What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison

I.   
Only now, in spring, can the place be named:   
tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple,   
dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow   
on my knowing.   All winter I was lost.   
Fall, I found myself here, with no texture   
my fingers know.   Then, worse, the white longing   
that downed us deep three months.   No flower heat.   
That was winter.   But now, in spring, the buds   
flock our trees.   Ten million exquisite buds,   
tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings,   
bellowing from ashen branches vibrant   
keys, the chords of spring’s triumph: fisted heart,   
dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple.   
The song is drink, is color.   Come.   Now.   Taste.

II.   
The song is drink, is color.   Come now, taste   
what the world has to offer.   When you eat   
you will know that music comes in guises—   
bold of crepe myrtle, sweet of daffodil—   
beyond sound, guises they never told you   
could be true.   And they aren’t.   Except they are   
so real now, this spring, you know them, taste them.   
Green as kale, the songs of spring, bright as wine,   
the music.   Faces of this season grin   
with clobbering wantonness—see the smiles   
open on each branch?—until you, too, smile.   
Wide carnival of color, carnival   
of scent.   We’re all lurching down streets, drunk now   
from the poplar’s grail.   Wine spray: crab apple.

III.   
From the poplar’s grail, wine spray.   Crab apple   
brightens jealously to compete.   But by   
the crab apple’s deep stain, the tulip tree   
learns modesty.   Only blush, poplar learns,   
lightly.   Never burn such a dark-hued fire   
to the core.   Tulip poplar wants herself   
light under leaf, never, like crab apple,   
heavy under tart fruit.   Never laden.   
So the poplar pours just a hint of wine   
in her cup, while the crab apple, wild one,   
acts as if her body were a fountain.   
She would pour wine onto you, just let her.   
Shameless, she plants herself, and delivers,   
down anyone’s street, bright invitations.

IV.   
Down anyone’s street-bright invitations.   
Suck ‘em.   Swallow ‘em.   Eat them whole.   That’s right,   
be greedy about it.   The brightness calls   
and you follow because you want to taste,   
because you want to be welcomed inside   
the code of that color: red for thirst; green   
for hunger; pink, a kiss; and white, stain me   
now.   Soil me with touching.   Is that right?   
No?   That’s not, you say, what you meant.   Not what   
you meant at all?   Pardon.   Excuse me, please.   
Your hand was reaching, tugging at this shirt   
of flowers and I thought, I guess I thought   
you were hungry for something beautiful.   
Come now.   The brightness here might fill you up.

V.   
Come.   Now the brightness here might fill you up,   
but tomorrow?   Who can know what the next   
day will bring.   It is like that, here, in spring.   
Four days ago, the dogwood was a fist   
in protest.   Now look.   Even she unfurls   
to the pleasure of the season.   Don’t be   
ashamed of yourself.   Don’t be.    This happens   
to us all.   We have thrown back the blanket.   
We’re naked and we’ve grown to love ourselves.   
I tell you, do not be ashamed.   Who is   
more wanton than the dancing crepe myrtle?   
Is she ashamed?   Why, even the dogwood,   
that righteous tree of God’s, is full of lust   
exploding into brightness every spring.

VI.   
Exploding into brightness every spring,   
I draw you close.   I wonder, do you know   
how long I’ve wanted to be here?   Each year   
you grasp me, lift me, carry me inside.   
Glee is the body of the daffodil   
reaching tubed fingers through the day, feeling   
her own trumpeted passion choiring air   
with hot, colored song.   This is a texture   
I love.   This is life.   And, too, you love me,   
inhale my whole being every spring.   Gone   
winter, heavy clod whose icy body   
fell into my bed.   I must leave you, but   
I’ll wait through heat, fall, freeze to hear you cry:   
Daffodils are up.   My God, what beauty!

VII.   
Daffodils are up, my God!   What beauty   
concerted down on us last night.   And if   
I sleep again, I’ll wake to a louder   
blossoming, the symphony smashing down   
hothouse walls, and into the world: music.   
Something like the birds’ return, each morning’s   
crescendo rising toward its brightest pitch,   
colors unfurling, petals alluring.   
The song, the color, the rising ecstasy   
of spring.   My God.   This beauty.   This, this   
is what I’ve hoped for.   All my life is here   
in the unnamed core—dogwood, daffodil,   
tulip poplar, crab apple, crepe myrtle—   
only now, in spring, can the place be named.

-Camille Dungy

From "The Months"

March
When the Earl King came
to steal away the child
in Goethe's poem, the father said
don't be afraid,
it's just the wind...
As if it weren't the wind
that blows away the tender
fragments of this world—
leftover leaves in the corners
of the garden, a Lenten Rose
that thought it safe
to bloom so early.

- Linda Pastan

Ode to Gaiety

Go gloom
Begone glum and grim
Off with the drab drear and grumble
It's time
its pastime
to come undone and come out laughing
time to wrap killjoys in wet blankets
and feed them to the sourpusses
 
Come frisky pals
Come forth wily wags
Loosen your screws and get off your rocker
Untie the strait lacer
Tie up the smarty pants
Tickle the crosspatch with josh and guffaw
Share quips and pranks with every victim
of grouch pomposity or blah
 
Woe to the bozo who says No to
tee hee ho ho and ha ha
Boo to the cleancut klutz who
wipes the smile off his face
Without gaiety
freedom is a chastity belt
Without gaiety
life is a wooden kimono
 
Come cheerful chums
Cut up and carry on
Crack your pots and split your sides
Boggle the bellyacher
Convulse the worrywart
Pratfall the prissy poos and the fuddy duds
Take drollery to heart or end up a deadhead
at the guillotine of the mindless
 
Be wise and go merry round
whatever you cherish
what you love to enjoy what you live to exert
And when the high spirits
call your number up
count on merriment all the way to the countdown
Long live hilarity euphoria and flumadiddle
Long live gaiety
for all the laity
 
~ James Broughton

A poem for my best boy

to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go

- Mary Oliver

Our Jeopardy

It is good to use best china
treasured dishes
the most gentle goblets
the oldest lace tablecloth
there is a risk of course
every time we use anything
or anyone shares an inmost
mood or comment
or a fragile cup of revelation
but not to touch
not to handle
not to employ the available
artifacts of being
a human being
that is a quiet crash
the deadly catastrophe

where nothing is enjoyed or broken
or spoken or spilled
or stained or mended
where nothing is ever
lived
loved
pored over
laughed over
wept over
lost
or found.

-Thomas John Carlisle

Call Me by My True Names

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

There is joy
in all:

in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,

in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.
 
So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.
 
The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.
 
~ Anne Sexton
The Awful Rowing Toward God
 

Gardening as Therapy

"“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.”

Vita Sackville-West

First, and what follows...

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

-- Martin Niemöller

-----------

 THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats

----------

"We don't need to be born again. We need to grow up."


-- Bishop Spong

Camas Lillies

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas
opening into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?

And you — what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down —
papers, plans, appointments, everything —
leaving only a note: "Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming."

Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.

Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

~ Lynn Ungar