What We Want - Waiting For My Life by Linda Pastan

Zinnia, after peaking...

I love Anais Nin so much...

Waiting For My Life

By Linda Pastan

I waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.

Sometimes my life coughed and coughed:
a stalled car about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like bird song
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life.

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"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else." ~Emily Dickinson

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There Are Poems

By Linda Pastan

There are poems

that are never written,

that simply move across

the mind

like skywriting

on a still day:

slowly the first word

drifts west,

the last letters dissolve

on the tongue,

and what is left

is the pure blue

of insight, without cloud

or comfort.

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"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance." ~Carl Sandburg

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What We Want

By Linda Pastan

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.

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In a dream you are never eighty. ~Anne Sexton

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