Cherish

You are the girliest

girl I know.

I say so knowing you

to be a woman of deeds,

of experience, a woman

possessed of a gaze

and a touch that heals

all who fall

under your tender regard.

 

But yet you

are always the girl

I have wished to join

on journeys

and at rest.

 

You instill a wish in me

to do what I can

with every thought and tool

that I can wield to protect

all that there is of you.

 

To lie with that girl,

to trace with cautious fingertips

every curve of you,

to make sweetness and murmur,

to hum and to twist,

to stretch minutes like taffy,

to linger in those moments,

languid and liquid,

to soar and to swoon,

winging our way to a rapture

that is only ours,

to make.

The magic passes by

The poems always come

unbidden.

I could hunt
for them,
but don’t know
where to look.
 
But this one,
not merely unbidden,
but buried
in sequence
with unlike things.
 
After a hard talk
with a man
I love,

and a while spent
with the compost pile,
and a gathering of tools
and a piling of lumber,
and a power outage,
to divert me
from one work to another,
timed by whoever
times such things,

and a brownie
with special powers,
and a trip
to the store,
for a bottle of cream
to make the week-old oatmeal
coming out
of the darkened fridge
a meal
moderately more palatable
than it might otherwise be,
 
and more brownie,
a bit more brownie,
and a passing tease
with a virile neighbor
about his virility,
and a beer on a warm slow day,
 
the power
came on,
and the poem
came, too,
loaded with prizes
(except no gift
of invented words
to share),
 
came with memories
of Noble Causes
and Bruising Battles
(as Marrianne’s book
has it),
 
came with memories
of love and adventure,
came with hints
of life left to live,
 
and, suddenly,
the unbidden poem,
having arrived,
having said
whatever it had to say,
departed,
leaving me to return
to tools and timber.

The Pompitus of Love

On a mother’s day--2017

If the question is

where love fits,

then the answer

must be a multiple,

an integral and a sum,

a remainder or two,

and a dividend

and all the derivatives

of big and sloppy

and small and precise

equations.

It helps to begin

with why love, at all.

There’s you so strong

and fierce and tender.

There’s who we are together

when we are our best

and us together when

we need each other most.

There’s the way you love

our boys and girls;

the ones we know

and the ones we don’t.

There’s how you go

and how you feel

and how we make our love

and how you let me come to you

and how you find me when I don’t.

There’s the work we do together

and the work still left to do.

There’s this life I never could have lived alone.

There’s the meals and the drinks,

the families and the visits,

the awe and the wonder,

and the well and the promise,

and the sun and the moon,

and time.

Levertov’s children: The Poets in the World

Denise Levertov’s book, The Poet in the World, is her quite engaging investigation of the process by which some of her own poems came into existence. But I am deeply distracted by the title.

The Poet in the World—something great implied here about poets and poetry. The ideal, the poet in the world, is transcendent. But reality lies in the pursuit of the ideal, the challenge that must be accepted, poem by poem, by poets in the world.

Levertov, a poet for change, a poet for human liberation, inspires me. In turn, what I want, more than anything else, is to inspire you because, if I am a poet, it is likely that some of the reasons why I am are also some of the reasons why you are, too.

Just the other day, a friend introduced me to Nawal.

“This is Jeff Epton,” my friend said. “He’s a poet,” which I think was a very affirming thing to say, and typical of my friend.

Nawal’s smile was brilliant and warm. Perhaps I flatter myself, but I inferred that she was happy to meet a poet.

“Are you a poet, also?” I asked.

Nawal demurred. “I write poetry sometimes,” she said.

I brushed her qualification aside. I’m sure you are a poet, I responded, reminded in the same moment of a fragment I had written recently about being surrounded by poets. (And reminded in this present moment that I read the fragment to Malik, who told me that he’s a rapper, not a poet, because he doesn’t go deep enough. But the truth is we’re all mostly just skimming the surface, only occasionally holding our breath for a deeper dive.)

In any case, Malik considered the passage and concluded that what I had written was, indeed, a poem. As it turns out, affirmations are everywhere.

I told Nawal about the poem, and about how it had been inspired by Levertov’s book. When I mentioned Levertov’s title, The Poet in the World, I could see in Nawal’s expression that the title, and all it might imply, resonated for her.

She said that she’d like to see my poem, and I asked for and received her e-mail address. I’ll send it along, I told her. But this morning I discovered the poem really was a fragment.

I hate to rush things (though Marrianne would tell you that actually I just don't like to finish things), but it has been hanging fire for too long, so I went ahead and finished it, for now. And, if later, the poem turns up again, somehow unfinished, I’ll finish it again, maybe. But in the meantime, it seems to be the case that muses, like poets, are everywhere.

And here, ushered into the world by Denise Levertov and Malik and Nawal and me and who really knows who else, is the poem, finished for now:

The Poets in the World

Am I a poet in the world?

A voice both anchored here

and cast away?

An echo dimly understood?

A whisper barely heard?

I am a poet in the world,

and when I am,

when I inhabit this place

and this place inhabits me,

I know some

of what there is

to know about the world,

how it tastes

in places, how it feels

in part, how the silence

sounds, how the noise

can sing from me,

even in the forest, in the cities,

with scattered ears to hear.

I am a poet in the world.

I want a taste,

a feel. I strain to see,

to hear the world ahead,

the lagging and the dragging world

behind.

I am a poet in the world.

I know to a certainty,

I send out words,

and words return to me.

I am surrounded.

So many voices.

So many poets.