Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
My Death by Raymond Carter
If I’m lucky, I’ll be wired every whichway
in a hospital bed. Tubes running into
my nose. But try not to be scared of me, friends!
I’m telling you right now that this is okay.
It’s little enough to ask for at the end.
Someone, I hope, will have phoned everyone
to say, “Come quick, he’s failing!”
And they will come. And there will be time for me
to bid goodbye to each of my loved ones.
If I’m lucky, they’ll step forward
and I’ll be able to see them one last time
and take that memory with me.
Sure, they might lay eyes on me and want to run away
and howl. But instead, since they love me,
they’ll lift my hand and say “Courage”
or “It’s going to be all right.”
And they’re right. It is all right.
It’s just fine. If you only knew how happy you’ve made me!
I just hope my luck holds, and I can make
some sign of recognition.
Open and close my eyes as if to say,
“Yes, I hear you. I understand you.”
I may even manage something like this:
“I love you too. Be happy.”
I hope so! But I don’t want to ask for too much.
If I’m unlucky, as I deserve, well, I’ll just
drop over, like that, without any chance
for farewell, or to press anyone’s hand.
Or say how much I cared for you and enjoyed
your company all these years. In any case,
try not to mourn for me too much. I want you to know
I was happy when I was here.
And remember I told you this a while ago – April 1984.
But be glad for me if I can die in the presence
of friends and family. If this happens, believe me,
I came out ahead. I didn’t lose this one.
--
Raymond Carver was a poet and short-story writer most famously known for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver died of lung cancer at age 50, four years after writing My Death.
Two-Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.
New Year by Kate Baer
Look at it, cold and wet like a newborn
calf. I want to tell it everything—how we
struggled, how we tore out our hair and
thumbed through rusted nails just to
stand for its birth. I want to say: look how
far we’ve come. Promise our resolutions.
But what does a baby care for oaths and
pledges? It only wants to live.
To Begin With, The Sweet Grass by Mary Oliver
I.
Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?
Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.
II.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
III.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.
IV.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.
And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?
I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.
V.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
change.
Congratulations, if
you have changed.
VI.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?
And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
your life—
what would do for you?
VII.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Arcadia by Andrés Reisinger, RAC, and Arch Hades.
Arcadia is a narrated, graphic film that journeys through our collective 21st century existential crisis. It is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary collaboration between artist Andrés Reisinger, musician RAC, and poet Arch Hades.
I saw Arcadia for the first time last April, at the MOCO Museum in Amsterdam while on my honeymoon. I felt almost hypnotized. Sometimes, out of nowhere, I remember a quote or a fleeting visual from this film and it's like someone has breathed into me. If you have 10 minutes, this video is sure to make you feel something. If you don't have 10 minutes, save it for later.
(Fun fact: This project made Arch Hades the highest paid living poet of all time.)
Excerpt from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.
Excerpt from The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
You took the last bus home
you took the last bus home
i still don’t know how you got it through the door
but you’re always doing amazing stuff
like the time when you caught that train
Perfectly Human
by Miles Walser
So you were born backwards.
Your heart covers 80% of your skin.
It is huge—and it is fragile.
You don’t know how to chain-link fence your feelings.
You will find your trust abandoned and bruised on the side of the road—
Do not leave it there—
Dust it off and put it right back under your shirt.
If you don’t learn to stop apologizing for yourself,
you will mirage out of existence.
See, someday, that 80% is gonna get you hurt.
You will tell a woman over and over that you love her,
and she will say nothing.
You will sob in public,
and people will just stare.
They will want to carve their names into you
and watch as the pieces fall off—
let them try.
Your heart is a geyser and for that you will always feel strange.
Most people shut down when they get over saturated with feeling;
most people harden into hate
–into indifference–
because the biggest risk we ever take is to love without fear.
You are not afraid.
You are a cathedral waiting to be filled with hymns;
you are an infinite playground;
you are sky-bound and sprinting,
so cover your heart in goose-bump armor.
It will only beat stronger,
beat louder.
Keep hoping.
Stand up on subways and shout compliments to strangers,
dance, poorly, in public if it makes you feel better.
Love until it hurts.
Then love more—you know how.
There will be days when you’ll wish you were numb;
when you’ll want to rip your heart off your body
and find something easier to take its place.
Collect those days like bricks
and marvel at the buildings you will make.
Stand on top, chest open, head up—
Nobody will ever see the world like you do.
Never try to be better than the best version of you.
You are not perfect.
You are perfectly human.