Here's a poem that will make you feel better about whatever's come in your mailbox today. I actually heard Carl Dennis read when I was at UT. He was funny, darkly ironic, and just about the most unassuming-looking person you could imagine. He loves to imagine absurd (and yet nevertheless nagging) ethical dilemmas.

This poem was on my bedroom door for a long time while I was in college. I even bought the book it's from, Practical Gods, which was no small thing back in the days of box wine and minimum-wage jobs.

Progressive Health

By Carl Dennis

We here at Progressive Health would like to thank you

For being one of the generous few who’ve promised

To bequeath your vital organs to whoever needs them.

Now we’d like to give you the opportunity

To step out far in front of the other donors

By acting a little sooner than you expected,

Tomorrow, to be precise, the day you’re scheduled

To come in for your yearly physical.  Six patients

Are waiting this very minute in intensive care

Who will likely die before another liver

And spleen and pairs of lungs and kidneys

Match theirs as closely as yours do.  Twenty years,

Maybe more, are left you, granted, but the gain

Of these patients might total more than a century.

To you, of course, one year of your life means more

Than six of theirs, but to no one else,

No one as concerned with the general welfare

As you’ve claimed to be.  As for your poems—

The few you may have it in you to finish—

Even if we don’t judge them by those you’ve written,

Even if we assume you finally stage a breakthrough,

It’s doubtful they’ll raise one Lazarus from a grave

Metaphoric or literal.  But your body is guaranteed

To work six wonders.  As for the gaps you’ll leave

As an aging bachelor in the life of friends,

They’ll close far sooner than the open wounds

Soon to be left in the hearts of husbands and wives,

Parents and children, by the death of the six

Who now are failing.  Just imagine how grateful

They’ll all be when they hear of your grand gesture.

Summer and winter they’ll visit your grave, in shifts,

For as long as they live, and stoop to tend it,

And leave it adorned with flowers or holly wreaths,

While your friends, who are just as forgetful

As you are, just as liable to be distracted,

Will do no more than a makeshift job of upkeep.

If the people you’ll see tomorrow pacing the halls

Of our crowded facility don’t move you enough,

They’ll make you at least uneasy.  No happy future

Is likely in store for a man like you whose conscience

Will ask him to certify every hour from now on

Six times as full as it was before, your work

Six times as strenuous, your walks in the woods

Six times as restorative as anyone else’s.

Why be a drudge, staggering to the end of your life

Under this crushing burden when, with a single word,

You could be a god, one of the few gods

Who, when called on, really listens?

Possibly I have given the impression that my days teaching in Houston were nothing but hard work and success. This is what happens when you tell about challening experiences through the blessed buffer of years. In fact, though, this page from an old writer's notebook reminded me how teaching can equal great challenge (and great rewards), but also some pretty big heartbreaks at times, especially when best efforts are met with disregard or outright hostility.

Here's the next page from my writer's notebook, full of antidotes for dealing with a doozy of a bad day. (A transcript follows in case you can't read my scribbles.)

From Brian Andreas's Traveling Light:

No hurt survives for long without our help.

Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me, but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That's what takes a real hero.

Wisdom from A.P. (aka Arnulfo):

Just do your job tomorrow, and that'll be enough.

Stop worrying about the whole world.

Know what you are going to do when things don't go how you expect them to.

Don't expect things to go a certain way.

Know who you are on the inside, and let that be enough.

This is a rant. So forgive me for putting aside my usual lovable self to be a horrible cranky pants.  I think I'd be forced to either quit writing or disown "The Road Not Taken" if I were Robert Frost. Not because I don't like the poem--it's a grand poem--but because everybody and their grandma keeps shitting on it with a smile by quoting that blasted "road less traveled" bit without bothering to read the rest of the poem.

I wish I had a dollar for every graduation speech, motivational pamphlet, card, or blog post that earnestly reprints this last bit of the poem:

Oh, the homegrown American spirit! Oh, non-conformity! Oh, independence! 

Only... not. Folks, the last part is a jab at how we recast our past decisions after the fact. This is what the speaker imagines himself saying "with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence" even though the paths were actually "about the same." Read the whole damn poem, and see that what Frost is doing is making fun of how we reframe an arbitrary decision (the implications of which we'll never fully know) into a grand, pioneering act.

For the love of Frost, read the whole poem and stop quoting the last lines out of context. Please. Please. Please.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It turns out that April is both poetry appreciation month and sexual assault awareness month. This conjunction made me think of a Barbara Kingsolver poem that maps reflections about sexual assault onto a description of the aftermath of a burglary. Forget my preliminaries... just read the poem:

This House I Cannot Leave

By Barbara Kingsolver

My friend describes the burglar:

how he touched her clothes, passed through rooms

leaving himself there,

                                             staining the space

between walls, a thing she can see.

She doesn’t care what he took, only

that he has driven her out, she can’t

stay in this house

she loved, scraped the colors of four families

from the walls and painted with her own

and planted things.

She is leaving fruit trees behind.

She will sell, get out, maybe

another neighborhood.

                                                  People say

Get over it. The market isn’t good. They advise

that she think about cash to mortgage

and the fruit trees

but the trees have stopped growing for her.

I offer no advice.

I tell her I know, she will leave. I am thinking

Of the man who broke and entered

Me.

         Of the years it took to be home again

in this house I cannot leave.

Just want to say two things. (1) Sexual assault happens (and has happened) to many, many more people than we realize: mothers, sisters, lovers, brothers, friends, children. (2) Healing also happens. Slowly, as Kingsolver indicates in those last lines. Because the healing has to happen at the scene of the crime: in our violated selves.

Today, I treat you to a favorite poem by Mark Strand, "Keeping Things Whole." It goes everywhere with me in the pocket of my writer's notebook. It's mostly memorized. I still remember where I was sitting when I first read this poem. I was in a Parlin classroom on the UT-Austin campus, and spring was coming. There was construction going on outside. I could hear a squirrel, and the poem made me cry.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fil the spaces

where my body's been.

We all have reasons for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

Visit this poem and others at POETRY OUT LOUD.