I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

—MARY OLIVER

Sure I Was Payed Well

but the money felt
like a thick stack of bills
had been folded once and crammed in my open mouth

so what I wanted to say
was blocked, or at the very least garbled
by the wad of dollars

and my jaws ached
with the strain of being held apart
by the cash. Though I tried to dress well

I wasn’t sure if people on the street
mocked me behind my back
for being so funny looking

with a mouth stuffed with currency.
Or maybe they didn’t see me at all
but only saw the clump of bills

that presed down on my tongue.
When I sought out others payed a smuch as me
I found myself calculating how thick

their gag of dollars was compared to mine. In any case
it was difficult to talk about the experience we had in common

since their words were hard to distinguish
through the money. And I confess
I was afraid to stick my fingers in behind

and lever the currency out; I was fearful of
what was dammed up
behind that cash,

of what the absence of those dollars
would release. And I was anxious
that the wad of money

would turn out to be an illusion:
a few genuine bills on the outside of the roll
and the rest only paper,

paper.

- Tom Wayman

Happiness

BY JANE KENYON

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

From Open Closed Open By Yehuda Amichai

And there are days here when everything is sails and more sails,
even though there's no sea in Jerusalem, not even a river.
Everything is sails: the flags, the prayer shawls, the black coats,
the monks' robes, the kaftans and kaffiyehs,
young women's dresses and headdresses,
Torah mantles and prayer rugs, feelings that swell in the wind
and hopes that set them sailing in other directions.
Even my father's hands, spread out in blessing,
my mother's broad face and Ruth's faraway death
are sails, all of them sails in the splendid regatta
on the two seas of Jerusalem:

the sea of memory and the sea of forgetting.