Day 137 | Identification by Wislawa Szymborska

Identification
Wislawa Szymborska, trans. Clare Cavanagh

It’s good you came—she says.
You heard a plane crashed on Thursday?
Well so they came to see me
about it.
The story is he was on the passenger list.
So what, he might have changed his mind.
They gave me some pills so I wouldn’t fall apart.
Then they showed me I don’t know who.
All black, burned except one hand.
A scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring.
I got furious, that can’t be him.
He wouldn’t do that to me, look like that.
The stores are bursting with those shirts.
The watch is just a regular old watch.
And our names on that ring,
they’re only the most ordinary names.
It’s good you came. Sit here beside me.
He really was supposed to get back Thursday.
But we’ve got so many Thursdays left this year.
I’ll put the kettle on for tea.
I’ll wash my hair, then what,
try to wake up from all this.
It’s good you came, since it was cold there,
and him just in some rubber sleeping bag,
him, I mean, you know, that unlucky man.
I’ll put the Thursday on, wash the tea,
since our names are completely ordinary—

Day 136 | “I came upon the gnawed torso of a seal” by Melanie Braverman

“I came upon the gnawed torso of a seal”
Melanie Braverman

I came upon the gnawed torso of a seal, silver fur agleam against the sand like a coin thrown down in a losing bet. What left this bounty of meat on the beach to rot? I watched the neighbor’s small boys skirt the dead seal the way sandpipers tease themselves in the surf, dodging up and back along the body’s shore. “It’s dead,” I told their father as he ambled behind them up the beach. He called to the little boys, his voice borne toward them on the mild breeze. “Boys, come back,” he said, and they did not.

Day 135 | from My God, It’s Full of Stars by Tracy K. Smith

from My God, It’s Full of Stars

Tracy K. Smith

          3.

Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,

That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—

When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.

Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be

One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

So that I might be sitting now beside my father

As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

For the first time in the winter of 1959.

Day 134 | Johnny One Note by W. S. Di Piero

Johnny One Note
W. S. Di Piero

Bobby Hutcherson in Oakland

The mallet strikes but something’s off,

and so he hits again, curling that lower lip,

purses his brow, as if this sign, this minor woe,

were speech the vibes might understand,

so when he lifts bluish lids as if wakened

to the desired tone that rings now, it seems,

it sounds, under wraps, a water-ly quaver,

through the club crowd’s silence,

as it floats above us like an aerosol

trying to find a new way to escape,

passes through the wall’s mortared pores

to reverb in the cool night air of an

unpeopled sidewalk, droning toward tracks

where a passing peopled train sucks up

and winds his finally found, wowed tone

around its wheels, held there by steel heat

one hundred miles, until it reaches the sea,

where wheels and whistle overreach

surging surf the good vibration feels such

desire for, and leaves its tedium

of the round and round, lofting to a sea

that comes and goes but finally simply goes,

as one night, this night, the cool vibes’ air

(struck finally in the changed groove of sax

and ecstatic kit) is free, finally free,

to go where we won’t hear from it again.

Day 133 | The Body by Marianne Boruch

The Body
Marianne Boruch

has its little hobbies. The lung
likes its air best after supper,
goes deeper there to trade up
for oxygen, give everything else
away. (And before supper, yes,
during too, but there’s
something about evening, that
slow breath of the day noticed: oh good,
still coming, still going … ) As for
bones—femur, spine,
the tribe of them in there—they harden
with use. The body would like
a small mile or two. Thank you.
It would like it on a bike
or a run. Or in the water. Blue.
And food. A habit that involves
a larger circumference where a garden’s
involved, beer is brewed, cows
wake the farmer with their fullness,
a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat
understands I will be crushed
into flour and starry-dust
the whole room, the baker
sweating, opening a window
to acknowledge such remarkable
confetti. And the brain,
locked in its strange
dual citizenship, idles there in the body,
neatly terraced and landscaped.
Or left to ruin, such a brain,
wild roses growing
next to the sea. The body is
gracious about that. Oh, their
scent sometimes. Their
tangle. In truth, in secret,
the first thing
in morning the eye longs to see.

Day 132 | To the Angelbeast by Eduardo C. Corral

To the Angelbeast
Eduardo C. Corral

All that glitters isn’t music.

Once, hidden in tall grass,
I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:
doe after doe of leaping.

You said it was nothing
but a trick of the light. Gold
curves. Gold scarves.

Am I not your animal?

You’d wait in the orchard for hours
to watch a deer
break from the shadows.

You said it was like lifting a cello
out of its black case.

Day 131 | [in Just-] by E. E. Cummings

[in Just-]
 E. E. Cummings

in Just-
spring          when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far          and             wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles
far
and
wee

Day 130 | Lesson by Forrest Hamer

Lesson
Forrest Hamer

It was 1963 or 4, summer,
and my father was driving our family
from Ft. Hood to North Carolina in our 56 Buick.
We’d been hearing about Klan attacks, and we knew

Mississippi to be more dangerous than usual.
Dark lay hanging from the trees the way moss did,
and when it moaned light against the windows
that night, my father pulled off the road to sleep.

Noises
that usually woke me from rest afraid of monsters
kept my father awake that night, too,
and I lay in the quiet noticing him listen, learning
that he might not be able always to protect us

from everything and the creatures besides;
perhaps not even from the fury suddenly loud
through my body about his trip from Texas
to settle us home before he would go away

to a place no place in the world
he named Viet Nam. A boy needs a father
with him, I kept thinking, fixed against noise
from the dark.

Day 129 | “I used to love the run-up to a storm” by Melanie Braverman

“I used to love the run-up to a storm”
Melanie Braverman

I used to love the run-up to a storm, watching from the porch as the grown-ups hurried to bring things in, my mother rummaging through drawers for a flashlight, cursing: nothing was where it was supposed to be in our house. It can’t be so, but the only people I ever remember huddled in the basement were my mother and me, suspended in that eerie half-light like bats. We’ve just spent a week like this, my mother perched in a chair above the water keeping watch for the next bad thing. We were happy so sometimes she’d let the vigil rest, the sentry of her shoulders easing to a more receptive pose, a quarter moon, until something called her back to the watch, mother first no longer but this white, foremost light. You can read by it. You can see.

Day 128 | House of Shadows. Home of Simile by Eavan Boland

House of Shadows. Home of Simile
Eavan Boland

One afternoon of summer rain

my hand skimmed a shelf and I found

an old florin. Ireland, 1950.

We say like or as and the world is

a fish minted in silver and alloy,

an outing for all the children,

an evening in the Sandford cinema,

a paper cone of lemonade crystals and

say it again so we can see

androgyny of angels, edges to a circle,

the way the body works against the possible—

and no one to tell us, now or ever,

why it ends, why

it always ends.

I am holding

two whole shillings of nothing,

observing its heaviness, its uselessness.

And how in the cool shadow of nowhere

a salmon leaps up to find a weir

it could not even know

was never there.