walk to school bus
- 8:00 = Get to class
- 8:50 = Class
- 9:00 = Walk
- 9:50- Class
I mean, where on this list is this person supposed to squeeze in breathing?
Love
I wasn’t going to post anything today, but then my friend Jennifer pointed me to this poem, probably the best thing I’ve ever read in response to September 11, 2001.
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Leap
by Brian Doyle
A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.
Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.
The mayor reported the mist.
A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.
Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.
Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.
But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.
I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.
Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.
No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.
She will not be restrained
“When I grow up, I catch the moon! I jump real high and catch the moon!”
I am a writer
I don’t really do poetry. As in, I’ve attempted it but I don’t write it often or very well. As in, my most frequent reaction to reading it is to let out a slow sigh, roll my eyes and turn my attention to something else, usually in the middle of a stanza.
Of course, there are exceptions, those being the works of e.e. cummings and Sharon Olds and, of course, Wendell Berry. I’ve posted one of my favorite Berry poems before and now, here is (part of) another one. I heard it read by Garrison Keillor last night in the car as I was driving home and it resonated with me for reasons both obvious and not. And while it is lovely to read and re-read, it is also a treat to hear it read by round-voiced Keillor. Go here and listen to it with your eyes closed. That’s how I listened to it while I was driving, though I wouldn’t recommend that dangerous stunt.
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Part VII of 1994- by Wendell Berry
I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.
