Doors opening, closing on us

Maybe there is more of the magical
in the idea of a door than in the door
itself. It’s always a matter of going
through into something else. But

while some doors lead to cathedrals
arching up overhead like stormy skies
and some to sumptuous auditoriums
and some to caves of nuclear monsters

most yield a bathroom or a closet.
Still, the image of the door is liminal,
passing from one place into another
one state to the other, boundaries

and promises and threats. Inside
to outside, light into dark, dark into
light, cold into warm, known into
strange, safe into terror, wind

into stillness, silence into noise
or music. We slice our life into
segments by rituals, each a door
to a presumed new phase. We see

ourselves progressing from room
to room perhaps dragging our toys
along until the last door opens
and we pass at last into was.

~ Marge Piercy

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Letter to N.Y.

          for Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you’re in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can’t catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

–Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid
if it’s wheat it’s none of your sowing,
nevertheless I’d like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

~ Elizabeth Bishop

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My Pocket Poem: A Walk, by Rilke

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(translated by Robert Bly)

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National Poem in Your Pocket Day!!!!

Happy National Poem in Your Pocket Day!!!!! That’s right all you poetry readers! Today is National Poem in Your Pocket Day!

The idea is simple: select a poem you love during National Poetry Month, then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends and be sure to share it with me, your favorite poetry pimp!

This first started in NYC in 2002 and went national in 2008.

Mine is something from Rilke, hope you enjoy! Can’t wait to hear what you are carrying!

 

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Mirror

A white room and a party going on
and I was standing with some friends
under a large gilt-framed mirror
that tilted slightly forward
over the fireplace.
We were drinking whiskey
and some of us, feeling no pain,
were trying to decide
what precise shade of yellow
the setting sun turned our drinks.
I closed my eyes briefly,
then looked up in the mirror:
a woman in a green dress leaned
against the far wall.
She seemed distracted,
the fingers of one hand
fidgeted with her necklace,
and she was staring into the mirror,
not at me, but past me, into a space
that might be filled by someone
yet to arrive, who at that moment
could be starting the journey
which would lead eventually to her.
Then, suddenly, my friends
said it was time to move on.
This was years ago,
and though I have forgotten
where we went and who we all were,
I still recall that moment of looking up
and seeing the woman stare past me
into a place I could only imagine,
and each time it is with a pang,
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.

~ Mark Strand

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Speed Walking on August 31, 2013

Nothing much to report this morning
as if anyone were waiting to hear,
putting the day on hold like,

just a few women jogging by,
girls with their eyes lowered,
and a few men, their awkward hellos.

The squirrels don’t really count
because of their ubiquity,
but there was the one brown rabbit

frozen up ahead on the cinder path,
immobile as a painting of a brown rabbit,
so I stopped and tried to be

as still as a pencil drawing of a man,
and maybe a half a minute passed
before he bounced himself into the weeds.

Was that you Seamus,
coming to pay me a little visit?
Who else could it possibly be?

I asked with confidence.
Not Robert Penn Warren surely.
No, only you with your eye still bright.

~ Billy Collins

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Challenge & Housekeeping!

So, I found a great poem for today, a real Monday, kind of poem. And discovered I already used it back in 2012. My detection skills are failing somewhat. I did catch it but who knows what else has slipped through? This April illness has kicked my tuckus. A prize to anyone who finds any duplication errors …. I don’t know of any, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t.

Housekeeping reminder: April 26th, this Thursday, is National Poem in Your Pocket Day!!! I look forward to hearing what you’ll be carrying!

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Shadow-Bride

Shadow-Bride

There was a man who dwelt alone,
as day and night went past
he sat as still as carven stone,
and yet no shadow cast.
The white owls perched upon his head
beneath the winter moon;
they wiped their beaks and thought him dead
under the stars of June.

There came a lady clad in grey
in the twilight shining:
one moment she would stand and stay,
her hair with flowers entwining.
He woke, as had he sprung of stone,
and broke the spell that bound him;
he clasped her fast, both flesh and bone,
and wrapped her shadow round him.

There never more she walks her ways
by sun or moon or star;
she dwells belowwhere neither days
nor any nights there are.
But once a year when caverns yawn
and hidden things awake,
they dance together then till dawn
and a single shadow make.

~ J.R.R. Tolkien

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The Chameleon

I caught a chameleon lizard
in my backyard,
and to please myself
I moved him from a green leaf
to a tree’s brown bark,
then to my yellow porch
where he froze in my hand,
his eyes fixed on me
as if waiting for me to change.

But I stayed the same.

I stayed the same,
and kept him behind a screen
until he had given me
all his colors.

Then I opened the door,
but he wouldn’t move.
He just kept his eyes on me –
as if waiting for me to change.

~ Judith Ortiz Cofer

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The Wisdom of the Geese

The geese are displeased.
They want to invent the snow.

Each has swallowed
a whole pitcher of light.

Stuffed with brightness,
they can hardly move.

As they waddle through tall grass
they drop feathers, quaint clues,

like the arch humor of ferns.
Something wakes the pond, wrinkling it.

It’s bad luck to look back.
They step off into dark water.

~ Nancy Willard

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