Linda Pastan's Carnival Evening, Amazing Poetry

There are some poets you discover and you immediately just KNOW that they KNOW. I first heard one of Ms. Pastan's poems read by Garrison Keiller on "The Writer's Almanac" on NPR and I felt an immediate kinship with her words. I was instantly enthralled and felt illuminated from within.

I own this book as it's an edition of new and selected poems from several of her books and I must say it's a fine book of poems, one that I go to again and again. I had a hard time selecting only a few poems to post here because I have so many favorites. If you haven't yet discovered Ms. Pastan's poetry, then you're in for a delicious treat. Enjoy! Blessings, ~Marion

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.

Linda Pastan

____________________

IN THE MIDDLE OF A LIFE

Tonight I understand

for the first time

how a woman might choose

her own death

as easily

as if it were a dark plum

she picked

from a basket

of bright peaches.

It wouldn't be despair

that moved her

or hunger,

but a kind of stillness.

The evenings are full

of closure: the pale flowers

of the shamrock fold

their fragile wings, everything

promised has been given.

There is always

that moment

when the sun balanced

on the rim

of the world

falls

and is lost at sea,

and the sky seems huge

and beautiful without it.

I lie down on my bed

giving myself

to the white sheets

as the white sheets of a sloop

must give themselves

to the wind,

setting out on a journey---

the last perhaps

or even the first.

Linda Pastan

=============================

PAIN

More faithful

than lover or husband

it cleaves to you,

calling itself by your name

as if there had been a ceremony.

At night, you turn and turn

searching for the one

bearable position,

but though you may finally sleep

it wakens ahead of you.

How heavy it is,

displacing with its volume

your very breath.

Before, you seemed to weigh nothing,

your arms might have been wings.

Now each finger adds its measure;

you are pulled down by the weight

of your own hair.

And if your life should disappear ahead of you

you would not run after it.

Linda Pastan

*********************************

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.

Linda Pastan

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE BOOKSTALL

Just looking at them

I grow greedy, as if they were

freshly baked loaves

waiting on their shelves

to be broken open---that one

and that---and I make my choice

in a mood of exalted luck,

browsing among them

like a cow in sweetest pasture.

For life is continuous

as long as they wait

to be read---these inked paths

opening into the future, page

after page, every book

its own receding horizon,

And I hold them, one in each hand,

a curious ballast weighting me

here to the earth.

Linda Pastan