Day 114 | Courtesy by David Ferry

Day 101 | Courtesy by David Ferry

Day 42 | Old Men Watching Baseball by Oliver Evans

Old Men Watching Baseball
Oliver Evans

Huddled together for comfort on warm park benches
They sit in the inappropriate noonday sun
With sagging souls and bellies, wearily watching
The baseball boys in bright and agile bronze,
Uneasy knowledge in them of a time
When they, like these, could hit and fitly run
For beckoning bases. Playing then was prime
Before the fast and curving years descended
Upon them one by one, and struck them out.

O baseball boys, see here your final score!
For we grew faces in our flowery years
Soft-smooth as yours, our limbs were likewise limber,
Our throats as statuesque, our muscles moved
As mightily, our waists were just as slender.
Our voices carried, and we played as long
As sunlight lasted, heedless of the fears
Of old men whispering on twilight benches.

Day 25 | Car Showroom by Jonathan Holden

Day 19 | Car Showroom by Jonathan Holden

Day 103 | To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Robert Herrick

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

   Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

   Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

   The higher he’s a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run,

   And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

   When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

   Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,

   And while ye may, go marry;

For having lost but once your prime,

   You may forever tarry.

Day 101 | Courtesy by David Ferry

Courtesy
David Ferry

It is an afternoon toward the end of August:

Autumnal weather, cool following on,

And riding in, after the heat of summer,

Into the empty afternoon shade and light,

 

The shade full of light without any thickness at all;

You can see right through and right down into the depth

Of the light and shade of the afternoon; there isn’t

Any weight of the summer pressing down.

 

In the backyard of the house next door there’s a kid,

Maybe eleven or twelve, and a young man,

Visitors at the house whom I don’t know,

The house in which the sound of some kind of party,

 

Perhaps even a wedding, is going on.

Somehow you can tell from the tone of their voices

That they don’t know each other very well—

Two guests at the party, one of them, maybe,

 

A friend of the bride or groom, the other the son

Or the younger brother, maybe, of somebody there.

A couple of blocks away the wash of traffic

Dimly sounds, as if we were near the ocean.

 

They’re shooting baskets, amiably and mildly.

The noise of the basketball, though startlingly louder

Than the voices of the two of them as they play,

Is peaceable as can be, something like meter.

 

The earnest voice of the kid, girlish and manly,

And the voice of the young man, carefully playing the game

Of having a grown-up conversation with him:

I can tell the young man is teaching the boy by example,

 

The easy way he dribbles the ball and passes it

Back with a single gesture of wrist to make it

Easy for the kid to be in synch;

Giving and taking, perfectly understood.

Day 19 | Car Showroom by Jonathan Holden

Car Showroom
Jonathan Holden

Day after day, along with his placid

automobiles, that well-groomed

sallow young man had been waiting for

me, as in the cheerful, unchanging

weather of a billboard—pacing

the tiles, patting his tie, knotting, un-

knotting the façade of his smile

while staring out the window.

He was so bad at the job

he reminded me of myself

the summer I failed

at selling Time and Life in New Jersey.

Even though I was a boy

I could feel someone else’s voice

crawl out of my mouth,

spoiling every word,

like this cowed, polite kid in his tie

and badge that said Greg,

saying Ma’am to my wife, calling

me Sir, retailing the air with such piety

I had to find anything out the window.

Maybe the rain.  It was gray

and as honestly wet as ever.  Something

we could both believe.

Day 153 | We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

We Real Cool
Gwendolyn Brooks

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Day 94 | Sustain by Alison Luterman

Day 88 | Sustain by Alison Luterman.

Day 45 | On Getting out of Vietnam by Howard Nemerov

Getting out of Vietnam
Howard Nemerov

Theseus, if he did destroy the Minotaur
(It’s hard to say, that might have been a myth),
Was careful not to close the labyrinth.
So After kept on looking like Before:
Back home in Athens still the elders sent
Their quota of kids to Knossos, confident
They would find something to die of, and for.

Day 88 | Sustain by Alison Luterman

Sustain
Alison Luterman

1.
My love plays piano and his foot hovers above the pedal.
Sustain, they call it when the note floats
like a basketball player suspended in air,
or a question whose purpose is to remain unanswered.
There’s only this low keening urgency,
the sound of mourning doves,
drone and descant, murmur and coo.
I am learning to rest inside the word enough
its rough leathery consonants, its f of finitude.

2.
To bear up under
pain, or the memory of pain
repeating itself, like scales, as if we were practicing
to never do again what
of course we will do again

3.
I love you
the way language loves the tongue,
the way a sentence loves its verb,
and parentheses love whatever they enclose.
I love you the way notes love the fingers that play them,
the way the ear loves sound
as well as the silence that comes after.
I love you the way a bridge loves land,
anchoring itself to the river banks so it can arch
over waters too rough to swim.
I love you the way an apple loves the teeth that bite it,
and a worm loves the earth it turns.

4.
After divorce
we sustained heavy losses,
multiple injuries,
head wounds, trauma, shock.

But you can’t sustain shock.

You have to let it go, or move on into deeper waters.

5.
Give us this day our stone-ground wholegrain toast with organic butter,
our fair trade coffee, our soy creamer, our free-range eggs,
our morning paper with its dismaying headlines,
our kissing and teasing in the kitchen.
Let it all go on, just
another day, or week, or ten or twenty years.
Barely enough time to slip through this life
like a fish through a hole in the net,
or a string of pearls through nimble fingers,
a lone saxophone note draped around the silken neck of night.

6.
When I was young I worshiped the spark
of the ignition, turn of the key in the lock,
open door, blank page, lost maps,
deserted freeways, and myself.
Me, with my thumb stuck out,
going for broke, coast to coast, on shredded brakes.

Later, after the fire
had burned through and taken
with it my most cherished obstacles,
I learned to live in a field of ash, holding
sorrow when there was nothing else to hold onto.

7.
I don’t know this woman
with the clean kitchen, the watered garden,
curly-leafed kale and immortal chard
growing around her house.
I don’t know how
she keeps it going, sustains this note
we’ve put our weight on,
or how the trees keep on standing there
with all the trouble they’ve seen,
breathing in poison, giving out oxygen.
I want to be like them, though I am only
a flesh apple of hope and doubt.
I want your hand in mine,
as the old world ends and something else is born
every moment,
singing love’s praises just a little while longer.