Susan Boyle

I got goose bumps as I watched and listened to Susan Boyle singing "I Dreamed a Dream". Her performance on British television became an internet sensation - maybe because she is just so good - maybe because we all dream dreams.

The following poem reminds me of Susan Boyle:

The Dance

A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man she’s with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and moving him with such effortless grace
into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all rhythmically solid music in this second-rate café,

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,
nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be admired or be repentant for,
but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we misbe-lieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.


C.K. Williams

Earth Day

Earth Day was this week, and my sister helped my father plant a flower in a pot for his room at the nursing home.

When my father was young he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps program, planting trees in northern Minnesota. I have a picture of him from then, lean and handsome, standing on the shores of a lake. He said he liked the CCC camp because they fed him all he wanted to eat three times a day.

They feed him three times a day at the nursing home, too.


Martin Van Dorn

Gardener

Under the window, on a dusty ledge,
He peers among the spider webs for seed.
He wonders, groping, if the spiders spun
Beneath that window after all. Perhaps
His eyes are spiders, and new veils are dropped
Each winter and summer morning in the brain.
He sees but silken-dimly, though the ends
Of his white fingers feel more things than are.
More delicate webs, and sundry bags of seed.
That flicker at the window is a wren.
She taps the pane with a neat tail, and scolds.
He knows her there, and hears her – far away,
As if an insect sang in a tree. Whereat
The shelf he fumbles on is distant, too,
And his bent arm is longer than an arm.
Something between his fingers brings him back:
An envelope that rustles, and he reads:
“The coreopsis.” He does not delay.
Down from the rafter where they always hang
He shoulders rake and hoe and shuffles out.

The sun is warm and thick upon the path,
But he goes lightly, under a broad straw
None knows the age of. They are watching him
From upper windows as his slippered feet
Avoid the aster and nasturtium beds
Where he is not allowed to meddle. His preserve
Is further, and no stranger touches it.
Yesterday he was planting larkspur there.
He works the ground and hoes the larkspur out,
Pressing the coreopsis gently in.
With as old hose he plays a quavering stream,
Then shuffles back with the tools and goes to supper.

Over his bowl of mil, wherein he breaks
Five brittle crackers, drifts the question: “Uncle,
What have you planted for the summer coming?”

“Why – hollyhocks,” he murmurs, and they smile.

Teaching Abstinence

The following two poems are ones I've enjoyed for a while. They are not related to anything in particular going on in my life right now, but I felt like sharing.

She said:

Suitcases

Piled high in a corner of a second-hand store
in Toronto: of course,
it's an immigrant country. Sometimes

all you can take is what you can carry
when you run: a photo, some clothes,
and the useless dead-weight

of your mother tongue.
One was repaired
with electrician's tape—a trade

was all a man needed. A girl,
well, a girl could get married. Indeed
each case opened like an invitation:

the shell-pink lining, the knicker—
like pockets you hook back
with a finger to look

for the little linked keys.
I remember how each held a wraith
of stale air, and how the assistant seemed

taken aback by my accent;
by then, though, I was headed for home,
bored, and already pregnant.

Kathleen Jamie


He said:

Pregnant you sit, and pale,
How you have changed, poor girl.

Plucking at your dress, you sit
And you want to go on weeping, weeping. . .

What makes you women spoil us
And, falling, give us your lips,

Then run beyond the platforms,
Outstripped by speeding trains? . .

How hard you tried to keep up
With the blurring carriage windows. . .

Trains rattle by, express and mail,
Trains to Khabarovsk and elsewhere. . .

From Moscow all the way
To Ashkabad, like numb idols,

Women stand as if turned to stone,
Their bellies proffered to the moon.

And swinging into the light,
In the unpeopled life of the night—

How well the moon, with her
Big belly, understands them.

Andrey Voznesensky