The Gladdest Thing

Intensities of Emphasis and Wonder

Michelle McGinnis — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:22:19 +0000

The sleeping one is erect and mumbles.
The room went Arctic overnight

and his foot peeks outside the covers.
You leave his warm slumber

five minutes before the new hour,
stomach growling, and possible

moon somewhere. There’s slight moisture
still. He’ll later say he saw you leave.

The day will happen soon enough-
peanut butter sandwich, dropped knife,

tote bag of graded papers.
Flossing in a colder room,

planning Jefferson myth-debunking,
washing hair—the man’s sleep stretches

without boundaries, rolled to middle,
as if it were his bed, thick lashes,

even beard, and no concern for pillow.
He doesn’t know it’s October and you are happy.

— Farrah Field

That Everything’s Inevitable

Michelle McGinnis — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:27:23 +0000

That everything’s inevitable.
That fate is whatever has already happened.
The brain, which is as elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is.
In this world, I am the surest thing.
Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes.
Please insert your spare coins.
I am filling them up.
Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim.
But yet, I am a vatic one.
As vatic as the Vatican.
In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum
I am waiting, like an animal,
For poetry.

— Katy Lederer

Yellow Bowl

Michelle McGinnis — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:19:37 +0000

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.

— Rachel Contreni Flynn

Children in a Field

Michelle McGinnis — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:01:24 +0000

They don’t wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls. It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance-
light, their bare calves already far-gone
in green. What songs will they follow?
Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm
or harm the border promises, whatever
calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless
through the high grass and into the willow-
blur, traceless across the lean blue glint
of the river, to the long dark bodies
of the conifers, and over the welcoming
threshold of nightfall.

— Angela Shaw

Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle

Michelle McGinnis — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:34:14 +0000

The celebrated windows flamed with light
directly pouring north across the Seine;
we rustled into place. Then violins
vaunting Vivaldi’s strident strength, then Brahms,
seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness,
bit by bit, the vigor from the red,
the blazing blue, so that the listening eye
saw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapes
of shield and cross and strut and brace, that held
the holy glowing fantasy together.
The music surged; the glow became a milk,
a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbed
until our beating hearts, our violins
were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead.

— John Updike

How to Read a Poem: Beginner’s Manual

Michelle McGinnis — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:56:24 +0000

First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
your steel-tipped boots,
or your white-collar misunderstandings.

Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it.

To read poetry requires only courage
enough to leap from the edge
and trust.

Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.

Poetry demands surrender,
language saying what is true,
doing holy things to the ordinary.

Read just one poem a day.
Someday a book of poems may open in your hands
like a daffodil offering its cup
to the sun.

When you can name five poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you exceed your quota
and don’t even notice,
close this manual.

— Pamela Spiro Wagner

Shopper

Michelle McGinnis — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:53:49 +0000

I am spending my way out
of a recession. The road chokes
on delivery vans.

I used to be Just Looking Round,
I used to be How Much, and
Have You Got It In Beige.

Now I devour whole stores—
high speed spin; giant size; chunky gold;
de luxe springing. Things.

I drag them around me into a stockade.
It is dark inside; but my credit cards
are incandescent.

— Connie Bensley

The Altar

Michelle McGinnis — Wed, 06 May 2009 00:24:30 +0000

The plastic statue of the Virgin
On top of a bedroom dresser
With a blackened mirror
From a bad-dream grooming salon.
Two pebbles from the grave of a rock star,
A small, grinning windup monkey,
A bronze Egyptian coin
And a red movie-ticket stub.

A splotch of sunlight on the framed
Communion photograph of a boy
With the eyes of someone
Who will drown in a lake real soon.

An altar dignifying the god of chance.
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.

— Charles Simic

September Twelfth, 2001

Michelle McGinnis — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:35:15 +0000

Two caught on film who hurtle
from the eighty-second floor,
choosing between a fireball
and to jump holding hands,

aren’t us. I wake beside you,
stretch, scratch, taste the air,
the incredible joy of coffee
and the morning light.

Alive, we open eyelids
on our pitiful share of time,
we bubbles rising and bursting
in a boiling pot.

— X.J. Kennedy

Unharvested

Michelle McGinnis — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:03:50 +0000

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan.
For there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

— Robert Frost