Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil
probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty
dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we
spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight
pours through
the open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here,
and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street
the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying
along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my
wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush:
This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called
that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter
to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more
and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in
the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a
cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m
speechless:
I am living, I remember you.
–Marie Howe
Mmm…
I was just listening to an interview on NPR where the poet (didn’t catch who – that always happens to me when I’m hopping in and out of the car) was talking about how poetry speaks truths that can’t be spoken through prose. And this really does that for me. So much truth.
Nice! It’s good to have whatever it is that prompts us to stop and notice: I am living.
I love this poem – I think she wrote it about her brother. I heard an NPR interview with her once a while back.
I think she captures the sacred in the ordinariness of everyday living.
[…] I’ve been remembering Marie Howe’s gorgeous poem, “What the Living Do.” It begins with a clogged kitchen sink: not a romantic image, but familiar, ordinary. […]
[…] entire volume of Robert Frost and a luminous chapbook by Gregory Orr, and returning to the words of Marie Howe and W.S. Merwin almost daily. The world can be a grim place, whether I’m battling the mundane […]