New Love

Onion skin, tulip petal, skim of ice, eggshell,
tissue paper, lace doily, paper snowflake, Maybasket,
crystal flute, spiderweb, hydrangea blossom, vegetable seedling,
plate glass, pasta noodle, spring green leaf, new love.

Some things are so fragile only fear contains them.
Just to hold them is a worry. Just to touch them
is a worry. Always worry, always worry.
Things of beauty, delicacy, tautness,
they stretch and pull against themselves,
they fall in pieces in light breezes.

Brand new, they push against odds, hold hope, suspend disbelief.
Beneath their crystalline exteriors there is something fragile,
something soft and thin, something waiting to break.

KINDNESS by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Sea Ice

Tidal flow lifts, then drops, great sheaths of ice,
leaving giant slabs scattered over boulders
as the sea recedes. Shattered shards,
like milky white sea glass coated with winter's brine,
heavy and immobile, wait on salt flats for tide's turning.
Together, these pieces present a shoreline jigsaw
of sea ice buckling, suspended, not quite interlocking.

The act itself produces energy, thunderous noise,
transformation from one to many.
Solid ice, groaning under its own weight,
splinters with crystalline crashes, comes to rest
on ocean's floor only to resurrect at next tide.

A beginning can be similar with its elements of union
yet to be, barely hoped for. A wary dance in halls
of emotion, no dance card, no road map, just endless
stumbling in the heartland, sometimes wandering,
sometimes diverging, sometimes finding the way.

Not quite partners, each brings a heart
that buckles with rising hope, a heart
that settles as layers fall away, a heart
that eases as formality ebbs and comfort flows.
Energy is siphoned from each, combined, and
sent back out in rays of brilliant emotion.
Over and over, day after day, in a gradual knowing,
until high tide arrives and fingers interlock
into the familiarity of union.

On Things Unnoticed

One summer night, with twilight approaching,
returning with head down, lost in thought,
I entered the field by my house--
the one I'd driven past each day for two years
the one I'd walked through with the dog,
stepping over hollows of new-mown stubble,
the one where a swing was tucked up into the branches
of a lonely pine sentinel, where sun's rays slanted
in rising and setting, where crickets sang,
where mice roamed, where rain fell, where wind blew,
where frost settled, where snow piled up,

and on this evening, I glanced up to see
a bioluminescent world of blinking orbs.
The shock of their beauty startled me,
forced the air from my chest.
It was as if the whole unnoticed field
had exploded in a mating dance
of fireflies, just for me.

The Uses of Sorrow

By Mary Oliver in her book of poetry entitled Thirst
Beacon Press, 2006

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

Doesn't Every Poet Write a Poem About Unrequited Love?

By Mary Oliver from her book of poetry entitled Thirst
Beacon Press, 2006.

The flowers
I wanted to bring to you,
wild and wet
from the pale dunes

and still smelling
of the summer night
and still holding a moment or two
of the night crickets

humble prayer,
would have been
so handsome
in your hands--

so happy--I dare to say it--
in your hands--
yet your smile
would have been nowhere

and maybe you would have tossed them
onto the ground,
or maybe, for tenderness,
you would have taken them

into your house
and given them water
and put them in a dark corner
out of reach.

In matters of love
of this kind
there are things we long to do
but must not do.

I would not want to see
your smile diminished.
And the flowers, anyway,
are happy just where they are,

on the pale dunes,
above the cricket's humble nest,
under the blue sky
that loves us all.

The Place I Want to Get Back To

By Mary Oliver, from her book of poetry entitled Thirst
Beacon Press, 2006

The place I want to get back to
is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness

and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me

they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let's see who she is
and why she is sitting

on the ground, like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;

and so they came
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way

I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward

and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring to me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years

I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can't be repeated.

If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

Naming the Moon

This year, bitter cold grips March, and it's hard to call
tonight's moon the Full Worm Moon, no earthworm casts
on snowbound earth to herald return of robins. Rather,
this seems the Full Crust Moon, with snow cover crusting
after daytime thawing and nighttime freezing. Endless cycles
of release and reclaiming, of breath of spring and blast of winter.
The Full Crow Moon is a distant possibility, for on warmer mornings
I've lately heard the cawing of crows, signaling winter's imminent demise.
Soon, sap will ease in maple trees, and the Full Sap Moon will fit.
No matter the name, this moon, on this frigid night,
in this last month of winter, just two weeks before Vernal Equinox,
harbinger of luscious spring, is the last full moon of this dark season.

Names, Shakespeare said, are inconsequential, but somehow
it seems important to put banners to things like moons
or beginnings or endings. Somehow, there's need to name,
to pinpoint endings, to herald beginnings.
The moon itself rises faithfully, named or not, but life
begins and ends with perhaps more ease
when its moments are left unnamed.