LISTEN, KID

That was fun. You proved you could do it and you did it hard. But this next year won’t have any backyard parties or curbside fireworks or sunny road trips with a boy you could fall in love with if only he plays that Okkervil River song again. The lake hasn’t been warm for two years now and that boy who comes over in the middle of the night is free during the day. Think about it. There are two different diseases racing to kill your mother. Sit still here with me. Do you hear that? This is your life now. The cats want to be fed. Your favorite leggings have holes in them and your jeans don’t fit because you drank too much Frenet while making eyes at that boy who moved to Portland. Or maybe it was the whiskey and that other boy back from New York. They’re gone now. They were extras in the prequel to the only character test you will ever have: what would you do if the woman who raised you had one year left to live? What would you give up? This is it. Please stop humming that song because this is not a movie with a score. Feed the cats, pick up the medicine, give up the late nights. She brought you here. She woke you up. She taught you to speak. You’re smart enough to know that a life cannot be itemized. You owe her nothing but your bones which is all you have, so give them back. Show her the strength of what she made. This has nothing to do with you.

months
have
gone
by
without
either
of
us
stabbing
the
other

let's
eat
out

Denver Butson

FOR WHEN YOUR MOTHER HAS BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH CANCER

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

- Louise Gluck, October

This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold -William Carlos Williams

Now I will dismiss myself from impassive women,

I will go stay with her who waits for me, and with

those women that are warm-blooded and

sufficient for me;

I see that they understand me, and do not deny me;

I see that they are worthy of me - I will be the

robust husband of those women.

They are not one jot less than I am,

They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and

blowing winds,

Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and

strength,

They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend

themselves,

They are ultimate in their own right - they are calm,

clear, well-possess’d of themselves.

-a woman waits for me, walt whitman

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear

one more friend

waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness

has come

and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,

for a while lost

in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk

to mouth-size,

hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness

that doesn’t leave a stain,

no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....

Tonight a friend called to say his lover

was killed in a car

he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed

to repeat, and I repeated

the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.

Often a sweetness comes

as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,

then returns to its dark

source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road

it’s traveled

to come so far, to taste so good.

. Sweetness by Stephen Dunn