In Her Shoes

I have just (finally?) watched In Her Shoes, and it is simply wonderful! I highly recommend it. And as Roger Ebert wrote, "It's not every big-budget movie that gets its two biggest emotional payoffs with poems by Elizabeth Bishop and e.e. cummings." And it looks like "books by Elizabeth Bishop and ee cummings have doubled in sales after the poets' works were featured in the movie" (source: BookSlut). So here are, for your reading pleasure, those two great poems:

One Art
Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.


i carry your heart with me
ee cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

(Originally posted on Dec. 2, 2005)

No Return, No Exchange

Here's my life; take it,
see what you can make of it.
Like a gum that's been chewed
for far too long, it's lost its flavor.
I'm done with it; and I'm afraid
I've made quite the mess of it...
There, see if you can do better.
And let me know; I'm curious.
But I won't hold my breath;
I don't care enough to.

I've waited on sidewalks
where busses don't pass,
and the riders have all fallen asleep.
I've lingered in the fog of old songs
and teenage dreams, and woken up
to find me lurking around
a playground, overgrown
into the swing-set I forgot me in.
This adulthood, I fear, is not for me;
but then again, neither was childhood.
I'm not angry to have come to this world,
but I don't think I'll miss it much.
And to be honest, I don't think
it'll miss me much either...

(Originally posted on February 10, 2012)

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

Such is the world we inhabit: while wasting time on Facebook, between political news and recipe videos, an obituary of someone you know, half a world and years away, appears… Death asserts itself everywhere.

I met Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore in Philadelphia on Saturday, May 21, 2005. I don’t recall that because I have good memory, but because I blogged about it that day. Daniel was a judge on the Philadelphia Reading Series Open Poetry Competition, which was held at The Book Corner, a second-hand bookstore near the Free Library of Philadelphia, and around the corner from where I worked at the time. I’d been writing poetry and posting it online for a couple of years then, but that was the first time I’d read it in public. I was terrified… and I won second prize! Daniel came up to me afterwards and congratulated me. He was an editor of English translations of Mahmoud Darwish, one of my all-time favorite poets, and it meant so much to me.

The following year, thanks to Daniel, I was featured in the Other Voices International Project. But soon after, Daniel was there for me during one of the darkest episodes of my life. During Israel’s war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, I was in Philadelphia while my family was under the bombs in Lebanon. I was at my wits end, feeling helpless and hopeless. I was in the streets demonstrating, reading my poetry to anyone who would listen. Daniel was part of a poetic "call to arms" I held online; and along with Laurie Pollack and Arlene Bernstein, helped me form Philly Poets for Peace, which raised money for the UNICEF Emergency Relief Fund. Daniel and I read from Darwish’s To an Iraqi Poet, he in English and I in Arabic; it helped me hold on to my sanity during that nightmare. A year later, Daniel helped me publish four poems in Islamica magazine...

And then, as they say, life happened. We lost touch, I wrote less and less, and eventually I moved back over the Atlantic to Europe… I’m ashamed to admit I followed the news of Daniel’s illness recently on Facebook in silence. Words may be what brought us together, but words failed me… I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. And here I am, at a loss of words again. So I’ll just borrow from my younger self, and dedicate to you one of the poems you helped me publish, The Flight of the Swallow… Forgive me my silence.

The Flight of the Swallow

In memory of Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

What do they know
Of the flight of the swallow
Or the crane and how it dives?

What do they know
Of the life under your eyes
Or your smile and how it wanes?

What do they know
Of the gathering of the night
Or her waist and how it sways?

What will they know
Of the taste of the sea in your bread
And your embrace trembling under my sleep?

They'll know nothing
But the snow gathering under their fingernails
And the horizon as it folds onto itself...

(Originally posted on May 10, 2005)

Kill

Kill, kill, kill everything.

Kill the light falling on this page
like a false promise of warmth;
kill the news of a world in spiral.

Kill time, cruel time, ruthless time,
endless time, fleeting time, time
laying at your feet like a bored dog.

Kill hope, lazy hope, easy hope, hope peeking
like misguided blossoms in a snow storm.
Kill this, the need to reach out and touch,
say I am here, and you?

Kill that, the urge to call them, to hear them,
to assure them as only you want to be assured.
Kill it, kill it all, kill the want to live again, kill
the want to die, kill the want to be, to become.

Kill it and remain, not a reminder, just
a hollow shell mistaken for what was,
just an answer to a question that has
long ago given up on one.

(Originally posted on February 03, 2012)

Traumatique

It is, as such.
Long expanses, and then.
One after.
Endless-ness.
Falling. from.
Again.

It is, as it is to be.
Unfolding, after the fact.
Rolls of skin, and.
Incessant-ly.
Always, from.
It is—feel it!
As such.

Start again,
from where sentences flow,
from whence the clothes hit the carpeted blankness,
gingerly,
and then.

Start, from the end.
Skip all that happened,
and say, nothing at all.

Start from where it doesn’t need to be said,
from the night breaking off on the windshield,
shattering, renouncing,
boundless.

Start from after,
the return, the happy ending,
as if nothing.
Start.

(Originally posted on May 13, 2007)

Interruptus

There was honking outside,
rare, but reminiscent
of other more vocal towns.

There was an image inside
of what you could see
in such a place.

There were footsteps and barking,
the sounds of my silence;
there was me nodding and moving,
if only for the sake of motion.

There is this never-ending floor
and you somewhere dying -
- are you breathing still?

There is this scar, refusing to heal,
itching like an absence...
If I hold my breath, would you feel it?
If I hold still, would anybody notice?

Somewhere else, something else,
another...
If I leave this unfinished,
would -

(Originally posted on November 21, 2011)

Splintered

We gave up our dreams to fumble at adulthood;
playing house isn't what it used to be.

Our low bed, littered with the week's routine,
was sulking underneath.
It has tired of the relentless cycle of sheets.
The green ones don't look like spring anymore;
only the one that passed: faded, and old.
And the flannel is no longer warm;
its worn out childish comfort now plain immature.

This trudging of the banal,
this endless march of inconsequence,
our illusion of the grand scheme falters under its gravity.
Only frames of domesticity, of ruffled canine fur,
and the reminder of a smile frozen elsewhere;
it buckles under the promise.

Here is life as I would have given you,
sparkling and easy, and devoid of questions.
Here is life as I would have wanted,
clean of choices, and clairvoyant.
Here is life, hurtling onto the landing
padded with dust, and fragile of bone.

Here, where it wouldn't have mattered, did I declare,
Here, I shall remain, a splinter in its eye,
for visions like these are worthless.

(Originally posted on Feb. 23, 2007)

"The Parthenon at Nashville" by Joe Bolton

Late December noon, near freezing—
Maple and sweetgum bare, but the grass green yet
In sunlight, and warmth of light wearing away
At the frail scythe's-edge of ice
Around the pond. On her lunch hour,
Parked in his car, they tossed the last
Of their sandwiches to ducks that bobbed and fussed
In the smaller oval of water not frozen over.
They were beyond being
In love, but not quite ready
To look past the end of the affair.
Across the water, reflected in the water,
Risen stone:
Columns swelling with light,
The stylized figures restored
To the frieze- an order
Called into question
By the troubled surface of the pond.
They remember wondering
What happened to the ducks
Come autumn. Now they know: nothing.
And now a solitary jogger pushes his breath
Past them, as the traffic continues
Out on West End.
They sense that something
Needs to be done or said—
Anything but this feeling of themselves
As figures held in the motion
Of some lost moment.
And yet they can't seem to move, to speak,
Maybe thinking they won't have this clarity
Again for a long time, maybe amazed
At the distance from which they see themselves:
Luminous, hardly human,
And already half in love with the beautiful ruins.

-Joe Bolton, from The Last Nostalgia

From "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression"

"Can I stand to live the way I do? Well, can any of us stand to live with our own difficulties? In the end, most of us do. We march forward. The voices of past time come back like voices of the dead to sympathize about mutability and the passage of the years. When I am sad, I remember too much, too well… It is at night that these people and my own past selves come to visit me, and when I wake up and realize that they are not in the same world as I, I feel that strange despair, something beyond ordinary sadness and closely akin, for a moment, to the anguish of depression. And yet if I miss them and the past they made for and with me, the way to their absent love lies, I know, in living, in staying on. Is it depression when I think how I would prefer to go where they have gone, and to stop the maniacal struggle of staying alive? Or is it just a part of life, to keep living in all the ways we cannot stand?

"I find the fact of the past, the reality of time’s passage, incredibly difficult. My house is full of books I can’t read and records to which I can’t listen and photos at which I can’t look because they are too strongly associated with the past. When I see friends from college, I try not to talk about college too much because I was so happy then—not necessarily happier than I am now, but with a happiness that was particular and specific in its moods and that will never come again. Those days of young splendor eat at me. I hit walls of past pleasure all the time, and for me past pleasure is much harder to process than past pain. To think of a terrible time that has gone: well, I know that post–traumatic stress is an acute affliction, but for me the traumas of the past are mercifully far away. The pleasures of the past, however, are tough. The memory of the good times with people who are no longer alive, or who are no longer the people they were: that is where I find the worst current pain. Don’t make me remember, I say to the detritus of past pleasures. Depression can as easily be the consequence of too much that was joyful as of too much that was horrible. There is such a thing as post–joy stress too. The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores."

—Andrew Solomon, from The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

"Summer's Lament" by Joe Bolton

Now summer's gone, those long days of summer.
The light's still warm, but there's nobody down by the river.
Is this all there is? There has to be more.

Bronzing our bodies like gods beside the water,
We watched the blue-green world through Wayfarers.
Everything happened that's supposed to happen in summer.

A last dark chord dies in my dark guitar,
But I can't let go of what's already over.
Is this all there is? There has to be more.

Remember how we'd drive down by the river,
Risking the bodies we loved into the water?
And our luck held. Our luck held all summer.

We could not drown. We couldn't push the fever
Far enough; it rose, but broke in the water.
Is this all there is? There has to be more.

In the sky's white text, I read the cities of winter:
A world we did not ask for, and a future.
Now this page is all that's left of summer.
Is this all there is? There has to be more.

-from The Last Nostalgia

"The Circumstances" by Joe Bolton

If strength is love, then we weren't strong enough,
But if strength is letting love go, we were.
Men among men, we couldn't trust each other.
With women, it was ourselves we couldn't trust.

It had to do with houses and with cars,
With what had to be done and with money.
We wound up loving money like a country
In a country we loved like women, its stars

Transposed from flag to night sky, its lithe palms
Lonely beyond all hope of consolation.
Night after night, the festive repetition
Of food and drink, of music and new films...

--It failed us, finally, or else we failed it.
We never brought the long quarrel with our fathers
To a close, and so never saw our daughters
Until they'd drifted away like money spent.

It rained then. And suddenly the faces
Of our wives were older, our faces were old,
The screens went blank, the light dimmed, and the cold
Came to stay for good in our white houses.

Dying, what we remembered of our lives
Was nothing more or less than simply talking
About nothing in particular, walking
Nowhere down dark streets with other men's wives.

-from The Last Nostalgia

"The Seasons: A Quartet" by Joe Bolton

I

Come late autumn, I'll wear black leather again,
My gray felt boots make a sound like the perfect crime
As I pass along the deserted avenue
Some Sunday evening, admiring the dried-up fountains.

I think the trees will be left harsh and bare
As Donatello's Mary Magdalene:
Their branches thorns, their leaves fallen hair. And you?
You'll know it's finally a fine line

We walk between the last fall and the next,
And a faith without foundation by which we survive
Such seasons as these. Look at the washed-out sky,
At the stars competing with streetlamps, then look for me:

I'll be the stranger slouching on the corner,
His face lit by a dying match. I'll be
Everything you've tried not to remember,
But which is reflected in the half-light of your eyes.


II

Is this the Russian snow Napoleon's legions
Bloodied with their feet before they fell?
No, just sundown in Paducah, Kentucky,
Day's last shallow breath shading to a faint rose

The soft white other side of the river.
I seem to remember turning away, once,
From this same balcony with its twisted railing
Dense as a frozen black gum, to see you

Still sewn up in your warm dream, till my breath
Frosted the glass over. Now, as tugboats slice
Their way through the ice on the Ohio again,
I think the Belle of Louisville has gone down

To winter in New Orleans, and I wonder
About the why and wherefore of your departure.
It's cold out here, and this feeble light won't last
The time it will take me to drink it a silent toast.


III

So the rain falls., and the garden grows full
Of itself, fruits and flowers like brushstrokes
Against the lush dark backdrop of the woods.
Somewhere in the woods a stream is playing

Lightly as some old desire turned inward,
And somewhere in the stream a single sunfish
Lets its fiat side break the pane of water
At an isolate oval of light in the dense cathedral.

All is desire: hushed lull before the storm,
Rain like scythes through the fields, scattered birds
Breaking into song to find one another,
The coming dark's duet of moon and star.

Five summers ago, I watched a woman
Wander into the garden at dusk, select
A tomato, and close her eyes as the juice fell
Like something utterly pure onto her breasts.


IV

What Pasternak called "Unforgetting September"
Ripens as always, and Tchaikovsky's Hunting Party,
Lured too far into the forest by the red fox,
Is lost forever. I am listening

To the String Quartet No.1in D Major
With its heartbreaking second movement Tolstoy
Wept through in Moscow in 1871.
(Tchaikovsky got the theme from a gardener.)

I can remember as well as September does,
And what music remains inside of me
Is muted over with memory, strains sad
As the seed that spills from the withered okra plants.

The best days of summer are the days of summer gone:
Something cooking, a wash of light on the water...
The music dies, and what I hold is the world.
One leaf falling would break the spell. It falls.

-from"The Last Nostalgia"