#how strange it is to be anything at all

Bathing
Allison Seay

I have been alone with the thing itself.
The depression. The defective heart. God.

Inside my mind it is dawn.  A wolf appears with a bird
in its mouth.  Blue feathers, my fate, the beautiful white throat.

==

FromTo See the Queen.

Today in:

2020: A Small Moment, Cornelius Eady
2019:You Meet Someone and Later You Meet Their Dancing and You Have to Start Again, David Welch
2018:Henry Clay’s Mouth, Thomas Lux
2017:When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me, Tracy K. Smith
2016:Eve Recollecting the Garden, Grace Bauer
2015:from I Love A Broad Margin To My Life, Maxine Hong Kingston
2014:Gift, Czeslaw Milosz
2013:This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin
2012:We Did Not Make Ourselves, Michael Dickman
2011:Happiness (3), Jean Valentine
2010:When I Think, Jeanne Marie Beaumont
2009:The Poem, Franz Wright
2008:Morning Poem, Robin Becker
2007:Supple Cord, Naomi Shihab Nye
2006:Wish For a Young Wife, Theodore Roethke
2005:The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy, Jeffrey McDaniel

The World Has Need of You
Ellen Bass

everything here seems to need us…
—Rilke

I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.

==

More like this: Einstein’s Happiest Moment// All Objects Reveal Something About the Body// A Short History of the Apple

On this day in:

2020: Annus Mirabilis, R. A. Villanueva
2019:This Page Ripped Out and Rolled into a Ball, Brendan Constantine
2018:Winter Stars, Larry Levis
2017:In That Other Fantasy Where We Live Forever, Wanda Coleman
2016:The cat’s song, Marge Piercy
2015:The Embrace, Mark Doty
2014:No. 6, Charles Bukowski
2013:A Schoolroom in Haiti, Kenneth Koch
2012:Track 5: Summertime, Jericho Brown
2011:Death, Is All, Ana Božičević
2010:Heaven, William Heyen
2009:April in Maine, May Sarton
2008:Making Love to Myself, James L. White
2007:Publication Date, Franz Wright
2006:Living in the Body, Joyce Sutphen
2005:Aberration (The Hubble Space Telescope before repair), Rebecca Elson