Identifying Poems

As I am preparing for the semester and reflecting on the poems I share with my students, I am thinking about what poems I use as personal identifiers. These five are the poems that fundamentally explain something of my lived experience. 

The Horizontal Line
(An Hommage to Agnes Martin)
By Edward Hirsch 

It was like a white sail in the early morning

It was like a tremulous wind calming itself
After a night on the thunderous sea

The exhausted lightning lay down on its side
And slept on a bed of cumulous sheets

She came out of the mountains
And surrendered to the expansiveness of a plain

She underlined a text in Isaiah:
Make level in the desert
A highway for our God
Every valley shall be exalted
And every mountain and hill shall be made low

The mountain grew tired of striving upward
And longed to flatten its ragged peaks

The nostalgia of a cathedral for the open plain

The nostalgia of a soprano for plainsong

I know a woman who slept on a cot
And sailed over the abyss on a wooden plank

She looked as far as the eye can see
But the eye is a circle—poor pupil--
And the universe curved

It was like a pause on the Bridge of Sighs
An instant before the storm
Or the moment afterward

My friend listened to Gregorian chants
On the car radio as he raced down
A two-lane highway in southern France

I remember riding a bicycle very fast
On a country road where the yellow line
Quivered ever so slightly in the sun

The faint tremor in my father's hand
When he signed his name after the stroke

The beauty of an imperfection

An almost empty canvas turned on its side
A zip that forever changed its mind

From its first pointed stroke
To its last brush with meaning
The glow of the line was spiritual

How the childlike pencil went for a walk
And came home skipping

It was like lying down at dusk to rest
On the cool pavement under the car
After a blistering day in the desert

The beaded evanescence of the summer heat

The horizon was a glimmering blue band
A luminous streamer in the distance

I recited, Brightness falls from the air
And the line suddenly whisked me away

No chapel is more breathtaking
Than the one that has been retrieved
On the horizon of memory

She remembered the stillness of a pool
Before the swimmers entered the water
And the colorful ropes dividing the lanes

Each swimmer was a scar in the blue mist

Invisible bird,
Whistle me up from the dark on a bright branch

It's not the low murmur of your voice
Almost breaking over the phone
But the thin wire of grief
The hum of joy that connects us

Sacred dream of geometry,
Ruler and protractor, temper my anguish,
Untrouble my mind

Heartbeat, steady my hand

Each year she crossed a line
Through the front page of a fresh diary
And vowed to live above the line

She would not line up with others
She would align herself with the simple truth

She erased every line in her notebook but one
Farewell to the aspirations of the vertical
The ecstasies of the diagonal
The suffering cross

Someone left a prayer book open in the rain
And the printed lines blurred
Ink smudged our fingers when we prayed

Let every line be its own revelation

The line in the painting was surrounded by light
The light in the painting held its breath
On the threshold of a discovery

If only she could picture
The boundlessness of God drawing
An invisible thread through the starry spaces

If only she could paint
The horizon without limits

A horizontal line is a pilgrimage

A segment of devotion wrested from time

An infinitely gentle mark on a blank page

The stripe remains after everything else is gone

It is a wisp of praise with a human hand

It is singing on a bare canvas

Questionnaire by Wendell Barry 
1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.
​
5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill. 
“Questionnaire” from Leavings: Poems. 




During Lockdown I Let the Dog Sleep in My Bed Again
by Maggie Smith 

Last night my daughter cried at bedtime.
Of loneliness, she said. She’s seen the graph,
the jagged mountain we need to press
into a meadow, and maybe she pictures
the drive home from southern Ohio,
how the green hills flatten without us
doing a damn thing. No sacrifice required.
I tell her the steep peak makes loneliness
our work, makes an honorable task of it.
But I shut myself in the bathroom and cry, hard,
into a hand towel. I walk alone in the snow,
squinting up into the big, wet flakes,
letting them bathe my face. I tell myself
it is a kind of touch. I tell myself it will do.

"During Lockdown I Let the Dog Sleep in My Bed Again" from Goldenrod.

"Affection" Watercolor and Salt on Paper, 22"x30", 2023

"Crown-Shy" Watercolor and Salt on Paper, 22"x30", 2024

"Juxtapose 2" Watercolor and Salt on Paper, 22"x30", 2025

---

Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye 
​
​Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let's call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to 
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just 
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I 
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemademamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend--
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

“Gate A-4” from Honeybee.

​

Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving   
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing   
as a woman takes up her needles   
and her yarn. Let evening come.


Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   
Let the wind die down. Let the shed   
go black inside. Let evening come.


To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   
in the oats, to air in the lung   
let evening come.


Let it come, as it will, and don’t   
be afraid. God does not leave us   
comfortless, so let evening come.

Copyright Credit: Jane Kenyon, “Let Evening Come” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Source: Let Evening Come: Poems (Graywolf Press, 1990)

It would be remiss to not mention, this week the brilliant poet Andrea Gibson died. Their work is extraordinary, with incisive, emotional rigor they presented experiential tableaus. I will miss their distinct voice in this world. ​