Poems for Different Parts of Life
On love, death, birth, and being here.
As an occasional artist (mainly in the form of poems and songs), I’ve noticed something profound and interesting about the things I make:
My art knows more than I do.
I will write a poem or a song and have no real idea what it means or where it came from.
Then, years later, I’ll have some therapeutic breakthrough and understand something new and profound about my life or what’s happening inside me, and suddenly realize, “I wrote about that a decade ago!”
Musings for moments.
If I’m right that my subconscious (or whatever part of me the art comes from) knows more than I do, I thought it would be worth sharing a selection of poems I’ve written over the years, in the hopes there might be something useful or revealing in some of them that could spark something for you.
I’ve written about a lot of momentous parts of life — marriage, parenthood and birth, presence and aging, death — so that’s how I’ll organize the selection.
If you’re not a poetry person, feel free to skip this issue. Or go read some true masters — like Mary Oliver, Maggie Smith, W.H. Auden, Alex Dimitrov, Philip Larkin (of course), Leonard Cohen, or Denise Levertov — and see if they can change your mind.
Without further ado, here is a big pile of poems.
On Birth
Newborn
The great mystery I saw
In your fathoms-deep black irises
That morning you were born
In our sun-soaked bedroom
Is with you still, and will be
A little longer, and then it will be gone.
So let this be a benediction,
An apology, a prayer, an offering;
Let it be heard once and for all
That I am wrong but that I love you. —
What are the Chances?
In profile, your tiny top lip
Points upward to show
Where next we’ll go.
Beneath your skin,
Capillaries, knit into a maze,
Deliver blood to every part.
Were you made
By us? Hardly. You appear,
A whole world, perfect, clear,
And all we have is awe.
The probabilities cannot
Be calculated, yet here you are.On Love
First Sight
I remember when first
I saw you it was like
A river suddenly ceasing
To flow; water, poised
Above rocks, uncertain
How to move now, with
All nature suddenly changed.
From the end of my life
A message was arriving
In my body: her. Here. Now.—
Before We Lose
Before we lose the summer on our skin
Come over here and kiss me in the rain,
The rain, the cool rain that feels like ice
Against the tanned warmth we’re holding onto.
Before we’re old and looking back on this,
Wistful because we couldn’t hold what can’t be held,
Because the weather won’t obey and bring us back,
Kiss me in the clean rain in your clinging shirt.
Before the fire goes out and you’re holding ash
To watch it crumble into darkened ground
Under a black sky, terribly aware, terribly lost,
Kiss me, before this rain has rushed past and left us dry. —
To Battle
Rich as tapestries,
Your hair, braided and dark,
Hangs down your devastating
Back. I can touch you now
As a brother does;
I cannot be your lover.
Instead, I go to battle,
The vision of your beauty
My flag and my shield. On Living and Aging
Atomic
The mystery belongs to none of us.
Brought here suddenly each day
To discover light anew, we realize
We are of our mothers born, we die
Beneath a blue and yawning sky.
The familiar deadens our surprise;
But oh, how the atoms dance to say
“Welcome. You are one of us.”—
Middle Age
We are vague.
We glow and float
Like the afterimage
Of a burning man
Brought to life. —
Cellular
It’s a very particular prison
In which I wake up daily,
Best described by what it isn’t,
But words still often fail me.
No bars, no walls lie hereabout:
Its limits are my body’s,
Which makes it hard to tunnel out
Or exit through the lobby. —
Moment
I came to beauty
An apprentice:
Morning breeze.
Coffee brewing.
Power lines’ whine
Outside; laughter
Somewhere in
The house —
Moment in
The unmomentous.On Marriage
This Ring
This ring will catch the light, the light of many years.
Every late night drive, every morning glow,
Sun from water on an island in the sea,
Bleary bedroom through-the-curtain day,
And reflected sunlight from your skin.
All of it will be held in the endless circle
Of gold I wear about my finger to remember
That we will never be asunder,
Holding me through all the years. —
After The Wedding
The fields lie empty now on which you walked
After the wedding. Paths you trod are worn.
Fall wind cools the air in which you talked,
And shifts the stalks of harvestable corn.
Too soon the thresh will come to cut it down,
And mark the passing of this brilliant year,
When light and laughter mingled like a sound
Too bright and high to reach the human ear.
May joy attend the moments of your lives,
And always may that sound be yours to keep.
The generous heart sees harvests and it thrives:
May happiness, well sown, be yours to reap. On Death
No More
No more Christmases.
No more sun-streaked morning floorboards.
No more smells of cut grass in summer.
No more down-soft embracing of children.
It’s hard to believe that you’ve chosen oblivion.
But I only see my life, I can’t see everyone’s.—
Conveyance
The photo shows a head in profile
So similar to mine, it could be me.
Nineteen fifties, close-cropped cut.
My father, young then,
In monochrome, unselfconsciously
Alive, because we’re all
Just living in the eternal now until,
Without warning, the shorn hair’s
White, the neck bent sideways,
One eye open, staring, the other
Closed, as the flesh finally cools.
A body is a vessel that carries
Something across all these
Years and continents, something
That was in a head like mine
And now is out, and free.
Father to no son.
No one. Everywhere. —
Your Death
One day when you are facing your own death
Will you say, I should have lived this way
Or that way, will you say there is a hillside,
Somewhere, I was meant to see. I’ll not see it now.
Or people you haven’t kissed and could have,
Or did and shouldn’t have,
Roaring fires never sat beside,
Books unread, gathering dust in dark rooms
Where you left them, now forever left.
When you are facing your death, what do you see?
Is it a mirror? Is it a void?
Do you see what you ate for breakfast,
And then all the meals prior to that, in quick succession?
You won’t need food where you’re going.
Maybe that’s as good a memory as any.
Does life really flash before your eyes, the better
For you to judge its failures, or its merits?
What about those (the vast majority, I’d say)
Who haven’t much to see? What about me?
My life has been a series of undramatic triumphs,
Of little struggle rewarded hugely,
But not much on stories. I might see
A few pairs of eyes, glittering,
A mountain range descending to the sea,
Light on distant water, a rowboat at sunset,
And then the smaller things, back gardens,
The tops of trees seen through car windows, speed-blurred,
Night on the roof. Silent kitchens, an hour before dawn,
An hour after midnight. A cat, sleeping on a chair,
Black and still as stone, as if it had always been there,
Will always be there. Like your own death,
Let’s face it, is always there, sleeping, uninterested
In the moments you call you.