advice for former selves

Advice for Former Selves
–Kate Baer

remembering

Remembering
–P.K. Page

Remembering you and reviewing

our structural love

the past re-arises alive

from its smothering dust.

For memory, which is only decadent

in hands like a miser’s

loving the thing for its thingness,

or in the eyes of collectors who assess

the size, the incredible size, of their collection,

can, in the living head, create and make

new the sometimes appallingly ancient present

and sting the sleeping thing

to a sudden seeing.

And as a tree with all its leaves relaxed

can shiver at the memory of wind

or the still waters of a pool recall

their springing origin and rise and fall

suddenly over the encircling basin’s lip—

so I, remembering from now to then,

can know and see and feel again, as jewels

must when held in a brilliant branch of sun.

Photo by Jessica Knowlden on Unsplash

the day

The Day
–James Schuyler

Photo by Ari Apple on Unsplash

monroeville

Monroeville, PA
–Ed Ochester
One day a kid yelled
“Hey Asshole!”
and everybody on the street
turned around.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

try

Try
–Maggie Anderson
To move the language toward happiness,
or failing that, toward love. Like this:
the trees have undone their sandals and silk saris,
thrown light scarves down onto the brickwork.
One red thread is caught mid-air on an updraft,
held by a spider web. Remember the way
he described the green soup he moved through
coming out of surgery? A swift current
of warm water, swirling and turning among
floating cylinders, friends inside them talking.
Next door the little boy swings higher and higher.
His half-scream is also half-laugh — more, more.
Follow the vowels; laudanum, potpourri, chrysanthemum.
Trust the verbs: to meander, to sashay, to bear up.

Photo by Pedro Vit on Unsplash

today, another universe

Today, Another Universe
–Jane Hirshfield

The arborist has determined:
senescence         beetles       canker
quickened by drought
but in any case
not prunable     not treatable     not to be propped.

And so.

The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.

The trunk where the ant.

The red squirrels’ eighty foot playground.

The bark cambium    pine-sap    cluster of needles.

The Japanese patterns       the ink-net.

The dapple on certain fish.

Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.

The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.

Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.

Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,
this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

after your death

After Your Death
–Natasha Trethewey

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.