What is the Knocking? (It is three strange angels. Admit them. Admit them.)
“I have been wondering lately about writing into what we don’t know. What if we have little to say in a poem? What if the poem is trying to say something through us? What in the world might it be trying to say? How we can learn to listen? To the actual world? To the apparently inert things around us? To our own unconscious? How can we set aside our ideas about what we want to say and allow the deeply unfamiliar to arise? (Who are these strange angels that DH Lawrence writes about?)”
—Marie Howe, describing her poetry writing workshops
The rules, once again applied
One loaf = one loaf. One fish = one fish.
The so-called kings were dead.
And the woman who had been healed grew tired of telling her story
and sometimes asked her daughter to tell it.
People generally worshipped where their parents had worshipped—
The men who’d hijacked the airplane prayed where the dead pilots had
been sitting,
and the passengers prayed from their seats
—so many songs went up and out into the thinning air…
People, listening and watching, nodded and wept, and, leaving the
theater,
one turned to the other and said, What do you want to do now?
And the other one said, I don’t know. What do you want to do?
It was the Coming of Ordinary Time. First Sunday, second Sunday.
And then (for who knows how long) it was here.
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil
probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes
have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This
is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong
blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living room windows because the heat’s on too
high in here, and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in
the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And
yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge
sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a
hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you
called that yearning.
what you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the
winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss – we
want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of
myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m
gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat
that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it
I know it is—and that if once it hailed me
it ever does—
And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a shifting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.
Marie Howe will be leading a workshop on December 4-6. Click for details.
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