Wordswoman

Notes From a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition

So these are the Himalayas.
Mountains racing to the moon.
The moment of their start recorded
on the startling, ripped canvas of the sky.
Holes punched in a desert of clouds.
Thrust into nothing.
Echo—a white mute.
Quiet.

Yeti, down there we've got Wednesday,
bread and alphabets.
Two times two is four.
Roses are red there,
and violets are blue.

Yeti, crime is not all
we're up to down there.
Yeti, not every sentence there
means death.

We've inherited hope —
the gift of forgetting.
You'll see how we give
birth among the ruins.

Yeti, we've got Shakespeare there.
Yeti, we play solitaire
and violin. At nightfall,
we turn lights on, Yeti.

Up here it's neither moon nor earth.
Tears freeze.
Oh Yeti, semi-moonman,
turn back, think again!

I called this to the Yeti
inside four walls of avalanche,
stomping my feet for warmth
on the everlasting
snow.

-Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected

You Can't Have It All
by Barbara Ras

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it August and abundantly so. . . .

Read the rest on Poets. org. Your day will be better for it.

When I am tired--and oh, I am tired!--there is poetry.

When my head fills to bursting with lists, with the remembering of things, with musts and shoulds--there is poetry.

When calendar page after calendar page has turned without an hour to sit quietly and think of nothing, softly--there is poetry.

Two-minute beauty. Paper-and-ink elixirs. Xanadu. Yes.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
by e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

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How ironic that it should be Miss Snark, who "vents her wrath on the hapless world of writers and crushes them to sand," that reminded me to read Jane Kenyon. The Snarky One's post yesterday include a Kenyon poem, "Happiness," so beautiful it made me ache.

There's just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

Read the full text of  "Happiness" on Poets.org

Only a very few works of poetry or prose inspire this fierce pleasure-pain reaction in me, equal parts a reader's joy and a writer's envy. First "Oh God, how perfect, how beautiful, how true," and then "Oh God, if I live to a be a hundred I will never write anything that shines like this."

Tobias Wolff has done that to me more than once, and Raymond Carver. But more often it is poetry, sometimes the unlikeliest poetry. Wislawa Szymborska's poem "Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition," and James Dickey's "The Bee." Rita Dove's "Daystar," about a mother wanting a moment alone to think (how I remember that desire!). Jane Kenyon again, with "Otherwise," for its reminder of mortality (Kenyon herself died of leukemia before the age of 50). James Wright's "A Blessing," with its two Indian ponies.

Beauty. Bliss. Words.

It's not the evocation of spring that moves me in this poem, it's the awareness of how finite time is. Especially when I realize that I probably have fewer springs left on earth than Housman's narrator.

Stop. Turn off the computer. Cancel the meeting. Go outdoors and breathe the blossoms, whether they're cherry or not.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Housman

I'm convinced that a daily dose of poetry is medicine for the soul. My favorite source is The Writer's Almanac, which you can have delivered to you as a daily email or as a podcast of the Public Radio segment as read by Garrison Keillor.

There's something magical about having poetry reliably and effortlessly bestowed upon me, no matter how hectic or mundane or awful or marvelous the day. I've discovered so many poems and poets that I would otherwise have missed. A sampler of personal favorites:

• Ron Padgett's The Fortune Cookie Man
• Barbara Crooker's In The Middle
• Marge Piercy's One Reason I Like Opera

Of poetry anthologies in print, two that I recommend with special fondness are Americans' Favorite Poems and Poems to Read, both edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz as part of the Favorite Poem Project. I love them as much for the accompanying notes on the real people who recommended these poems, and why they loved them so, as for the poems themselves.