#PoetryBreak: Easter

The Bathtub (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Easter 

 - Mari Howe

Two of the fingers on his right hand
had been broken

so when he poured back into that hand it surprised
him— it hurt him at first.

And the whole body was too small. Imagine
the sky trying to fit into a tunnel carved into a hill.

He came into it two ways:
From the outside, as we step into a pair of pants.

And from the center— suddenly all at once.
Then he felt himself awake in the dark alone.







from: Howe, Marie. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems. W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. 

Poetry Break: Reading Ovid

Voyeur (M.A. Reilly, Paterson, NJ, 2010)

Reading Ovid 

 - Marie Howe

The thing about those Greeks and Romans is that at least mythologically,

they could get mad. If the man broke your heart, if he  fucked your sister speechless

then real true hell broke loose:
   “You know that stew you just ate for dinner, honey? —

It was your son.”
   That’s Ovid for you.

A guy who knows how to tell a story about people who really don’t believe in the Golden Rule.

Sometimes, I fantasize saying to the man I married,  “You know that hamburger you just

gobbled down with relish and mustard? It was your truck.”

If only to watch understanding take his face like the swan-god took the girl.

But rage makes for more rage— nothing to do then but run.
    And because rage is a story that has

no ending, we’d both have to transform into birds or fish: constellations forever fixed

in the starry heavens, forever separated, forever attached.

Remember the story of Athens and Sparta?
   That boy held the fox under his cloak

and didn’t flinch. A cab driver told me the part
   I couldn’t remember this morning—

in Sparta, he said, it was permissible to steal but not to get caught.

The fox bit and scratched; the kid didn’t talk, and he was a hero.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Jesus said. He said, The kingdom of heaven

is within you.
   And the spiked wheel ploughed through the living centuries

minute by minute, soul by soul. Ploughs still. That’s the good news and the bad news, isn’t it?






From: Howe, Marie. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. 

Poetry Break: Magdalene

Coming Undone (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Magdalene

 - Marie Howe

You know it was funny because he seemed so well the night before
I stayed over to meet a student before class

—sitting at the picnic table...already so hot so early.
I must have been looking for a pen or something

when I thought of the car keys and, rummaging through my bag,
couldn’t find them and was up and walking across the grass when

I heard myself say, I feel as if I’m going to lose something today,
—and then I knew, and ran the rest of the way.

Poetry Break: The Gate

The Gate (M.A. Reilly, Tuscany, 2009)

The Gate

Related Poem Content Details

BY MARIE HOWE

I had no idea that the gate I would step through 

to finally enter this world 

would be the space my brother's body made. He was 

a little taller than me: a young man 

but grown, himself by then, 

done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, 

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold 

and running water. 

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. 

And I'd say, What? 

And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. 

And I'd say, What? 

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around. 

#SOL16: Portal

Rob in Ireland. 

I.

In Marie Howe's poem, Gate, she opens by writing:

"I had no idea that the gate I would step through  

to finally enter this world 

would be the space my brother's body made."

I tasted the sounds those perfect words made in my mouth--felt the immediacy that living demands. Like Howe who suffered the loss of her brother, I too know certain grief, and what such loss prompts the battered soul to do. For loss is both a gate that opens us to this moment, to the here and a burden we shoulder through the days.

Howe teaches us that we have only the present moment.


II.

The space my husband's body made as his soul soared and his life here bowed was more a passageway than an end. I did not know that at the moment.  But it was a gate to walk through and now, months later I am here, in a place I might not have come to without his death.

This is a space made by love--made by loss.


III.

What has taken shape before me is a new place of competence and uncertainty, of limits and possibilities. Across the last 15 months, I have grappled with choosing to live, not merely exist.

Who am I without him?
Who have I been?
Who won't I be?

I am no longer wife.
I am no longer RobandMaryann.
I am undefined from the ways I have known and yet, I am oddly hopeful.


IV.

What becomes possible after deep love and loss are newer ways of being in the world. Newer ways of coming to name what is essential and what is merely interesting.

I promise you--whatever it is you fear the most will announce itself after the death of your most beloved. Whatever you most fear will come knocking at that open gate seeking entrance. And understand this, you will be the better for it, if you bid it welcome. This is a time when courage has your name written all over it.

Let it in.


V.

There are gates--portals before us and to seek them requires sacrifice.  To walk through such gates is to know immense loss and promise; to know each and still feel your breath against the back of your hand.