poetry week, day 3

I'm bursting with happiness for some dear friends today. It's a good way to start the weekend.

The agenda is pretty full, as usual - picking strawberries at the farm, Indian food at the farmers market, making a maple bourbon sweet potato pie for the pie potluck at the happy/sad going-away dance tomorrow (for the wonderful people who got married a little while ago), hanging out with A Boy (yes, and that's all I'm going to say for now), going to said Boy's friend's going-away party... and all of that is today! Tomorrow: hiking, going to the happy/sad dance, going to a potluck, and perhaps going to the Brattleboro dance in the evening.

And, um, laundry? I'm hoping it will magically do itself while I'm busy with all these other things.

Oh, how I love summer in Vermont(/western Massachusetts)!

Anyway, Poetry Week continues, so here is another of my very favorites: "Ask For Nothing" by Philip Levine. When I was studying abroad in Ecuador in college, a friend on my program loaned me a slim volume of Philip Levine poetry. It pretty much changed my life. I had read and enjoyed poems before, but never had I devoured poetry, been struck dumb by it, felt wrapped in its warm blanket. When I got back to the U.S., I walked into the Hungry Mind (sigh... R.I.P.), our lovely local bookstore that later went the way of so many locally-owned bookstores (have I mentioned that Brattleboro has at least four that seem to be thriving?), and ordered the book, The Simple Truth. I even stuck with the order when they told me that those 68 pages would cost me $16, a fortune for a college student to devote to a "frivolous" purchase. But I've never regretted it.

Ask For Nothing

Instead walk alone in the evening
heading out of town toward the fields
asleep under a darkening sky;
the dust risen from your steps transforms
itself into a golden rain fallen
earthward as a gift from no known god.
The plane trees along the canal bank,
the few valley poplars, hold their breath
as you cross the wooden bridge that leads
nowhere you haven't been, for this walk
repeats itself once or more a day.
That is why in the distance you see
beyond the first ridge of low hills
where nothing ever grows, men and women
astride mules, on horseback, some even
on foot, all the lost family you
never prayed to see, praying to see you,
chanting and singing to bring the moon
down in to the last of the sunlight.
Behind you the windows of the town
blink on and off, the houses close down;
ahead the voices fade like music
over deep water, and then are gone;
even the sudden, tumbling finches
have fled into smoke, and the one road
whitened in moonlight, leads everywhere.