We knew the World Backwards and Forwards

We knew the world backwards and forwards
So small it fit in a handshake
So easy it could be described in a smile
As plain as the echoes of old truths and a prayer

History did not greet us with triumphant fanfare
It flung dirty sand in our eyes
Ahead of us were distant roads leading nowhere
Poisoned wells, bitter bread

The spoils of war is our knowledge of the world
So large it fits in a handshake
So hard it could be described in a smile
As strange as the echoes of old truths and a prayer.

MAY 16, 1973

One of those many dates

that no longer ring a bell.

Where I was going that day,

what I was doing --- I don't know.

Whom I met, what we talked about,

I can't recall.

If a crime had been committed nearby,

I wouldn't have had an alibi.

The sun flared and died

beyond my horizons.

The earth rotated

unnoted in my notebooks.

I'd rather think

that I'd temporarily died

than that I kept on living

and can't remember a thing.

I wasn't a ghost, after all.

I breathed, I ate,

I walked.

My steps were audible,

my fingers surely left

their prints on doorknobs.

Mirrors caught my reflection.

I wore something or other in such-and-such a color.

Somebody must have seen me.

Maybe I found something that day

that had been lost.

Maybe I lost something that turned up late.

I was filled with feelings and sensations.

Now all that's like

a line of dots in parentheses.

Where was I hiding out,

where did I bury myself?

Not a bad trick

to vanish before my own eyes.

I shake my memory.

Maybe something in its brances

that has been asleep for years

will start up with a flutter.

No.

Clearly I'm asking too much.

Nothing less than one whole second.

On Poets, Prophets and a Tribute to Wislawa Szymborska

"The overriding reality of the prophets is that they are characteristically poets. Poets have no advice to give people. They only want people to see differently to re-vision life.

The enemies of the poem are the managers of the status quo.

The poets want us to re-experience the present world under a different set of metaphors and they want us to entertain an alternative world not yet visible.

In Memory of Wislawa Szymborska

Some books I love so much I want to buy them again. So, at Goodwill one day I picked up a copy of Wislawa Szymborska’s View with a Grain of Sand; and because of what I found inside, its home is now on my shelf right next to my other copy of View with a Grain of Sand. In the corner of its first page, in the slanted cursive of an older lady, is the name “Catherine Hobart,” and underneath, “make copies and read for 60th,” and underneath that, “(didn’t).” On page 175, I found the poem she didn’t recite on her birthday, inscribed “for 60th”: “No Title Required,” about the poet sitting under a tree and watching a butterfly and reflecting how each moment has a “fertile past” and is as woven into the “tapestry of circumstance” as even the most renowned moments. The last lines read:

I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.

“I’m no longer sure” has been underlined in pencil.