Day 160 | blessing the boats by Lucille Clifton

blessing the boats
Lucille Clifton

                                    (at St. Mary’s)

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

Day 93 | Windchime by Tony Hoagland

Day 93 | Windchime by Tony Hoagland

Day 93 | Windchime by Tony Hoagland

Windchime
Tony Hoagland

She goes out to hang the windchime

in her nightie and her work boots.

It’s six-thirty in the morning

and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest

tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,

 

windchime in her left hand,

hammer in her right, the nail

gripped tight between her teeth

but nothing happens next because

she’s trying to figure out

how to switch #1 with #3.

 

She must have been standing in the kitchen,

coffee in her hand, asleep,

when she heard it—the wind blowing

through the sound the windchime

wasn’t making

because it wasn’t there.

 

No one, including me, especially anymore believes

till death do us part,

but I can see what I would miss in leaving—

the way her ankles go into the work boots

as she stands upon the ice chest;

the problem scrunched into her forehead;

the little kissable mouth

with the nail in it.

Day 78 | Reverie in Open Air by Rita Dove

Reverie in Open Air
Rita Dove

I acknowledge my status as a stranger:

Inappropriate clothes, odd habits

Out of sync with wasp and wren.

I admit I don’t know how

To sit still or move without purpose.

I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.

 

But this lawn has been leveled for looking,

So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green.

Who claims we’re mere muscle and fluids?

My feet are the primitives here.

As for the rest—ah, the air now

Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing

But news of a breeze.

Day 76 | Blackberrying by Sylvia Plath

Blackberrying
Sylvia Plath

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat

With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.

I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.

They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

 

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.

Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think the sea will appear at all.

The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.

I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

 

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,

Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me

To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock

That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

Day 85 | Have You Prayed by Li-Young Lee

Day 149 | Have You Prayed by Li-Young Lee.

Day 38 | First Storm and Thereafter by Scott Cairn

First Storm and Thereafter
Scott Cairn

What I notice first within

          this rough scene fixed

in memory is the rare

          quality of its lightning, as if

those bolts were clipped

          from a comic book, pasted

on low cloud, or fashioned

          with cardboard, daubed

with gilt then hung overhead

          on wire and fine hooks.

What I hear most clearly

          within that thunder now

is its grief—a moan, a long

          lament echoing, an ache.

And the rain? Raucous enough,

          pounding, but oddly

musical, and, well,

          eager to entertain, solicitous.

 

No storm since has been framed

          with such matter-of-fact

artifice, nor to such comic

          effect. No, the thousand-plus

storms since then have turned

          increasingly artless,

arbitrary, bearing—every

          one of them—a numbing burst.

 

And today, from the west a gust

          and a filling pressure

pulsing in the throat—offering

          little or nothing to make light of.

Day 149 | Have You Prayed by Li-Young Lee

Have You Prayed
Li-Young Lee

When the wind
turns and asks, in my father’s voice,
Have you prayed?

I know three things. One:
I’m never finished answering to the dead.

Two: A man is four winds and three fires.
And the four winds are his father’s voice,
his mother’s voice . . .

Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires.
And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching,
dreaming, thinking . . .
Or is he the breath of God?

When the wind turns traveler
and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed?
I remember three things.
One: A father’s love

is milk and sugar,
two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over

is trimmed and leavened to make the bread
the dead and the living share.

And patience? That’s to endure
the terrible leavening and kneading.

And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep.

When the wind
asks, Have you prayed?
I know it’s only me

reminding myself
a flower is one station between
earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood

was fire, salt, and breath long before
it quickened any wand or branch, any limb
that woke speaking. It’s just me

in the gowns of the wind,
or my father through me, asking,
Have you found your refuge yet?
asking, Are you happy?

Strange. A troubled father. A happy son.
The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.