All We Have to Go By

 

As if I had dreamed the snow

into falling,
I wake to a world
blanked out
in its particulars,
nearly erased.

This is the silence
of absolute whiteness--the mute
birds nowhere
in sight, the car
and animal tracks
filled in,

all boundaries,
as in love,
ambiguous.
Sometimes all we have
to go by
is the weather:

a message
the snow writes
in invisible ink,
what the sky means
by its litmus
colors.

Now my breath
on the chilly window
forms a cloud
which may turn
to rain later,
somewhere else.

--Linda Pastan

[Subzero sunrise in Vermont]

Imaginary Conversation

 

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

--Linda Pastan

[Morning coffee in Kauai].

The Almanac of Last Things

From the almanac of last things
I choose the spider lily
for the grace of its brief
blossom, though I myself
fear brevity,

but I choose The Song of Songs
because the flesh
of those pomegranates
has survived
all the frost of dogma.

I choose January with its chill
lessons of patience and despair--and
August, too sun-struck for lessons.
I choose a thimbleful of red wine
to make my heart race,

then another to help me
sleep. From the almanac
of last things I choose you,
as I have done before.
And I choose evening

because the light clinging
to the window
is at its most reflective
just as it is ready
to go out.

--Linda Pastan, from Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 

Autumn

I want to mention
summer ending
without meaning the death
of somebody loved

or even the death
of the trees.
Today in the market
I heard a mother say

Look at the pumpkins,
it's finally autumn!
And the child didn't think
of the death of her mother

which is due before her own
but tasted the sound
of the words on her clumsy tongue:
pumpkin; autumn.

Let the eye enlarge
with all it beholds.
I want to celebrate
color, how one red leaf

flickers like a match
held to a dry branch,
and the whole world goes up
in orange and gold.

--Linda Pastan

[Photo taken at Equinox Nursery in Manchester, VT]

The Death of the Bee

The biography of the bee
is written in honey
and is drawing
to a close.

Soon the buzzing
plainchant of summer
will be silenced
for good;

the flowers, unkindled
will blaze
one last time
and go out.

And the boy nursing
his stung ankle this morning
will look back
at his brief tears

with something
like regret,
remembering the amber
taste of honey.

--Linda Pastan