Midafternoon

HAPPINESS 

by Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39190/happiness-56d21cb4b54e9

tweet

when instead of asking, "Is that a man or woman," I said, you should have asked, "What pronouns do they prefer?" And he said, "Why are you making this difficult?" (Why are you disrupting my funny anecdote?) Snap. I felt firm in my role as a feminist killjoy thanks to @SaraNAhmed 

Absolute

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent


Stunning.

View all my reviews

Just Ajar

The Bench

by Peter Schmitt



It's all like a bad riddle, our widow friend
said at the time.  If a tree falls in the woods
and kills your husband, what can you build from it?
That she was speaking quite literally
we did not know until the day months later
the bench arrived, filling that foyer space
in the house the neighbors pitched in to finish.
 
She'd done it, she said, for the sake of the boys,
and was never more sure of her purpose
than when they were off, playing in the woods
their father loved, somewhere out of earshot
and she would be struggling in with groceries.
For her, it was mostly a place to rest
such a weight, where other arms might have reached
 
to lift what they could.  Or like the time we knocked
at her door, and finding it just ajar,
cautiously entered the sunstruck hallway,
and saw her sitting there staring into space,
before she heard our steps and caught herself,
turning smiling toward us, a book left
lying open on the bench beside her.



http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org
column 707

Desirous

From the Manifesto of the Selfish

by Stephen Dunn

Because altruists are the least sexy
     people on earth, unable
to say "I want" without embarrassment,

we need to take from them everything
     they give,
then ask for more,

this is how to excite them, and because
     it's exciting
to see them the least bit excited

once again we'll be doing something
     for ourselves,
who have no problem taking pleasure

always desirous and so pleased to be
     pleased, we who above all
can be trusted to keep the balance.

Top Ten

turkish delight

wide-brimmed straw hats in summer

jasmine pearl tea

eyewear

outdoor fruit and vegetable markets

tepertős pogácsa

freshly ground peanut butter

peanut butter on toast with tabasco and cucumber slices

baking bread

being in my body

whiskey, neat

pockets

Széchenyi Fürdő

my mother's dumplings

rocking chairs

scarves

giving books I love to people I think might love them too

The Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter

diners

grandma Kelley's rice casserole

Le Mans Hall

midwives

Spencer Tunick

wool socks, knee-high, with stripes in the winter

clowns

"In My Mind" by Amanda Palmer

bread and butter

cooking split-pea soup

democracy

church bells

Gellért Fürdő

African chicken and peanut soup from the New England Soup Factory

martini with blue cheese stuffed olives

1059 Riverside

gesztenyepüré

Greek yogurt with honey, in Greece

listening to my kids giggle and play after the lights are out at bedtime

bodza

Book Club

Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins

Rome

sunflowers

Indigo Girls

dandelions

sleep

Warren Dunes State Park

french fries

Ted Kooser

blue

the fact that baking bread is so simple

clean pressed sheets

One Billion Rising

walking by a lilac bush in bloom

holding hands

playgrounds

NPR

PBS

hard wood floors

handmade afghans

coffee

Jeune Homme Nu Assis au Bord de la Mer, by Jean- Hippolyte Flandrin

marching bands

HONK! festival of activist street bands

my clever, funny friend

roasted chestnuts

Rachel flodnija

birdie sing in the tree, woo woo woo, wee wee wee, I love you and you love me

Henszlmann Imre utca, 5

cuckoo clocks

handwritten letters

potluck dinners

Kelet Kávézó

Pad Thai in Budapest

tabasco sauce

massage

Amanda Palmer

marathons, watching them

hiking, with the right shoes

chocolate chip cookies, baking them

snorkling

Gloucester

public schools

#metoo

neighbors

pie crust

yellow roses

Orange Theory Fitness

the truth

My Apartment

This is Just to Say

by Erica-Lynn Gambino

(for William Carlos Williams)

I have just
asked you to
get out of my
apartment

even though
you never
thought
I would

Forgive me
you were
driving
me insane

boom.

I'm Alive

Indigo

by Ellen Bass

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs
toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers
with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,
which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse
of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young,
a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed
from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,
saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce
his lobes and his sunglasses testify
to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.
As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.
I want him to have been my child’s father.
I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always
fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours
on his zafu chanting om and then went out
and broke his hand punching the car.
I imagine when this galloping man gets home
he’s going to want to have sex with his wife,
who slept in late, and then he’ll eat
barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone
while he drinks a cold dark beer. I can’t stop
wishing my daughter had had a father like that.
I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know
it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.
It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.
First there was the war and then just waiting.
And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit
and I airlifted. That anyone is born,
each precarious success from sperm and egg
to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.
And here I am, alive.
Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.
Not the car I totalled running a stop sign
or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.
Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly
where I was standing—my best friend shoving me
backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.
I’m alive.
And I gave birth to a child.
So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her
onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.
I’ve cried most of my life over that.
And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.
Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me
if I no longer had my mind—
we were on our way into Ross,
shopping for dresses. That’s something
she likes and they all look adorable on her—
she’s the only one
who didn’t hesitate or refuse
or waver or flinch.
As we strode across the parking lot
she said, O.K., but when’s the cutoff?
That’s what I need to know.

• Ellen Bass is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University. Her most recent book is “Like a Beggar.”

Will Have Sex for Chipotle

To the woman who ran her car into my daughter's bicycle in a crosswalk, I say, accidents happen and its okay. I say this to her on my blog because what she did after my daughter was knocked to the ground was not okay. She got out and yelled at my daughter. “She said it was my fault. She yelled that I damaged her car.” Then she got in her car. And left. My daughter is 10 years old. She was alone, bleeding, and her bicycle handlebars were bent so that she couldn’t bike. Accidents happen. Being cold-hearted to child is a choice.

When I arrived by bike a few minutes later, two men from a nearby building were there. One had already brought tools to fix her bike. They were kind and helpful. One of them was wearing a white t-shirt with black letters that said, “Will have sex for Chipotle.”

I decided to get back on the bike and take Iza to computer programming day camp, as planned. Then I returned to the accident scene to thank the men. Those men did a good thing today. To the woman who had an accident and then behaved badly, here I am. If you find me, I am willing to forgive you.