by Gregory Orr
The world’s flaws—
“Leaf” is complete,
Unscarred by insect
Or wind-tossed twig,
Yet it is an essence
That implicates the world
As a wound implies a body.
*
When I was young
I was always eager
To learn new words.
How many there were!
Now, I’m old and still
Learn new ones,
But forget more and more
Of those I once knew.
When I was young
I couldn’t have imagined
The time would come
When I’d need so few.
*
I always supposed
It was words
I was after—
Those
Shining fish
The poem’s net gets.
But who knows?
Maybe it was
The sea
Itself,
I was trying
To haul on deck.
Song of Lyric Geography
It consists of cliffs and plateaus—
The lyric life I chose.
In the worst phase, I know
Each desperate word
Is only a handhold
And there’s a sheer fall below.
In the other, the pressure’s
Suddenly gone,
And I stroll along
As calm phrases unfold;
Soon, I’ve become deluded—
My guard’s down
And I’m convinced
It will always be like this:
A steady catalogue
Of my hard-earned bliss.
That’s when it opens
Beneath my feet—recurrent abyss.
You sat alone in a room . . .
You sat alone in a room,
Listening to the harsh
Chorus
Of accusing voices.
Waiting for the worst
To pass, waiting for
The meanest to cease.
Hoping the beloved
Was somewhere
Among them;
Hoping—when
The malicious
Hubbub was over—
You’d hear one word of love.
There are questions . . .
There are questions
That must be asked,
But no one alive
Can answer,
And yours is one of them:
Where was the beloved
Then,
You want to know?
When, in the dark
Orchard, he hurt you.
When you curled up
In the tiniest ball
A child’s body can be,
And still the blows fell?
The Undertoad
Something in words that’s perverse,
That wants to be beyond
What we understand and control—
Something above or below.
“Watch out for the undertoad,”
Was what she heard her father
Shout above the waves—
That a word misheard could create
Such a creature
And feed her childhood fears.
Or how I mistyped “undertow”
As “undertown”
And found myself inhabiting
A city beneath the sea
Where everything moved slowly
And breathed chains of bubbles
That rose toward the upper world,
A tethering of pearls.
Trying hard just to listen . . .
Trying hard just to listen
And let the story enter,
Though I’m tempted
To turn away,
Or to use my own words
To put a wall between us.
Eager to reassure quickly,
As if compassion
Could save me
From my own fear.
How my ears burn
With the blush
Of what she confesses,
Or go cold and bloodless
As he tells of all he endured.
Aftermath Sonnet
Letting my tongue sleep,
And my heart go numb.
Sensing that speech
Too soon,
After such a wound,
Would only be
A different bleeding.
Even needing to leave
The page blank.
Long season
Of silence—
Trusting that under
Its bandage of snow,
The field of me is healing.
How often I’ve wished . . .
How often I’ve wished
It arrived by just
Sashaying in
Through my senses.
But for me, love
Couldn’t enter
Until I was broken,
All the way to the center.
Right here, the blow fell—
A sledgehammer
Against a wall.
And so,
A ragged door was made,
And the beloved came to dwell.
It’s narrow . . .
It’s narrow, and no room
For error—I zig
And zag through
The treacherous channel.
What fool said joy
Is less risky than grief?
My ship could wreck
On either shore.
Needing to navigate
By contradiction:
What I want to grip,
I need to release.
When despair says
“Let go,” I must hold.
Aftermath Inventory
Shattered? Of course,
That matters.
But
What comes next
Is all
I can hope to master.
Knowing, deep in my
Bones,
Not all hurt harms.
My wounds?
If,
Somehow, I
Grow through them,
Aren’t they also a boon?
My scars?
Someday,
They might shine
Brighter than stars.
For Trisha
1.
They were your anchors—
Your parents.
Without them,
What can the boat do
But respond
To tides and currents?
In time, you’ll hoist sail;
Rudder and keel intact.
You can navigate—
There are islands to find.
But when you get there—
There being anywhere—
What will hold you?
What will keep you from drifting?
2.
Grieving over something
You never even knew
You loved: that gloomy
House of your childhood
Where you were mostly
Miserable.
Sold now,
And tomorrow a stranger
Will begin to live there.
Lighter and lighter as we grow
Older—stuff lost, or cast off.
3.
We’re so near, but because of that,
Sometimes we need to shout.
We call it “clearing the air.”
We’re allowed to say mean things
As long as they’re true, or seem so
In that moment.
Also, they must be
Evenly matched—tit for tat.
And later, we have to take it all back.
We don’t do this for fun. We do it
When one of us knows her heart’s
In the right place, but no longer beating;
Or one of us notices his lungs are ok,
But he’s no
longer breathing.
4. Prayer/Plea
Come now, come soon, I summon you
Who, alone, can burst this husk
Of numb that I’ve become.
And bring your jumper cables,
Your battery juiced with blue fire—
I need its zap.
I need you
And your voodoo lute. I need
One more of your rescues
Innumerable.
Heed this, my howled plea
That’s half-past last gasp:
I need you to
Horizon-happen, bringing the usual.
We were that joke . . .
We were that joke, a couple joined at the hip—
But such an oddity had its own appeal.
For us—the wounds kissed long before the lips.
Easy enough to get past the nasty quips:
How codependent we were; how unreal
And comically odd—a couple joined at the hip.
The risk of this: we’re a single nerve from toe to tip—
When one is hurt, the other’s bound to squeal.
The fate of those whose wounds kiss long before their lips.
The upside? Our lives are braided: two strips
Of soul-stuff wound together so we feel
That when our bodies couple at the hip
It’s what the gods intended: a joy that rips
The heart out and serves it as a meal.
When your wounds have kissed long before your lips
Love will always be the bittersweet of whips—
The hurt will deepen long before it heals.
You learn such things when you’re joined at the hip
And your wounds have kissed long before your lips.
Ode to the Country of Us
We made it up
Out of two pronouns:
“I” and “you.”
We called it
The country of Us.
*
That first, exploratory meeting
Full of mutual suspicions—
How could they be
Overcome?
In the beginning
It wasn’t even certain
We spoke the same tongue.
At best, they were wildly
Divergent dialects.
A dictionary?
Years
In the making.
Key terms—
Still in dispute to this day.
*
From the outset,
It was hard for
Us
To see eye to eye.
For my part, I was
Distracted
By the rest of you.
*
If we were two ships
We could have passed
In the ocean and not
Known.
If we were
Two birds we might
Have been flying
To opposite sides
Of the sky.
But
We were two bodies
Who bumped
Into each other
And clung.
Two
Bodies that collided,
Then steadied each other,
Then stayed.
*
Shortly after we met,
We held a contest
To design a flag.
I wanted a small
Yin-yang
Superimposed
On a labyrinth.
You favored a single
Rose,
Rising from a single vase.
We settled on something
Totally white—
It had nothing
To do with purity,
Nor with surrender.
Think of a blank page
On which experience
Will write lines
Indelible as those
That mark a face.
Think of a bed
With covers thrown back,
And the sheet beneath
Ready for the wars of love.
*
Our currency
Is touch.
A Kiss the single
Largest
Denomination.
Followed by
A Caress:
An open hand
Sliding down
An arm or
Squeezing a thigh.
Small change
The fingertips give.
*
No wonder it’s unstable:
The national anthem
Never the same
For two consecutive days:
Whatever love song
The jukebox plays.
*
The stamps are also
Ridiculous.
Only two kinds:
If you’re feeling
Friendly
You lather
Your lips thickly
With something
Red and smooch
The right-hand
Corner
Of the envelope.
If you’re pissed
At the intended
Recipient,
You ink your thumb
And push down
Hard,
As if crushing an insect.
*
Who could possibly predict
The future of a country
As small as
Us?
What are
Its prospects?
No army to speak of.
Some think
Its natural resources
All but exhausted.
Optimists insist
It will last our lifetime.
We can only hope.
*
Seeking the most
Accurate account?
You won’t find it
In history books—
They get the facts,
But they don’t
Get the mystery.
Poems and songs?
Saturated with lies;
Closest
You’ll come to the truth.
*
Nostalgia: a national
Pastime—
Whole days spent
Conjuring up
A lost
Golden moment,
Or lavishing
A nacreous beauty
Around a grit of fact.
*
Thrive though it might, its days
Are necessarily numbered.
You don’t need to see
A crack in the wall,
To know mortality calls.
Who’ll be the one to leave?
Who, the one to grieve?
*
Briefest of nations—
Blip
On history’s screen.
Leaving not even
A trace
Of its existence.
To the world
It was
Less than nothing.
To us: it was all.
Sitting at a dinner table . . .
Sitting at a dinner table
With seven old people,
The youngest among us
In her mid-sixties.
Eating and drinking
And talking along;
The men dominant
And pompous
And name-dropping
As each in turn
Mounts his hobbyhorse
And gives a little lecture
(myself included).
And the topic of written
Words comes up
And one of the women
Wisely observes
That the tablets of Moses
Gave the Jews of Genesis
A way to behave—
Got them back on a path
To basic decency
If not to a promised land.
And I respect that: writing
Out a few, clear-cut
Prohibition
s wasn’t
A bad idea;
And when you toss in
A little Sumerian
Eye-for-an-eye
And tooth-for-a-tooth,
You’ve got a rough version
Of justice, as well as some
Good rules.
And so,
We Western humans began
Our stumble through history,
Our endless and uncertain
Struggle against the worst
In us and the worst
Among us—those
Who delight in power
And, in turn, recruit
Those who take
Pleasure in harming others.
By now, the wine’s not
Working anymore
And I’m silently reflecting
On how I’ve lived through
The end of one century
Into the next, and still
It’s a dark and violent world.
The Ferris Wheel at the World’s Fair
The wheel swoops you up, swoops you down again.
