It’s hard to believe after a day not reading the news that everything is still going on; the bad still happening so badly, even as daily life perseveres (clocks tick, light shifts, spring tries.)
Wind shook the windows last night—it felt like winter clinging to the leg of the countryside, wailing please don’t go, only it’s winter that must move on—
Everything seems reversed like that— the blowhard shaking what he can—
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Another poem for April—I don’t think the drawing fits so well, but it’s late!!! Have a good night!
The darkness feels thicker than regular darkness. I lift one arm to test it, expecting to need a swimming stroke,
only when I type that, it comes out as “warm harm” instead of “one arm,” maybe because I am worrying about a candle that burns down in the kitchen, and the kettle that I have also left to heat on the hand-ignited gas stove.
The unattended candle, kettle, feel foolish, so I imagine wrapping my blanket about my shoulders and stepping down the treacherous-in-the-darkness stairs to check on it all,
yet still I sit, blanket over my legs, listening to the hum of the kettle, the taps of my typing, the farther silence that follows a dog’s bark down a nearby road, and also the slight tinnitus of which I am suddenly conscious, an internal chorus of cicadas.
I look up to the room, amazed somehow that all its physical, unelectrified contents, are exactly as they should be, even more so— the window panes, the chair, the pictures— me beneath the blanket, warm, unharmed,
and, I am conscious now, not only of the tinnitus, but of the great blessings that I have been given, so unearned.
I am almost afraid to think of them, as if some spirit of the universe might say,hey!— and correct the imbalance.
A lantern sits to my side, blowing glitter about its glass, and also about a stiff little cardinal that sits on a twisted wire tree. White-stuccoed gimcrackery that somehow manages an immense beauty simply in the way that it circulates light.
The walls dance with it.
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Another poem for April. Written early this morning. (Nothing burned down.)
Maybe there are things you should be doing, but, hey—it’s 5 in the morning!
You could even make dinner (you know, in advance), but no one will think to say why didn’t you make dinner?
You could do office work, and those times when you give in, smugness coats each email like an underscore.
You do at last make yourself budge from the blanket you save for these dawn hours in a small not-totally-freezing room, and find that the morning moon is in a completely different quadrant of the sky than seems the norm. Seriously! It’s veered way over to the South. (Definitely, South.) But how does that happen?
You could look it up.
Looking it up is the type of thing many people (i.e. your husband) would do, but it’s still only 6:09 and he’s asleep, while you are not even going to let yourself feel embarrassed by your lack of intellectual curiosity.
(Okay, okay: so, the reason that the moon changes position in the sky is that the moon’s orbit around the Earth is approximately 5.1 degrees offset from the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, which causes moonrise and moonset to vary to the North or South by as much as 28.6 degrees.)
Are you happy now?
Yes.
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The moon, in fact, set way to the South today, and was full, or almost full. I did not get a photo of it though, so here’s a pic from my children’s books, The Road I Like. (The pic doesn’t really suit the poem, as this poet is, thankfully, no longer a commuter!)
Have a good day. (And check out The Road I Like!) (Also, the moon!)
I could not sleep last night after reading about what happened to a body in Ukraine, before that body died.
There’s sickness here too (if not the same.)
But it’s Easter and I get up to tune the computer to boys’ singing about the resurrection.
The songs make me weep almost instantly, as all my dead rise to greet me.
I weep both because of my certainty that those one loves are never lost, and because of my longing for that certainty,
weep too for the suffering, and the wish for the healing of suffering.
And then the day begins, limpingly. It doesn’t really feel like Easter, until, between the feeding of animals and almost burning someone’s cream of wheat, I turn to a soprano who knows that her redeemer liveth,
and find in the beauty of her voice, her smiling but determined enunciation, a saving grace,
helped along by the sun shining through clouds, and a texted photo of a baby in an elephant dress, being held to stand—
They do not take away what happened to the body that I read about, or what happens to any body,
but they say that there is love also, even at the doorway of loss, love that rises again, though it may need to be held to stand.
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Happy Easter, Happy Passover. Another drafty poem for April. Wishes for All Good.
The air feels suddenly as if it’s taken a warm bath and not yet towel-dried. Your skin wants to roll around with that air, your skin feels wanton— it will do almost anything with that air,
like the tree frogs that now wheedle from the woods, so anxious to be chosen— take me, take me, me, me—
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Here’s a very little poem for April 14. As always, pic and poem are mine; all rights reserved. Have a good day!
The good thing about a word game is that it occupies your mind, fills the brain like a picture in which you find
the hidden objects, the candle that looks like a bed post, the hour glass disguised as a crust of toast—
Such puzzles take up space and if done fast, make words like “blood” or “puddle” pass in a flash, as you move on to the next word, clue, combination— a way of avoiding thinking about abomination—
But, when those who head armies, parties, states, play so very heartily, the charm abates—
the “hidden objects” now bodies; words like “puddle” and “blood” not flashing by, but huddling in yards and streets, a flood
of the unspeakable. Lies, slurs, and misdirection by the hour. oh, what games are played in the name of power.
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Another poem for April, and all going on. Very much a draft. (This poem is not really about the subway attack in Brooklyn, but my heart goes out to my very dear New York City, all the brave people there who have put up with so much.)
Would note in passing that the poem is also not just about Putin’s comments on the Ukraine (though obviously the picture is oriented towards that) but all kinds of misdirection everywhere—
It’s still too cold to rush into the dawn, the clear blue cold too old for me to want a fresh experience of it.
Though I know it is a different clear blue cold than March’s, or February’s, or early December’s, still,
I’ll let it sit over there on the other side of the window, while I sit here beneath a blanket, waiting for Spring.
Yes, I’d probably find it faster on foot; it’s my guess that Spring anoints the shivering more briskly than those under blankets; imbues the bold with a fresh and lively damp, but I’ll just camp here for the moment.
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Little poem for April 11. The above is a picture from one of my favorite children’s books, Snail Taxi. (I’m not sure that Snail Taxi takes place in April but I like the pic.) Snail Taxi is not yet on Amazon, but is available on Blurb here. Check it out—it is a very sweet little book (and I think it’s on sale right now!)
Oh, mystery novels of old whose plots escape me so readily that I can re-read them so steadily, with even greater mild delight in the details that bring to light the epiphanies to come (ah, I remember now)— how the hero/heroine will sum up all the side stories, save the complicated day—
Oh little time capsules with a couch, sinkholes of possibly otherwise troubled hours—-little bowers of wrongs righted (and so cozily!)
I can even walk, reading you— and if someone talks to me, say completely unselfconsciously, “huh?”
I think about time and picture a stream bed, in which I put my hands to catch something—the water? Sand? Minnows—
All I get is glow— my hands wet in the flow—you can’t stop time, hold it— even when you wade right in—it only makes your whole body shine (maybe) for as long as you can stand the rush.
But often, I avoid thinking about time, as if that might make time stop. I spend hours, whole days, weeks, in a little moving box that tries to blank out time, blanketing its windows (my little moving box has cut-out squares) but time doesn’t stop just because I’ve not thought about it—
And then I picture time as sand, endlessly falling sand—(that comes, I guess, from hourglasses) and why I wonder, do I imagine the fall of that sand to be endless?
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Another draft poem for April. As always, pic and poem mine. All rights reserved. Stay well!
ManicDDaily 
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