Incorrect Merciful Impulses is for the tender-hearted, the romantic, those who carry around a heaviness and aren’t sure what to do with it. I loved itIncorrect Merciful Impulses is for the tender-hearted, the romantic, those who carry around a heaviness and aren’t sure what to do with it. I loved it.
“I’m sure I’ve pitied you all wrong. I don’t know how it’s done. I never learned. I engulf with an affection from a chasm in my gut, a sweet trapdoor, a heart-shaped hole, a pretty well that threatens to swallow me up.”
- from The Problem of Death within Life
“I can stop this anytime or I can’t, I can’t
decide, do I cup my hands to receive
some element of grace, or brace my frame against the harsh that I create.”
- from Wake
“The grief is a planet. A dust ring. A small moon that’s been hidden under my pillow, that’s been changing the way my body moves this whole time.”
- from The Increasing Frequency of Black Swans
“I want to give you everything. This is called a sickness. By way of remedy, I am decorum bound, swept
up and hushed. I forget myself. I lay my goods down, lay my arms down in the dust. Then it’s a heaviness I borrow and am taught
to own. What’s mine is mine.”
- from Possession
“as is our way we have come too far to turn away from this
kernel that shapes us into other than animal or just
animal enough to breed and break…”
- from Ex Machina
“I’ve given up on sense, except the patterns of the morning the way you sigh and shield your eyes from light.”
- from Still Life with Copernicus & Hypnophobia...more
I was unfamiliar with Francesca Bell, but I bought this collection on a whim and found it to be incredibly moving. Bell’s voice packs a true gut punchI was unfamiliar with Francesca Bell, but I bought this collection on a whim and found it to be incredibly moving. Bell’s voice packs a true gut punch in poems written about her hearing loss and her daughter.
“How little she has known in her four-week life…
Yet she knew enough From the first to wake crying,
and for a terrible moment—inconsolable.
So long her journey from my dreams to my body to my arms.
So human the burden of grief she brought with her.” - from Sorrow Is Innate in the Human
“In the days of her death wish, my eyes were fixed, open, my life a watchtower I couldn’t stop looking down from. She couldn’t be trusted even to sleep separately then though we’d locked up so many things: belts that seemed innocent before her the well-meaning medicines electrical cords in their tyranny of tangles her scarves/my scarves the noise we found when we searched her closet two deluxe Swiss Army knives a handful of bare blades she’s extracted from her plastic razors all our shoelaces in a messy, little pile dental floss, reeking of mint keys to all four cars and every pair of scissors in the house no matter how small. I lay beside her in the dark to watch, weeping, while she kept on breathing against her will. I worked so hard to give her life. She worked so hard to hand it back.” - My Daughter Was Always the Resourceful One
“In the audiologist’s booth, I clutch the device with the button I’m to press if I hear a tone, hand clammy, the way a child holds the finger of an adult she thinks can save her.” - from What Small Sound
A wonderful collection of poems to spend some time each day with.
A few of my favorite excerpts:
“It seems we have made pain some kind of mistake, like A wonderful collection of poems to spend some time each day with.
A few of my favorite excerpts:
“It seems we have made pain some kind of mistake, like having it is somehow wrong.
Don’t let them fool you— pain is a part of things.
But remember, dear Ellie, the compost down in the field: if the rank and dank and dark are handled well, not merely discarded, but turned and known and honored, they one day come to beds of rich earth home even to the most delicate rose.
~
God comes to you disguised as your life. Blessings often arrive as trouble.
In French, the word blesser means to wound and relates to the Old English blestian—
to sprinkle with blood.
And in Sanskrit there is a phrase, a phrase to carry with you wherever you go:
sarvam annam:
everything is food.
Every last thing.”
from A Poem for My Daughter by Teddy Macker
“Now is the time to know That all you do is sacred.
Now, why not consider A lasting truce with yourself and God.”
from Now is the Time by Hafiz
“to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weighs you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you. I will love you, again.”
“Because life isn’t enough which is unbelievable to the fog, sea, or anything lucky to be without our incurable consciousness.” from Dark Matter
“The firs“Because life isn’t enough which is unbelievable to the fog, sea, or anything lucky to be without our incurable consciousness.” from Dark Matter
“The first disappointment. Which is not Remembered but lives in the body. And how familiar it became.” from Impermanence
“You too are something. You too have made your way inside me.
Yes then. To everything. Even an ending.” from To Everything
“For you I will be a version of myself I hardly remember.” from Poem Written In A Cab...more
“…Alone, I watch the water move now like a clock someone is winding with a knife. I am starved for that easy taxonomy ofWhew, I loved this collection.
“…Alone, I watch the water move now like a clock someone is winding with a knife. I am starved for that easy taxonomy of Things Before. For the years not likely to be cut open with scissors only to find proof of disease.”
from Elegy Without A Single Tree I Can Save...more
“Sometimes I imagine what it’d be like to show you I’m alive. The thrill of it. The sharp inhale. The nerve exposed. The bone.”
from First Love
“Some nigh“Sometimes I imagine what it’d be like to show you I’m alive. The thrill of it. The sharp inhale. The nerve exposed. The bone.”
from First Love
“Some nights we move together like two desperate creatures. Some nights we roll apart like two tired wives. We ask: Is it true you can be one thing then another? Is it true you can be loved anyway?”
“…The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone“…The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”
A handful of the poems in this collection struck me as corny, but I loved a lot of them too.
“I can hear a small hum inside me, an appliance left runniA handful of the poems in this collection struck me as corny, but I loved a lot of them too.
“I can hear a small hum inside me, an appliance left running. Years ago I thought it was coming from my bones. The hum kept me company, and I thought thank god for bones, did the fidelity
of bones—they’ll be there until the end and then some. Now what. How to continue.”
from The Hum
“… The body remains a house unaware of its rooms.”
The Undressing by Li-Young Lee absolutely enchanted me. This collection didn’t flow as well for me overall, but there were many poems I loved.
“So we’rThe Undressing by Li-Young Lee absolutely enchanted me. This collection didn’t flow as well for me overall, but there were many poems I loved.
“So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet, we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight, measuring by eye as it falls into alignment between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky, she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.
One day we’ll lie down and not get up. One day, all we guard will be surrendered.
Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize what we love, and what it takes to tend what isn’t for our having. So often, fear has led me to abandon what I know I must relinquish in time. But for the moment, I’ll listen to her dream, and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling more and more detail into the light of a joint and fragile keeping.”
“Spring, it came late that year. In wiped out Illinois, it snowed, it snowed, it snowed some more. Such heavy snow, our carport groaned beneath it, then“Spring, it came late that year. In wiped out Illinois, it snowed, it snowed, it snowed some more. Such heavy snow, our carport groaned beneath it, then fell hard to its knees. I waited for slush, for thaw, for forsythia to knot like a whip or a rosary, I waited soberly, desperately, and—because it had to—
Reflective and at times excruciatingly tender. I loved it.
“I was never aware so much had been lost even before I was born. There was so much to lose eveReflective and at times excruciatingly tender. I loved it.
“I was never aware so much had been lost even before I was born. There was so much to lose even before I knew what it meant to choose.”
from Spoken For
“It’s you who forgets more and more of your first language each day, you who let the unspoken grow between you and your mother each year. It’s you who lost the first songs she taught you. Not the birds.
They might spend most of their days in the sky, but every evening they remember to come back to earth. Not a single one of them ever got lost up high. It’s you who followed your dead there. And when they remained above, it was you made it back only three quarters of the way.”
from All About The Birds
“Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes. And I’ve been lonely for you from that instant. That loneliness appeared on earth as this body. And my share of time has been nothing but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly. Your face fleeing my ever Kissing it firmly once on the mouth.”
“Never pass up an opportunity to kiss: that sweet futile but delectable attempt to touch & experience the most secret Consciousness3.5 stars, rounded up
“Never pass up an opportunity to kiss: that sweet futile but delectable attempt to touch & experience the most secret Consciousness of a Being you may never know.”...more
“Outside the acacia burst into yellow flares of pollen and rubbed against the windows, its skin the color of cement, its branches loaded down with direc“Outside the acacia burst into yellow flares of pollen and rubbed against the windows, its skin the color of cement, its branches loaded down with directions and
I don’t understand how each unit of pollen flies so far, lifts on pockets of air and travels, like a spaceship, or a rocket,
or how each one is self-sufficient in its yellowness, traveling north of south or just straight up,
living life in spasms of movement, over rocks, whole towns, cities, and never being able to name things, to own them or not to own them, to find a way or to lose it.”
“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers.
I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.”
from The Hurting Kind
“…my be“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers.
I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.”
from The Hurting Kind
“…my beloved and I are lying in bed in a soft silence. We are talking about how we carry so many people with us wherever we go, how, even when simply living, these unearned moments are a tribute to the dead. We are both expecting to hear an owl as the night deepens. All afternoon, from the porch, we watched an Eastern towhee furiously building her nest in the untamed forsythia with its yellow spilling out into the horizon. I told him that the way I remember the name forsythia is that when my stepmother, Cynthia, was dying, that last week, she said lucidly but mysteriously, More yellow. And I thought, yes, more yellow, and I nodded because I agreed. Of course, more yellow.”
“But love is impossible and it goes on despite the impossible. You’re the muscle I cut from the bone and still the bone remembers, still it wants (so m“But love is impossible and it goes on despite the impossible. You’re the muscle I cut from the bone and still the bone remembers, still it wants (so much, it wants) the flesh back, the real thing, if only to rail against it, if only to argue and fight, if only to miss a solve-able absence.”
from In A Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me
“Even now, I don’t know much about happiness. I still worry and want an endless stream of more, but some days I can see the point in growing something, “Even now, I don’t know much about happiness. I still worry and want an endless stream of more, but some days I can see the point in growing something, even if it’s just to say I cared enough.”
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