Ethics - Linda Pastan

In ethics class so many years ago our teacher asked this question every fall: if there were a fire in a museum which would you save, a Rembrandt painting or an old woman who hadn't many years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs caring little for pictures or old age we'd opt one year for life, the next for art and always half-heartedly. Sometimes the woman borrowed my grandmother's face leaving her usual kitchen to wander some drafty, half imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand before a real Rembrandt, old woman, or nearly so, myself. The colors within this frame are darker than autumn, darker even than winter--the browns of earth, though earth's most radiant elements burn through the canvas. I know now that woman and painting and season are almost one and all beyond saving by children.
A New Poet
Finding a new poet is like finding a new wildflower out in the woods. You don't see

its name in the flower books, and nobody you tell believes in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows down the whole length of the page. In fact the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea on a foggy day - the odor of truth and of lying.

And the words are so familiar, so strangely new, words you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil or a pen or even a paintbrush, if only there had been a flower.
Emily Dickinson
We think of hidden in a white dress among the folded linens and sachets of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight sending jellies and notes with no address to all the wondering Amherst neighbors.
Eccentric as New England weather the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle, blew two half imagined lovers off.
Yet legend won't explain the sheer sanity of vision, the serious mischief of language, the economy of pain.
Home For Thanksgiving
The gathering family throws shadows around us, it is the late afternoon
Of the family.

There is still enough light to see all the way back, but at the windows that light is wasting away.

Soon we will be nothing but silhouettes: the sons' as harsh as the fathers'.

Soon the daughters will take off their aprons as trees take off their leaves for winter.

Let us eat quickly-- let us fill ourselves up. the covers of the album are closing behind us.
Jump Cabling
When our cars touched
When you lifted the hood of mine
To see the intimate workings underneath,
When we were bound together
By a pulse of pure energy,
When my car like the princess
In the tale woke with a start,
I thought why not ride the rest of the way together.
Love Poem
I want to write you a love poem as headlong as our creek after thaw when we stand on its dangerous banks and watch it carry with it every twig every dry leaf and branch in its path every scruple when we see it so swollen with runoff that even as we watch we must grab each other and step back we must grab each other or get our shoes soaked we must grab each other
Marks
My husband gives me an A for last night's supper, an incomplete for my ironing, a B plus in bed.
My son says I am average, an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
My daughter believes in Pass/Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait 'til they learn
I'm dropping out.
Meditation By The Stove
I have banked the fires of my body into a small but steady blaze here in the kitchen where the dough has a life of its own, breathing under its damp cloth like a sleeping child; where the real child plays under the table, pretending the tablecloth is a tent, practicing departures; where a dim brown bird dazzled by light has flown into the windowpane and lies stunned on the pavement-- it was never simple, even for birds, this business of nests.
The innocent eye sees nothing, Auden says, repeating what the snake told Eve, what Eve told Adam, tired of gardens, wanting the fully lived life.
But passion happens like an accident
I could let the dough spill over the rim of the bowl, neglecting to punch it down, neglecting the child who waits under the table, the mild tears already smudging her eyes.
We grow in such haphazard ways.
Today I feel wiser than the bird.
I know the window shuts me in, that when I open it the garden smells will make me restless.
And I have banked the fires of my body into a small domestic flame for others to warm their hands on for a while.
Pears
Some say it was a pear
Eve ate.
Why else the shape of the womb, or of the cello
Whose single song is grief for the parent tree?
Why else the fruit itself tawny and sweet which your lover over breakfast lets go your pear- shaped breast to reach for?
Petit Dejeuner
I sing a song of the croissant and of the wily French who trick themselves daily back to the world for its sweet ceremony.
Ah to be reeled up into morning on that crisp, buttery hook.
Prosody 101
When they taught me that what mattered most was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping over the page but the variations in that line and the tension produced on the ear by the surprise of difference,
I understood yet didn't understand exactly, until just now, years later in spring, with the trees already lacy and camellias blowsy with middle age,
I looked out and saw what a cold front had done to the garden, sweeping in like common language, unexpected in the sensuous extravagance of a Maryland spring.
There was a dark edge around each flower as if it had been outlined in ink instead of frost, and the tension I felt between the expected and actual was like that time I came to you, ready to say goodbye for good, for you had been a cold front yourself lately, and as I walked in you laughed and lifted me up in your arms as if I too were lacy with spring instead of middle aged like the camellias, and I thought: so this is Poetry!
Self-Portrait
After Adam Zagajewski

I am child to no one, mother to a few, wife for the long haul.
On fall days I am happy with my dying brethren, the leaves, but in spring my head aches from the flowery scents.
My husband fills a room with Mozart which I turn off, embracing the silence as if it were an empty page waiting for me alone to fill it.
He digs in the black earth with his bare hands. I scrub it from the creases of his skin, longing for the kind of perfection that happens in books.
My house is my only heaven.
A red dog sleeps at my feet, dreaming of the manic wings of flushed birds.
As the road shortens ahead of me
I look over my shoulder to where it curves back to childhood, its white line bisecting the real and the imagined the way the ridgepole of the spine divides the two parts of the body, leaving the soft belly in the center vulnerable to anything.
As for my country, it blunders along as well intentioned as Eve choosing cider and windfalls, oblivious to the famine soon to come.
I stir pots, bury my face in books, or hold a telephone to my ear as if its cord were the umbilicus of the world whose voices still whisper to me even after they have left their bodies.
Shadblow
Because the shad are swimming in our waters now,

breaching the skin of the river with their tarnished silvery fins,

heading upstream straight for our tables where already

knives and forks gleam in anticipation, these trees in the woods break

into flower--small, white flags surrendering to the season.
Something About The Trees
I remember what my father told me:
There is an age when you are most yourself.
He was just past fifty then,
Was it something about the trees that make him speak?

There is an age when you are most yourself.
I know more than I did once.
Was it something about the trees that make him speak?
Only a single leaf had turned so far.

I know more than I did once.
I used to think he'd always be the surgeon.
Only a single leaf had turned so far,
Even his body kept its secrets.

I used to think he'd always be the surgeon,
My mother was the perfect surgeon's wife.
Even his body kept its secrets.
I thought they both would live forever.

My mother was the perfect surgeon's wife,
I can still see her face at thirty.
I thought they both would live forever.
I thought I'd always be their child.

I can still see her face at thirty.
When will I be most myself?
I thought I'd always be their child.
In my sleep it's never winter.

When will I be most myself?
I remember what my father told me.
In my sleep it's never winter.
He was just past fifty then.
The Cossacks
For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year's Eve by counting my annual dead.

My mother, when she was dying, spoke to her visitors of books and travel, displaying serenity as a form of manners, though
I could tell the difference.

But when I watched you planning for a life you knew you'd never have, I couldn't explain your genuine smile in the face of disaster. Was it denial

laced with acceptance? Or was it generations of being English--
Brontë's Lucy in Villette living as if no fire raged beneath her dun-colored dress.

I want to live the way you did, preparing for next year's famine with wine and music as if it were a ten-course banquet.
But listen: those are hoofbeats on the frosty autumn air.
The Happiest Day
It was early May, I think a moment of lilac or dogwood when so many promises are made it hardly matters if a few are broken.
My mother and father still hovered in the background, part of the scenery like the houses I had grown up in, and if they would be torn down later that was something I knew but didn't believe. Our children were asleep or playing, the youngest as new as the new smell of the lilacs, and how could I have guessed their roots were shallow and would be easily transplanted.
I didn't even guess that I was happy.
The small irritations that are like salt on melon were what I dwelt on, though in truth they simply made the fruit taste sweeter.
So we sat on the porch in the cool morning, sipping hot coffee. Behind the news of the day-- strikes and small wars, a fire somewhere--
I could see the top of your dark head and thought not of public conflagrations but of how it would feel on my bare shoulder.
If someone could stop the camera then... if someone could only stop the camera and ask me: are you happy? perhaps I would have noticed how the morning shone in the reflected color of lilac. Yes, I might have said and offered a steaming cup of coffee.
The New Dog
Into the gravity of my life, the serious ceremonies of polish and paper and pen, has come

this manic animal whose innocent disruptions make nonsense of my old simplicities--

as if I needed him to prove again that after all the careful planning, anything can happen.
To A Daughter Leaving Home
When I taught you at eight to ride a bicycle, loping along beside you as you wobbled away on two round wheels, my own mouth rounding in surprise when you pulled ahead down the curved path of the park,
I kept waiting for the thud of your crash as I sprinted to catch up, while you grew smaller, more breakable with distance, pumping, pumping for your life, screaming with laughter, the hair flapping behind you like a handkerchief waving goodbye. Vermilion
Pierre Bonnard would enter the museum with a tube of paint in his pocket and a sable brush.
Then violating the sanctity of one of his own frames he'd add a stroke of vermilion to the skin of a flower.
Just so I stopped you at the door this morning and licking my index finger, removed an invisible crumb from your vermilion mouth. As if at the ritual moment of departure
I had to show you still belonged to me.
As if revision were the purest form of love.
What We Want
What we want is never simple.
We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names-- now they want us.
But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there even in full sun.
Wind Chill
The door of winter is frozen shut,

and like the bodies of long extinct animals, cars

lie abandoned wherever the cold road has taken them.

How ceremonious snow is, with what quiet severity

it turns even death to a formal arrangement. Alone at my window, I listen to the wind,

to the small leaves clicking in their coffins of ice. http://www.poemhunter.com/linda-pastan/biography/ Biography of Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan is an American poet of Jewish background. She was born in New York on May 27, 1932. Today, she lives in Potomac, Maryland with her husband Ira Pastan, an accomplished physician and researcher.

She is known for writing short poems that address topics like family life, domesticity, motherhood, the female experience, aging, death, loss and the fear of loss, as well as the fragility of life and relationships.

Linda Pastan has published at least 12 books of poetry and a number of essays. Her awards include the Dylan Thomas Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award (Poetry Society of America), the Bess Hokin Prize (Poetry Magazine), the 1986 Maurice English Poetry Award (for A Fraction of Darkness), the Charity Randall Citation of the International Poetry Forum, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She also received the Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award.

Two of her collections of poems were nominated for the National Book Award and one for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/linda-pastan Linda Pastan
b. 1932

Poet Linda Pastan was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won theMademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. After ten years at home, her husband urged her to return to poetry. Since the early 1970s, Pastan has produced quiet lyrics that focus on themes like marriage, parenting, and grief. She is interested in the anxieties that exist under the surface of everyday life.

Pastan's many awards include the Dylan Thomas award, a Pushcart Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in 2003. Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for 20 years. She is the author of over twelve books of poetry and essays. Her PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998) were finalists for the National Book Award; The Imperfect Paradise (1988) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her recent collections include The Last Uncle (2001), Queen of a Rainy Country (2006) and the forthcoming Traveling Light (2011). She lives in Potomac, Maryland.

(Poetry Foundation, 2011)