Poetry Review, Winter 2018

As any virtuous but bitter child, I am built of portions of wanting
to be nothing like my mother and wanting to make her proud.

I do this by practicing the small habits she left in me in silence.
A deliberate prayer, imagining my prophet to be a lodestar.

I wash the kirpan with oil and water, keep it where I keep the holy book,
I do not know still if I am faithless or faithful. I do this simply for ritual.

The ritual is to remember. The ritual is to pardon my mother for the sins
I am bearing for her. I believe if I make it sacred, maybe I can absolve her.

A long time ago, I met a priest. He told me there is no way to turn
a darkness inherited into something virtuous, but you could turn it honest.

So here is the violent truth they never tell you of love: everyone you love
will hurt you deeply and you will hurt them too, the only difference

lies in the magnitude of pain you give each other and how much
you are willing to carry and how much you are willing to forgive.

We prize clear-headedness: saying
What we mean, meaning what we say,
A metavirtue that blows the real virtues away.
Examples abound, but a lot of good they do:
Politics and the cult of authenticity
Disguising base and ridiculous views;
The TV shows I’m stuck with in the gym,
Where people with no discernable occupations
Level with each other; the way we talk to one another,
With simple rudeness offering itself as candor.
I’m not exempt: this clarity of style
Obscures what lurks beneath the surface
Of a juvenile mind whose explanations are too smooth,
Inventing stories and waiting for them to come true.
You’d think the difficulty would be obvious,
But it’s not, since it’s only visible from far away
And we’re too close to ourselves to see what we really are.
Poets like to think their new poems are their best ones,
Though they usually aren’t. Poems are mostly
Wishful thinking, especially the dark ones.

August. Only the immediate is apparent.
Lilac leaves, rhododendrons, holly,
trunk and branches of an ash.
Everything so near.
Leaf and branch pressing up to the screens.
A kind of otherness
in the ordinary catbird’s dark eye
in the window. Seeing a matter of being
quiet. A wren. A hummingbird. In June, a tanager.
As if what is secret is also visible.
I’m happiest looking one moment into the next,
the hours clocked by the leaves’ green changing
in the light. Silver green. Bright green.
Dusky gold-green.
Faith in the holly, in the birds, the ash tree.
Thirty years and counting in this room
where what comes and goes
comes and goes unrehearsed. So little happens.
So much. Day after day this is what I do. Wait
for what arrives at my windows,
equally thankful for what is new,
then old, then new.