Poetry

Hymn, With Birds and Cats

I will praise my failures. I will praise
What I have not accomplished and do not possess
Because it has led to this moment
At ten in the morning on a smoky October day,
Sitting on the bedroom floor in my bathrobe,
Treated to a rectangle of overcast sky
And a poplar whose yellow leaves,
Half blown away, are as artfully arranged
As the characters in a haiku.

I will praise my too-small apartment
With its cheap kitchen cabinets
And mismatched furniture, its jumbo litter box
Stealing half the front closet whose carpet
Is covered with pebbles. I will praise
The dun-colored carpet itself, gayer for wine stains,
And my cardboard box of a desk.
Because I have sat cross-legged there
And felt ideas alight on my shoulder like cardinals.
And my home was a mansion then,
A paradise of the new, which it is for the cats anyway
As they sleep under spider plants
In rich strips of sun.

I will praise my body whose middle-aged belly
Protrudes and whose knees have grown knobby,
This foolish animal shape who guilelessly
Stared back at me from the full-length mirror
Of a doctor’s office two days ago.
Because it is still rain- and sun-loving matter,
the same that splashed lake water as a child
And rolled like a colt in June grass.
And I am never more satisfied than when I am
Walking or pushing or lifting with it,
Loving even the ache that follows,
That assurance I am rooted with earth.

And I will praise my manila folders of failed
And abandoned poems, poems that will never be
Published or read by anyone except me.
Because not one was not perfect when first
Budding, not one did not leave the fragrance
Of possibility between these walls
Or deepen what decency I share
With damp soil and oak trees and the geese
Honking high above clouds just now,
Esteemed messengers I can hear but not see
As I sit drinking coffee, amazed
The ungainliness of my life should coalesce
Into something so sleek, so elegant,
As this sudden happiness.

Francis Marie Tolf

Mid-October in Central Park, one of the elms
has changed early, burning with a light
grown accustomed to its own magnificence,

imperceptible until this moment when it becomes
more than itself, more than a ritual
of self-immolation. I think of sacrifice

as nourishment, the light feeding bark and veins
and blood and skin, the tree better off
for wanting nothing more. I used to imagine

the chakra like this—a hole in the soul
from the top of the head, where the light of knowing
can shimmer through. In the summer of 1979

I saw that light shoot from my brother’s forehead
as we sat chanting in a temple in Manila.
He didn’t see it pulsing like a bulb in a storm,

but he said he felt the warmth that wasn’t warmth
but peace. And I, who have never been
so privileged, since then have wondered

if we believed everything because not to believe
was to be unhappy. I’ve seen that light elsewhere
—on a river in Bangkok, or pixeled across

the shattered façades of Prague—but it is here
where I perceive its keenest rarity, where I know
it has passed over all the world, has given shape

to cities, cast glamour over the eyes of the skeptic,
so that it comes to me informed with the wonder
of many beings. I can’t begin to say how infinite I feel,

as though I were one of many a weightless absence
touches, and out of this a strange transformation:
the soul ringed with changes, as old as a tree,

as old as light. I am always learning the same thing:
there is no other way to live than this,
still, and grateful, and full of longing.

Eric Gamalinda