Rest, now.
Let the weight you run from every day
now draw you down.

Later there will be time to tend
to everything left undone.
Now, rest.

Fall
into your own bones
lying horizontal on this ground.

Come
into your dark corners.
Come into this

original nakedness
under all the layers.
Come where all your losses

split
you
open.

Don't rise,
yet --
Rest.

Be drawn deeper down
into the salt tide of tears.
Let grief wash you,

then drown you
beyond the name
you first were given,

when you reached to touch
your own mother's face for the very first time,
and she smiled her light down into you.

Now reach those same fingers
for the face of infinity --
so that, opening your eyes

you will know
the one dreaming you
is pleased with you,

that everything seen
is your self,
and that now is the time

to rise wholehearted into the work
aching to be animated
by precisely you.

    - Brooke McNamara

You there.
Have you forgotten something?
Something about choosing?
Look around: is this the world you promised yourself?

I want to know who you could become
if the conditions were just right.
I want to know the you that's possible
with just enough thunder
and just enough sun.

Who taught you the human smile,
and did it ever land
in the living tissues of your human heart
beating miracles for free -
or is your face always onstage?

When you speak do you hear that one
as the oldest friend
since your microcosmic firework of conception,
which made creatures of the earth and sky alike
shudder with jollity and not know why,

or does your own voice
still sound to you like a stranger?
I want to know if you need permission
to arrive home right now
into your body longing to learn you.

Do you know breath as always a holy door?
Who are you when you breathe
down deep, at last allowed to feel it all,
and your hair bursts into flame, and you remember:

we don't choose once and it's over,
but are asked to re-engage in every instant.
Look around: this very world
needs your arrival now, like sun
and like thunder, now and now and now.

​    - Brooke McNamara

For how many years have you gone through the house
    shutting the windows,
while the rain was still five miles away

and veering, o plum-colored clouds, to the north,
away from you

and you did not even know enough
to be sorry,

you were glad
those silver sheets, with the occasional golden staple,

were sweeping on, elsewhere,
violent and electric and uncontrollable--

and will you find yourself finally wanting to forget
all enclosures, including

the enclosure of yourself, o lonely leaf, and will you
dash finally, frantically,

to the windows and haul them open and lean out
to the dark, silvered sky, to everything

that is beyond capture, shouting
I'm here, I'm here! Now, now, now, now, now.

    - Mary Oliver

​Finally will it not be enough,
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shape of clouds?

Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shape of flesh, everchanging
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of body for body,
unending light.
You will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love.

​    - Wendell Berry

​I Went Out to Hear

The sound of quiet. The sky
indigo, steeping
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats' wings before
the air troubled above
my head, turned to look
and saw them gone.
On the surface of the black
lake, a swan and the moon
stayed perfectly
still. I knew this was 
a perfect moment.
Which would only hurt me
to remember and never
live again. My God.
How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.

​    - Leila Chatti

It is too easy to become overwhelmed
by the suffering in the world
and the only prayer one can muster
is for the qualities of surrender
be made visible
and soon

As the way dawn light
caresses our dreams
when we dare to raise our face
towards the hope of winterlight

When the end of the day arrives
we slip off the woolen cloak of sacrifice
so heavy it threatens
to tip over the chair
by the weight of it

Yes we have courted bitterness
the tannin lingering on our lips
but once we are no longer willing
to remain a prisoner to resentment

We begin to call back
the known
the true essence
of who we once were
before we became
victim to the unbearable

And this is the trial of love
that we are born to

This unspeakable price
we pay to dance
    such a short while to
    this earthly music
    in the deepest hours of night

So that we will emerge
    more light filled
    than before.

    - Kristy Hellum

​Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.

    - Adrienne Rich

​I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on

in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful.

—And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, "I'm only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold."

Sunset like a burning wagon train
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage--

And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass
& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,

I forgot about the ocean,
Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.

And the sides of the ship were green as money,
             and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.

Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,
under the constellation of the horse.

At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
                                                        by pushing into it--

The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.

    - Tony Hoagland

​Because one must be naked to get clean,
my dad shrugs out of his pajama shirt,
steps from his boxers and into the tub
as I brace him, whose long illness
has made him shed modesty too.
Seated on the plastic bench, he holds
the soap like a caught fish in his lap,
waiting for me to test the water’s heat
on my wrist before turning the nozzle
toward his pale skin. He leans over
to be doused, then hands me the soap
so I might scrub his shoulders and neck,
suds sluicing from spine to buttock cleft.
Like a child he wants a washcloth
to cover his eyes while I lather
a palmful of pearlescent shampoo
into his craniotomy-scarred scalp
and then rinse clear whatever soft hair
is left. Our voices echo in the spray
and steam of this room where once,
long ago, he knelt at the tub’s edge
to pour cups of bathwater over my head.
He reminds me to wash behind his ears,
and when he judges himself to be clean,
I turn off the tap. He grips the safety bar,
steadies himself, and stands. Turning to me,
his body is dripping and frail and pink.
And although I am nearly forty,
he has this one last thing to teach me.
I hold open the towel to receive him.

​    - Amy Fleury