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Posts Tagged ‘book’




A bookmark is a kind of promise.
You can go back, it says,
I will mark this place
where you have been,
this place where you
will want to return.

I want a bookmark
for every moment of your life.
Want to mark, for instance,  
the day when we walked the streets
and listened to music.
The day when you held your sister
as she cried. The countless nights
when I sat at your bed and sang.
Days picking cherries.
Hours swimming the river.
Lighting fireworks year after year.

I notice what a bookmark is not.
Not eraser. Not pen.
Not a chance to change the story
or to live it again.
It simply invites us to resee
how not one bit of life is ordinary,
invites us to look back and marvel
at the treasure of each moment,
even as the pages keep turning.

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Two Unspokens

slender trunks of aspen—
commemorating this grove
by not naming it

*

all those books
I haven’t yet written—
dogearring my favorite pages

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It helps me to think
of the singularity
not as a point per se,
but as a book
that contained
everything that is
and everything
that ever was
and everything
that ever will be—
a book in which
the makings
of spiral galaxies
and nebulae and
triceratops and
Tchaikovsky
and you and ticks
and a bullet and
Google were
all nestled together
in the pages,
and if we could
go back and read
that big bang of a book
I believe we’d find
that in the beginning
was not the word
but a volume
of unfilled folios,
a blank with infinite
potential, an empty
space so generous
that everything
might emerge.
Even planets.
Even fireflies.
Even forgiveness.
Turn the page.
Even peace.

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for Paul Fericano and so many others


I turn first to the chapter
on techniques for broken wings.
I learn of contour splints and anchor tape
and reasons why most broken wings
should not be completely immobilized.

I am not so unlike an injured bird.
Struck down by grief, I too, am unable to fly.
Even walking, I find I’m off balance.
I’m best treated without an audience.
I heal best with absolute calm.

I was unsure at first why my friend
would have sent me—along with tea,
chocolate, crackers and sweet biscuits—
a book on “kitchen healing:”
how to treat injured wildlife at home.

But there beneath the image
of a simple wing break, I read,
a sentence like a prophecy:
“Nature starts the healing process
almost as soon as the injury occurs.”

And I feel, to my surprise,
the tender places where the bones
of my wings no longer protrude.
And though my joints are rigid,
with supports, I’m recovering.

And I am thankful for all the hands of friends—
unskilled, untrained, yet willing to try.
Hands that send letters and blankets
and feathers and books. Calm hands
that help heal these fractures until I can fly.


*Quote from Care of the Wild Feathered & Furred: A Guide to Wildlife Handling & Care by Mae Hickman and Maxine Guy (Unity Press, 1973)

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For two hours, I am the woman
who works at the orphanage, the woman
who falls in love with a man from India
who is not who he says he is.
He and I make love for hours beneath a mirror,
twining our limbs in a sea of silk,
and he shows me the pleasure
of losing the stories I’ve told myself
about what is possible with love.
When, after many pages,
we arrive at happily ever after,
I find myself on the couch in my kitchen,
notice my own thick legs curled beneath me,
my own raw heart in my tired chest
doing its faithful work. I’m surprised
to return to my own story:
the woman who is grieving—
the woman alone
in the empty room who listens
for the voice that isn’t there,
who listens for footsteps that do not come.
For the last two hours, I had forgotten her,
had forgotten this woman
whose story I know as my own,
this woman who lost her son.
I had forgotten the ache she carries,
the constant throb. And though it cuts,
though it wounds,
I am so grateful to return to her life,
to her story—the story
of how she gave her everything
to someone she loved,
how she knows he loved her, too.
It’s not a story she had wanted to live,
but now that it’s hers
she would never give up a page
of their story. Not a single word.

*

this poem has been published in ONE ART

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One Memoir

 
 
these beautiful thoughts
old pages turned yellow
every word still true

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One Stuck

this infinite book of life

and me still re-reading

chapter one

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Going Home




Today I am so grateful
we are the characters
who go on a journey
and learn to find the bravest, best
and kindest versions of ourselves,
even when the road is beset
with Lestrygonians driving white Range Rovers,
especially when Charybdis tries to merge
into our crowded two-lane sea
after driving in the eddies of the emergency lane
to bypass the long lines,
yes, we are the characters who learn
that we are responsible for our own soundtrack
and must sing to meet each moment,
must be our own sirens calling ourselves
again and again and again
to crash only on our own shores
then sail on more carefully, more purposefully,
our song all the more joyful,
more determined, and yes, more alive.

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Off the hot street and down

the narrow stairwell,

I entered the smell of books—

a musty scent of paper and ink.

How I loved entering the stacks,

shelves taller than I was.

Loved running my hands

along hardcover spines

wondering at the worlds inside.

I was allowed twelve thin books,

that meant twelve chances

to travel to realms where monkeys

stole hats and the Whangdoodle snoozed.

Twelve chapters in which I

was no longer an awkward girl

but a baker in an old village

or a mouse in an attic befriending a girl

who was something like me,

or at least like the girl I wished I could be,

a girl who was brave, a girl

who couldn’t help but stumble

every single time

into happily ever after.

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One Endless Supply

slipping again

out of those same dog eared thoughts

faded rose petals

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