listen to linda

Yesterday was a day outside; today was a day inside: I worked for twelve and a half hours. I came up to write tonight with few words anywhere in or on my person, so I decided to go back through last week’s poems at The Writer’s Almanac. Maybe reading how someone else puts words together, I thought, would push me to do the same. And I found this poem by Linda Pastan:

Rereading Frost

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.

I had never heard of Linda Pastan before tonight. My loss. I took a little time to try and find more written about her and by her. Inspired by her own willingness to sit and read how someone else has already captured the moment, I offer you two more poems I found.

Vermilion

Pierre Bonnard would enter
the museum with a tube of paint
in his pocket and a sable brush.
Then violating the sanctity
of one of his own frames
he’d add a stroke of vermilion
to the skin of a flower.
Just so I stopped you
at the door this morning
and licking my index finger, removed
an invisible crumb
from your vermilion mouth. As if
at the ritual moment of departure
I had to show you still belonged to me.
As if revision were
the purest form of love.

That last sentence kills me. I’ve lived that sentence more than once.

Women on the Shore

The pills I take to postpone death
are killing me, and the healing
journey we pack for waits
with its broken airplane,
the malarial hum of mosquitoes.
Even the newly mowed grass
hides fault lines in the earth
which could open at any time

and swallow us.
In Edvard Munch’s woodcut,
the pure geometry of color—an arctic sky,
the luminescent blues and greens of water—
surrounds the woman in black
whose head is turning to a skull.
If death is everywhere we look,
at least let’s marry it to beauty.

I don’t want to say much. Her words need room to resonate, not to be drowned out, even if it is applause. Suffice it to say, if there is not a Linda Pastan Fan Club, I’m starting one.

Peace,
Milton