day fifteen

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

 _____________ & _________________

Bonnard’s Nudes

His wife. Forty years he painted her.
Again and again. The nude in the last painting
the same young nude as the first. His wife.

As he remembered her young. As she was young.
His wife in her bath. At her dressing table
in front of the mirror. Undressed.

His wife with her hands under her breasts
looking out on the garden.
The sun bestowing warmth and color.

Every living things in bloom there.
She young and tremulous and more desirable.
When she died, he painted a while longer. 

A few landscapes. Then died.
And was put down next to her.
His young wife.

Raymond Carver

day fourteen

The Shoe 

Each time I relived it, after the worst
was over, I’d say to myself, as if my fate
would solace me,
”at least I’ll never have to do this again.”
It is true that I’ll never have to kiss his
dying hands, now dead. I’ll never have
to find where he left his coffee mug, now mine.

I’ll never have to wash his hair or repair
his typewriter or stock the medicine stand.
I’ll never even have to find places
that can use his clothes because
some friend-I don’t remember who-
did that for me when I could not. I
distributed his portrait, I picked up his poems.

I thanked friends and children for helping me
hold on. I made braids out of dead funeral
flowers to border the rooms where
once he breathed and took on the heavy
chores, gladly, of loving me. I sprinkled
one teaspoon of his ashes on our bereft bed
and slept with them. They scourged my body.

But when that single shoe, the mate I thought
had got sent off with its partner, showed up
today, alone, crouching behind the couch, alive
with Effie’s opulent Turkish angora fur, I knew
solace was something I could neither seek nor
find. Oh beloved! I know I am an old woman.
But I cannot live in your shoe.

Kathryn Starbuck

day eleven

Topography

Sharon Olds

day ten

The Sailor

In my movie the boat goes under
An he alone survives the night in the cold ocean,
Swimming he hopes in a shoreward direction.
Daylight and he’s still afloat, pawing the water
And doesn’t yet know he’s only fifty feet from shore.
He goes under for what will be the last time
But only a few feet down scrapes bottom.
He’s suddenly a changed man and half hops, half swims
The remaining distance, hauls himself waterlogged
Partway up the beach before collapsing into sleep.
As he dreams the tide comes in
And rolls him back to sea.