Poet's Petard # 10 – December 2021

A Wish List

Recently a friend and I challenged each other with the question: “What's on your secret list of wishes right now, the one likely to make you the most happy?” Pretty simple and straightforward, right?

Our only rule was nothing hugely impossible or vague. Doesn't have to be a material possession.Take advantage of this opportunity to be totally selfish. But be careful what you wish for.

Right now I'd spend my wish on a room with a floor-to-ceiling window (at least 12 feet high) for this time of year, when the daylight hours are moving into the single digits. I would bask and bask. . . .

Think about how foolish this question would have sounded to the wise and kindly centaur Cheiron who was born immortal like his fellow centaurs, but was shot by accident with a poison-tipped arrow from the bow of the hero Heracles. Cheiron couldn't wish his way out of this paradox – eternal life with a festering wound so painful that he finally chose the lesser of evils and petitioned the gods for the ability to die. His request was granted.

Song-writer Soham Patel makes a choice (in her poem “Ultra Orator Spell”):

"My goal isn't to unfold popular music once more,
rather it is to speak now
to how the animals say it better."

Lawrence Raab, similarly, goes out to the edge to find the center, in his poem Even Clearer:

"Many times the world has ended,
and many times things turned out
a lot better than they are right now.
Don't be fooled by what you can see.
Think back: the story of your life,
the one that happened, is enclosed
by the shadows of others,
every moment more deeply surrounded,
the way evening crosses a meadow
and climbs the walls of a house,
though inside a light still burns."

Reginald Gibbons reminds us that whatever we wish for is always likely to be much larger than we could have imagined (from “After Mandelshtam”):

"The rain-barrel's full,
there's ice in its mouth.
Smash the ice – comets
and stars melt away
like salt, the water
darkens and the earth
on which the barrel
stands is transparent
underfoot, and there
too are galaxies,
ghost-pale and roaring
silently in the
seven-hundred-odd
chambers of the mind."

And Brenda Hillman, with the final stanza of her poem “Some Kinds of Forever Visit You,” granted another wish for me – one I didn't even know I had:

            "Here comes the fond
                mild winter; other
                   realms are noisy
                   & unanimous. You tap
            the screen & dream
                  while waiting: four
                      kinds of forever
                   visit you today:
            something, nothing,
            everything & art,
                greater than you are
                      & of your making –"