Lot's Wife

LOT'S Wife


Sometime soon after the embers cooled, 
after dust clouds settled, after the last strings 
of smoke, hoisted by desert breezes, cleared the air, 


they must have come, people of those three cities 
remaining, to pick among the charred bones, 
the rubble of what was once temple and house,


stable and brothel; to kick at stones; to tug 
at handles of buckets, blades of shovels and spades. 
Later, raising ash plumes in the scorched plain, 


cloths at their mouths and noses, eyes burning, 
neither fearful nor repentant but full of wonder, 
full of the scavenger's overabundant hope, 


they would have found her--even as now 
some men encounter the woman of their dreams 
(beauty of the movie screen, princess they capture 

with a camera's flash, girl whose finger brushes theirs
when she takes their card at the market register)--
found her, that is, not as-the person she was 


but as whom they needed her to be, and, man or woman, 
each of them would have wanted a piece of her. 
Standing in that wasted landscape, 


she must have seemed a statue erected there 
as a tribute to human frailty, white, crystallized, 
her head turned back as if in longing to be the girl 


she had been in the city she had known. 
And they must have stood there, as we do, 
a bit awestruck, taking her in for a time,


and then, with chisel and knife, spike and buckle, 
chipped at her violendy and stuffed their leathern 
pouches full of her common salt, salt with which


to season for awhile their meat, their daily bread.


Gary J. Whitehead


From The New Yorker January 2, 2012 

Pennsylvania Pastoral

PENNSYLVANIA PASTORAL


The car stops, not because
the driver decided they'd gone 
far enough or because the woman
said "1'm sick" or the boy 
had to pee. It simply stopped 
because it had to, and when the
three get out and he pops
the hood they discover the fan 
belt has vanished and the engine
shut down, wisely. It could 
be worse, it could always be
worse--a cylinder could seize 
for no foreseeable reason and send
them into irreversible debt. 
Cars are, after all, only 
machines and this one-- 
a '48 Pontiac 6--is 

aged and whimsical. It could
be much worse--the Mohave
in mid-July with no shade 
in sight or northern Ontario 
in winter, the snow already burning
the backs of Father's hands and
freighting Mother's lashes.
They've stalled descending into a gully 
in rural Pennsylvania, a quiet
place of maples leafing out,
a place with its own creek 
high in its banks and beyond 
the creek a filling station, 
its lights still on after dawn, 
the red and green pumps ready to
give, and someone there, half-awake. 


Philip Levine

From The New Yorker January 2, 2012

Love Poem with Toast

Poem: "Love Poem with Toast"

by Miller Williams, from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems. © University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.










The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

From the Writer's Almanac

Droplets

Poem: "Droplets" by C.K. Williams, from Love About Love. © Ausable Press.


Droplets 


Even when the rain falls relatively hard,
only one leaf at a time of the little tree
you planted on the balcony last year,
then another leaf at its time, and one more,
is set trembling by the constant droplets,

but the rain, the clouds flocked over the city,
you at the piano inside, your hesitant music
mingling with the din of the downpour,
the gush of rivulets loosed from the eaves,
the iron railings and flowing gutters,


all of it fuses in me with such intensity
that I can't help wondering why my longing
to live forever has so abated that it hardly
comes to me anymore, and never as it did,
as regret for what I might not live to live,


but rather as a layering of instants like this,
transient as the mist drawn from the rooftops,
yet emphatic as any note of the nocturne
you practice, and, the storm faltering, fading
into its own radiant passing, you practice again.