Passing Remark

In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don’t like much to happen.

In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.

My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, “Then why did you choose me?”

Mildly I lower my brown eyes—
there are so many things admirable people do not understand

-William Stafford

~

Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

-Mary Elizabeth Frye

~

There is a place in the heart that
will never be filled

a space

and even during the
best moments
and
the greatest times
times

we will know it

we will know it
more than
ever

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
and

we will wait
and
wait

in that space.

-Charles Bukowski

i know this feeling too well.

~

Essay On The Personal

Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses—
until we're ready.
Always
it's a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door.
How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over.
How good
someone else abandoned the farmhouse,
bankrupt and desperate.

Now we can bring a fine edge
to our parents.
We can hold hurt
up to the sun for examination.

But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief.
What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.

Love, then, becomes an old movie.

Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.

We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does.
Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.

-Stephen Dunn

about finally returning to yourself, your unique self, after pursuing an impersonal perfection. one of my favourite poems.

~

With No Experience In Such Matters

To hold a damaged sparrow
under water until you feel it die
is to know a small something
about the mind; how, for example,
it blames the cat for the original crime,
how it wants praise for its better side.

And yet it's as human
as pulling the plug on your Dad
whose world has turned
to feces and fog, human as--
Well, let's admit, it's a mild thing
as human things go.

But I felt the one good wing
flutter in my palm--
the smallest protest, if that's what it was,
I ever felt or heard.

Reminded me of how my eyelid has twitched,
the need to account for it.

Hard to believe no one notices.

-Stephen Dunn

could someone explain this poem to me? 

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i hate patriarchy. and i especially loathe being sexist and having double standards. every day i'm still trying to unlearn all my terrible preconceptions about gender. if you asked me questions about gender now, you probably wouldn't think i'm sexist, because i've tried to relearn a lot. but a shred of misogyny still remains, because society, at large, disparages women. what matters is that we try to make another step towards equity each day.

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