By Richard Siken
Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make
the new streets yours.
Trees outside the window and a big band sound that makes you feel like
everything’s okay,
a feeling that lasts for one song maybe,
the parentheses all clicking shut behind you.
The way we move through time and space, or only time.
The way it’s night for many miles, and then suddenly
it’s not, it’s breakfast
and you’re standing in the shower for over an hour,
holding the bar of soap up to the light.
I will keep watch. I will water the yard.
Knot the tie and go to work. Unknot the tie and go to sleep.
I sleep. I dream. I make up things
that I would never say. I say them very quietly.
The trees in wind, the streetlights on,
the click and flash of cigarettes
being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight.
It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
green beautiful green.
It’s simple: it isn’t over, it’s just begun. It’s green. It’s still green.
Richard Siken, "Meanwhile" from Crush. Copyright © 2005 by Richard Siken. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
Source:
Crush
(Yale University Press, 2005)Poet Bio
More By This Poet
Real Estate
My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out a...
More Poems about Living
From the Sky
When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.
Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).
A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).
Teens are writing love...
Secret Anti-Aging Formula
Her skin never wrinkled
And I used to wonder why
Her skin never wrinkled
As every year passed by
Look at Grandma's hands my mom would say
I bet you'd never think of how they stay that way
As she grew older
Her skin remained smooth and...
More Poems about Relationships
Water of the womb
It is winter in Anchorage, and I am only as tall as the shoveled snowbanks in the parking lot of the pink apartments. I am old enough to have chores but young enough not to fully understand frostbite. It is...
On Mindfulness
Home is a sound.
I can hear it
in the western meadowlark, the inlaid rocks in my driveway,
in the accent and slang
of my mom’s voice.
It’s engrained
in her stretched vowels,
in her smashed-together words, in her
hard Rs,
and in the word rez.
I grew up hearing...