Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
A literal bright spot in yesterday’s emotional roller coaster was poet Amanda Gorman reading in her yellow coat. I mean, she could have worn anything and done that reading and the entire world would still have fallen in love with her, but just look at this fashion (it’s Prada):
If you didn’t hear it–or even if you did–listen to her read “The Hill We Climb” again and marvel at this 22 year old and her perfection. The kids are all right.
Today marks two years since my mom died of pancreatic cancer. It’s also Inauguration Day and the person responsible for so much needless suffering over the last four years is losing power. The best of times, the worst of times.
I don’t have a lot to say today. I saw this poem last week, linked in Laura Olin’s newsletter, and it made me cry–I think because of the hope, and tiny beautiful things in with the awful things.
You Can’t Have It All
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. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.
It’s been a minute since we’ve had any Mary Oliver. I’ve posted this before but seeing the poem typeset is nice (from my new fav account). Also: “Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
Hello, friends! Having a week off was so, so great: I made a coat! I got nine hours of sleep! We went to a new fabric store! I turned 41! And I found this poem on this new account and thought it was a nice mindset for the New Year.
No resolutions or words to live by this year–I plan to just “keep on keeping on,” doing the work and trying to be kind (especially to myself).
This seems appropriate to the season and today’s weather:
Christmas
by Bernard O’Donoghue
Despite the forecast’s promise,
It didn’t snow that night;
But in the morning, flakes began
To glide all right.
Not enough to cover roads
Or even hide the grass;
But enough to change the light.
Apparently the poet Seamus Heaney is a favorite of Joe Biden; he quoted from The Cure at Troy in a speech at the DNC in August and has also used it before at different events (which you can read about here if you can access the Washington Post).
I’m not gonna lie, when I heard this for the first time Monday morning I just bawled. Some of it was the emotional hangover from the last four years; some of it was the poem itself; and some of it, as my friend who shared this put it, was the relief at having “a president who not only reads, but reads poetry, and has a favorite poet that he clearly deeply understands.”
(Sharing the official version because of the captioning; the Irish RTE broadcast used the audio with its own montage to end the news Saturday night.)
This seems appropriately doloroso as we wait for results and bite our nails completely off (and realize just how many Americans are really terrible people).
from October
by Louise Gluck
4.
The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.
This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared
The songs have changed; the unspeakable
has entered them.
This is the light of autumn, not the light that says
I am reborn.
Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.
This is the present, an allegory of waste.
So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:
the ideal burns in you like a fever.
Or not like a fever, like a second heart.
The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.
And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eyes gets used to disappearances.
You will not be spared, nor will what you love be
spared.
A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.
How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.
Maestro, doloroso:
This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.
Apparently this is my election season poem, last seen in 2008 and 2016 (posted nearly to the day four years ago, when we were anxious but really didn’t expect Hillary to lose, sob). It still keeps giving–every time I read it I want to underline “How is it possible to want so many things/and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep/ and wants to hit his head again and again/against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?” WHY INDEED.
How to Like It
by Stephen Dobyns
These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let’s go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let’s tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let’s pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let’s dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn’t been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let’s go down to the diner and sniff
people’s legs. Let’s stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man’s mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let’s go to sleep. Let’s lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he’ll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he’ll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let’s just go back inside.
Let’s not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let’s go make a sandwich.
Let’s make the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.
And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept–
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.
We got rain over the weekend for the first time in weeks. Here’s something seasonal about it, by Ursula Le Guin:
OCTOBER
from Six Quatrains
by Ursula K. Le Guin
At four in the morning the west wind
moved in the leaves of the beech tree
with a long rush and patter of water,
first wave of the dark tide coming in.
I saw this poem mentioned a couple weeks ago in my social media scrolling–I think on Instagram?–and looked it up, since I Jane Hirshfield is a favorite. It’s a little bleak but “even in this bad year, the apples grow.”
Bad Year
by Jane Hirshfield
Even in this bad year,
the apples grow heavy and round.
Three friends and I trade stories:
biopsy, miscarriage, solitude,
a parent’s unraveling body or mind.
What is reliable? What do you hold?
I demand of the future, later.
The future – whose discretion is perfect –
says nothing, but rolls another
apple loose from its grip.
A hopeful yellow jacket comes to hunt
the crack, the point of easy entry.