We went out at midnight to see the sun touch the horizon.
There was so much meaning attached to a simple act of angular geography.
It hung there, suspended, like breath before a wish arranges itself
And the world went white and the water and the air and we closed
our eyes for the blackness
And when we opened it was light again,
just like we always knew it would be.
– Emily Shearer
Author’s Note: My teenage son went to Iceland last year with a school group; his stories of the midnight sun inspired this poem. With it, I wanted to capture the optimism of youth.…
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People never come here knowing. They just see the little town when they stay out at Mickey’s. They walk out on the beach there and that’s when they see it. When they peer just around the bay and see a few houses in the lips of the next cove. But they don’t get it. They trickle through lemon trees on the edges of the town as if it were some open bazaar, buying little pieces of us as they walk by. Stare right at us with quarters for eyelids. Blinking, staring, picking us up off the shelves, stuffing houses and children and the warm rose succulents right under their eyelids. They drag the whole town through the dirt by the knots in their shoe laces.
And then they walk into that market and don’t pay any attention to the jagged lines in the old yellow paint, don’t even notice the threshold of sucker plants potted on each side of the door, swelling when they walk by.…
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I eat the same lunch
and sit in the same seats,
I smile at strangers,
or I keep my head down.
I am not a good man,
I am not bad.
I am filling a space;
a ticket number in
the deli line,
the middle child,
a third wheel,
a well-timed joke
in a class of strangers.
I sleep alone,
cry alone,
drink water most of
the time,
set my clocks three
minutes fast so that
I am never late.
I don’t like my first name,
I don’t like god,
I am afraid of needles
going through my
pale skin.
I have four cavities,
two shelves of books,
one shelf of movies.
I believe in art and in
the sound of my own
voice.
And I love you,
most of all.…
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Somehow I thought he’d want to do
different things from what they used to do
together here. But no, a show,
a big Broadway musical show,
is his choice for tonight. Yes,
there are tickets. I was half-hoping not.
And wishing in vain that it was May, not December,
and we were buying for three.
That last spring night we had clear hope
we watched Guys and Dolls in her hospital room.
Though we’d missed the beginning, and her favorite song,
we watched till the end.
She nodded off,
as she always did at home before the tube,
head on his shoulder,
but nodded back in,
to say, surprised, in her everyday voice,
“It’s good,” letting us believe
she was on the mend.
After that, she had just three days more,
and only one in which
she could say a word.…
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this poetry has been my life’s challenge
and I rose to it
every time
this poetry the arena I boldly entered
and I’m fighting still
I’m not quite sure I’ve imagined
locked doors of academia
and their thousand reasons
to do something else with my life
but I owe it all to poetry
it was my access to the inner life
lit my smoke in front of
the firing squad of time
gave the muse a fire escape
she could climb
in just an overcoat and heels…
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Mom is being buried today.
We will never see her face again except in photographs.
The coffin lid came down a week ago, forever,
or at least the seventy-five years it’s guaranteed.
Only seventy-five years, although it’s made of copper
the salesman said was indestructible.
We’ll all be long gone by then,
except for the grandchildren (maybe)
and great-grandchild.
Something to be said for being buried
not too far from Disneyland.
Four months later, on Shelter Island,
a cloud is coming toward us,
swiftly falling, like the ghost
of a meteor about to self-destruct. I can’t
tear my eyes away, until it passes—
not falling after all, only moving on
to the next—house, table, life.
I want it open.
Do we all want it open?
We take our seats under a shelter,
in the heat, before the coffin.…
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This is about knowing yourself.
When I was a kid,
I remember writing
on a small piece of paper:
“I am gay”.
Then I tore it up
and flushed it down the toilet,
trying to forget the truth
I had just confessed.
Because that disease is not true:
that only happens in the movies,
and to that one distant cousin
of my mother,
to whom she doesn’t talk to anymore.
…
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