It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.) A whole year of fruit was lost,
each snowflake traveling down from space
to touch a blossom with its cold crystal.
Now it’s nearly spring again and inside the house
the one I married is forcing quince branches
in a jar of warm water. Oh, to be chosen, given a vessel,
shaped by another’s strictures and desire! In the end
what do any of us want? Having been woken early,
brought into the human world and made to respond,
the little buds swell with their new circumstance.
The air is dense with invisible paths. The shock of fullness?
That’s called life. That stab of light is the morning sun.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Jenny George’s “Eurydice” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,