Unable to Find
the right way to get out of bed,
we watch the shades cut dawn
into thin slices, waver a while,
shoulder to shoulder, then join, lazy.
Let’s leave this room now: it’s given us
all it can, let’s go—it’s Sunday—have
breakfast out, find a table for two: two eggs,
two toast, two coffees—black. No, nothing
plain: latté. We’ll read the paper,
the story of a man who rescued the only thing
he wanted from the rubble of his collapsed shack:
his cat—and be moved by it, and like that;
or play hangman on our paper napkins,
find easy words—no double-meanings: day,
night, rivers… then send the game to its fate,
crumpled on our empty plates.
Let’s step inside a church, sit through a wedding,
a christening, a mass for the dead, but leave
before the last amen. We’ll take the long way home,
make plans for summer—winter even.
— Laure-Anne Bosselaar, from The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (1997)
Misgivings
“Perhaps you’ll tire of me,” muses
my love, although she’s like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn’t tire of rain, I think,
but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can’t
control is what we could; those drab,
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may augur we’re on our owns
for good reasons. “Hi, honey,” chirps Dread
when I come through the door, “you’re home.”
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-
in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it’s far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let’s cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.
— William Matthews, from After All: Last Poems (1998)
Goods
It’s the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
the gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.
— Wendell Berry from Collected Poems. © North Point Press, 1985.
I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS poetry wendell berry
Appetite
Pale gold and crumbling with crust
mottled dark, almost bronze,
pieces of honeycomb lie on a plate.
Flecked with the pale paper
of hive, their hexagonal cells
leak into the deepening pool
of amber. On your lips,
against palate, tooth and tongue,
the viscous sugar squeezes
from its chambers, sears sweetness
into your throat until you chew
pulp and wax from a blue city
of bees. Between your teeth
is the blown flower and the flower’s
seed. Passport pages stamped
and turning. Death’s officious hum.
Both the candle and its anther
of flame. Your own yellow hunger.
Never say you can’t take
this world into your mouth.
—Paulann Petersen
The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
- Theodore Roethke (1953)
Theodore Roethke church of beethoven feelings! poetry the waking villanelle bookishInvert
I.
My spine’s a stone walkway that leads me
to remembered and logical places. Still
I get lost. Ideas branch in too many directions,
distract me with red leaves and the weave
of thin twigs. I hold onto things for too long.
Every mistake an heirloom porcelain vase.
II.
My spine’s a ladder rung with bones
that can hold my weight, if I leave a few
chipped habits and sorrows behind. I climb
down into a place of seeds and pale petals.
Roots show me how to take in and pass on,
hold nothing.
Down here is where the story started.
The one I retold incorrectly for so many
years, forgot the details and main characters,
the plot that twisted like an old pebbled path.
I start over, relearn the fiction, how it all began.- Jennifer Frank
Jennifer Frank was last week’s poet at the Church of Beethoven. She lives in Albuquerque.
jennifer frank church of beethoven albuquerque poetry so many feelings quarter-life crisis just trying to be a boss but I have all these feelings bookish