Poetry, April 3

So the poem I was going to do for April 2nd is entirely too awesome to be just backlogged, but I want this poem for today, so I'm going to keep looking for one for yesterday, and go ahead and post today's. It's kind of for Quark (pretend there's an "e" on the end of the title), and kind of because I love the other poem it references--OH. I KNOW. I'LL DO THAT POEM FOR YESTERDAY. Because sadly we didn't meet up with any hot title-of-that-poemers, but our journey was awesome all the same. SAFE TRAVELS PEGGY.

Anyway, I found this poem in the book Good Poems, which I bought for myself today as an early birthday present. It's basically, uh, poems that Garrison Keillor liked from doing the Writer's Almanac. So you can actually listen to the poem being read here. (Also, Muddy Waters? I'm pretty sure he lived up the road a ways from my great-aunt.) I am extraordinarily happy with this purchase. Just flipping through it and seeing poets' names is filling me with contentment.

So for today, for its references, its source, its title, and its beauty, from Linda Pastan:


Bess
When Bess, the landlord's black-eyed
daughter, waited for her highwayman
in the poem I learned by breathless
heart at twelve, it occurred to me

for the first time that my mild-eyed
mother Bess might have a life
all her own-a secret past
I couldn't enter, except in dreams.

That single sigh of a syllable
has passed like a keepsake
to this newest child, wrapped now
in the silence of sleep.

And in the dream I enter,
I could be holding my infant mother
in my arms: the same wide cheekbones,
the name indelible as a birthmark.