my romantic tryst with cancer

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. - by Miller Williams from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems, 1999

"...some kind of light is coming from her head. Even the geraniums look curious, and the bees, if they were here, would buzz suspiciously around her hair, looking for the door in her corona. We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy, we've all tried to start a fire, and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own. In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty, and when we see it, what we do is natural: we take our burned hands out of our pockets, and clap." - by Tony Hoagland excerpted from Grammar published in Donkey Gospel, 1998

When will we let go of our pasts, and embrace the future, and what if that future is less textured but more calm, less fraught but more self affirming, less lived, but longer?

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight, Out of the room that lets you feel secure. Infinity is open to your sight. Whoever you are. With eyes that have forgotten how to see From viewing things already too well-known, Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree And put it in the heavens: tall, alone. And you have made the world and all you see. It ripens like the words still in your mouth. And when at last you comprehend its truth, Then close your eyes and gently set it free. (After Rilke) - Dana Gioia

I found this on the seat beside me on the Queen Street streetcar on a night when my own heart felt broken. In the foggy depths of this brooding night, two strangers are hurting. Perhaps it is for the best. Perhaps of such sadness is poetry born. Perhaps in such wrought moments, people find  futures that are different from their presents. In such grief perhaps, is promise born... But perhaps, it could also have been very different. There is never enough love in this world for there to be too much. Perhaps they made it right. Perhaps they talked honestly, and with integrity. Perhaps two bodies lie together again tonight, making and being love, breathing each other in, legs locked, arms around each other. I will never know what that crumpled note was written about, or how or why I came to find it. Like so many things in life, that defy reason, that dare fate, this one does too. I just know that if I had to choose, I would take the second ending- that was about love, not loss- thou

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?  - Mary Oliver from New and Selected Poems, 1992 Beacon Press, Boston, MA, Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver.

by Aaron Fogel Fellow compositors and pressworkers! I, Chief Printer Frank Steinman, having worked fifty- seven years at my trade, and served five years as president of the Holliston Printer's Council, being of sound mind though near death, leave this testimonial concerning the nature of printers' errors. First: I hold that all books and all printed matter have errors, obvious or no, and that these are their most significant moments, not to be tampered with by the vanity and folly of ignorant, academic textual editors. Second: I hold that there are three types of errors, in ascending order of importance: One: chance errors of the printer's trembling hand not to be corrected incautiously by foolish professors and other such rabble because trembling is part of divine creation itself. Two: silent, cool sabotage by the printer, the manual laborer whose protests have at times taken this historical form, covert interferences not to be

by Ted Kooser Today, from a distance, I saw you walking away, and without a sound the glittering face of a glacier slid into the sea. An ancient oak fell in the Cumberlands, holding only a handful of leaves, and an old woman scattering corn to her chickens looked up for an instant. At the other side of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times the size of our own sun exploded and vanished, leaving a small green spot on the astronomer's retina as he stood on the great open dome of my heart with no one to tell. from Solo: A Journal of Poetry, Premiere Issue, Spring 1996 Copyright 1996 by Ted Kooser .