Publisher’s Note
Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poet’s intent, whether it’s Walt Whitman’s lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeley’s lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds it—a space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on.
Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended—with the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structure—rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on. A little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side.
There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poem’s structure.
We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent—similar in fashion to the way Whitman’s lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break.
This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for them—and we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, we’ve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.
—Daniel Halpern, Publisher
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Publisher’s Note
1: How to Fly
How to Drink Water When There Is Wine
How to Have a Child
How to Cure Sweet Potatoes
How to Shear a Sheep
How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)
How to Give Thanks for a Broken Leg
How to Survive This
How to Do Absolutely Nothing
How to Lose That Stubborn Weight
How to Get a Divorce
How to Be Married
How to Knit a Sweater (a Realist’s Prayer)
How to Love Your Neighbor
How to Be Hopeful
2: Pellegrinaggio
I. Pellegrinaggio
II. The Roman Circus
III. On the Piazza
IV. Into the Abruzzo
V. In Torricella, Finding Her Mother’s House
VI. Circumnavigating Torricella Peligna
VII. Pompeii
VIII. At the Top of Mount Vesuvius
IX. Swimming in the Bay of Naples
X. On the Train to Sicily
XI. Monreale
XII. Lemon-Orchard Blue
XIII. The Road to Erice Is Paved with Intentions
XIV. Palermo
3: This Is How They Come Back to Us
Burying Ground
This Is How They Come Back to Us
Passing Death
The Visitation
Long Division
My Great-Grandmother’s Plate
Thank-You Note for a Quilt
My Mother’s Last Forty Minutes
4: Walking Each Other Home
By the Roots
My First Derby Party
Snow Day
Six Women Swimming Naked in the Ocean
Courtship Dance on Playa Luria
Will
Creation Stories
Meadowview Elementary Spelling Bee
Blow Me—
After
Walking Each Other Home
5: Dancing with the Devil
Thief
Dancing with the Devil: Advice for the Female Poet
Cage of Heaven
Insomniac Villanelle
My Afternoon with The Postman
6: Where It Begins
Where It Begins
7: The Nature of Objects
Ghost Pipes
The Nature of Objects
Come August, a Seven-Day Rain
Ephemera
Love Poem, with Birds
Swimming in the Wamba
Cradle
Down Under
The Hands of Trees
Mussel, Minnow
Matabele
Great Barrier
Forests of Antarctica
Notes
About the Author
Also by Barbara Kingsolver
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
How to Fly
How to Drink Water When There Is Wine
How to stay at this desk when the sun
is barefooting cartwheels over the grass—
How to step carefully on the path that pulls
for the fleet unfettered gait of a deer—
How to go home when the wood thrush
is promising the drunk liquid bliss of dusk—
How to resist the kiss, the body forbidden
that plucks the long vibrating string of want—
How to drink water when there is wine—
Once I knew all these brick-shaped things, took them
for the currency of survival.
Now I have lived long and I know better.
How to Have a Child
Begin on the day you decide
you are fit
to carry on.
Begin with a quailing heart
for here you stand
on the fault line.
Begin if you can at the beginning.
Begin with your mother,
with her grandfather,
the ones before him.
Think of their hands, all of them:
firm on the plow, the cradle,
the rifle butt, the razor strop;
trembling on the telegram,
the cheek of a lover,
the fact of a door.
Everything that can wreck a life
has been done before,
done to you, even. That’s all
inside you now.
Half of it you won’t think of.
The rest you wouldn’t dream of.
Go on.
How to Cure Sweet Potatoes
Dig them after the first light frost. Lay them
down in a shallow tray like cordwood,
like orphans in a dresser drawer. Cover them
with damp towels. Bring up the heat. In a
closet or spare room, you’ll want it hotter
than the worst summer day you remember
and that humid. A week of this will thicken
their skins, make them last for months
in your cellar, and turn all their starch to sugar.
Bear in mind this
is not a cure for anything
that was wrong with the sweet potato
that meant to be starchy, thanks, the better
to weather a winter in cold clay, then lean on its toes
and throw out reckless tendrils into one more spring.
Bear in mind also the ways that you were once
induced to last through the sermon, the meal,
the insufferable adult conversation, all the times
you wanted to be starchy but were made to be sweet.
Recall this surrender when you sit down to eat them.
Consider the direction of your grace.
How to Shear a Sheep
Walk to the barn
before dawn.
Take off your clothes.
Cast everything
on the ground:
your nylon jacket,
wool socks, and all.
Throw away
the cutting tools,
the shears that bite
like teeth at the skin
when hooves flail
and your elbow
comes up hard
under a panting throat:
no more of that.
Sing to them instead.
Stand naked
in the morning
with your entreaty.
Ask them to come,
lay down their wool
for love.
That should work.
It doesn’t.
How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)
Behold your body as water
and mineral worth, the selfsame
water that soon (from a tree’s
way of thinking, soon) will be
lifted through the elevator hearts
of a forest, returned to the sun
in a leaf-eyed gaze. And the rest!
All wordless leavings, the perfect
bonewhite ash of you: light
toward the unbodied breath of a bird.
Behold your elements reassembled
as pieces of sky, ascending
without regret, for you’ve been lucky
enough. Fallen for the last time into
a slump, the wrong crowd, love.
You’ve made the best deal.
You summitted the mountain
or you didn’t. Anything left undone
you can slip like a cloth bag of marbles
into the hands of a child
who will be none the wiser.
Imagine your joy on rising.
Repeat as necessary.
How to Give Thanks for a Broken Leg
Thank your stars that at least your bones
know how to knit, two sticks at work:
tibia, fibula, ribbed scarf as long as a winter.
The mindless tasks a body learns when it must.
Praise your claw-foot tub. Tie a sheet around its belly
like a saddle on a pig, to hammock your dry-docked
limb while the rest of you steeps. Sunk deep
in hot water up to your chin, dream of the troubles
you had, when trouble was still yours to make.
The doctor says eight weeks. Spend seven here.
Be glad for your cast that draws children with
permanent markers, like vandals and their graffiti
to the blighted parts of town. They mark out
their loves and territories, and you, the benevolent
mayor, will wear these concerns in public,
then throw them away when your term is up.
Concede your debt to life’s grammar, even as
it nailed you in one fell stroke from subject to object.
Praise the helping verbs, family hands that feed;
the surgical modifiers that pin you from shattered
to fixed to mended. Praise the careless syntax
of a life where, through steady misuse, a noun
grows feet: it turtles and outfoxes and one day,
with no one watching, steps out as a brand-new verb.
How to Survive This
O misery. Imperfect
universe of days stretched out
ahead, the string of pearls
and drops of venom on the web,
losses of heart, of life
and limb, news of the worst:
Remind me again
the day will come
when I look back amazed
at the waste of sorry salt
when I had no more than this
to cry about.
Now I lay me down.
I’m not there yet.
How to Do Absolutely Nothing
Rent a house near the beach, or a cabin
but: Do not take your walking shoes.
Don’t take any clothes you’d wear
anyplace anyone would see you.
Don’t take your rechargeables.
Take Scrabble if you have to,
but not a dictionary and no
pencils for keeping score.
Don’t take a cookbook
or anything to cook.
A fishing pole, ok
but not the line,
hook, sinker,
leave it all.
Find out
what’s
left.
How to Lose That Stubborn Weight
Follow this simple program:
Examine your elbow, the small bones
in your wrist. Kiss what you can.
Gather up all the magazines
and catalogues in your house—those
hungry girls in expensive clothes.
Put them all inside your refrigerator.
Next, your streaming videos and
discreetly altered friends: balance these
in a pile on your bathroom scale.
Leave them there for sixteen weeks.
See how the weight melts away
from the craven core. Listen,
all God’s children got this yearn
and half of them wish they could look
just about like you do now. And so
will you, if you ever get to be ninety.
That photo that set you off today?
How you’ll wish you’d taken more,
the shape of a lusty animal you forgot
to love, wish you’d hung mirrors
on all your walls and halls and
oh hell, the fat blue indifferent sky
in praise of this body you had one time
when everything still worked.
How to Get a Divorce
Fight for these things:
One phone call to your mother-in-law.
The credit you deserve, because
sacrifice for love is a cozy hearth, or a spark
that burns down the house. It’s all in the timing.
The flimsy relics of childhood, yours.
The car you could talk to.
The tools you learned to live by.
Your children intact, blessed by your diplomacy,
a language of words you will chisel out of ice.
No work you’ve ever done will cost you more,
or purchase more.
Don’t fight for these:
The car that’s not paid for.
Every gift you pretended to like.
Take one object treasured by your spouse,
something small that won’t be missed:
Smash it with a rock.
Bury the remains in the backyard.
Bear the pall however. It’s your party.
By the powers vested in hearsay,
your marriage is now oil and water.
Some of your friends will choose to drink the oil.
These you have to give up:
Collected shells and pressed flowers.
The eyes that knew your body
when it was still perfect. Everything must go
.
Don’t throw it in the Grand Canyon. Seal it all
in a box with packing tape, shoved to the back of a closet.
Years from now, when some passion brings new order
to your household, you will open this box. Find inside:
Music you’ve since gone looking for.
Wedding photos, two sweet kids with comical hair.
A ring for your daughter, prop for the story
she’s had to rewrite alone.
Your one-time self in a rummage of lost and found.
Quietly set it all out on a shelf in plain sight
because, like rain and gravity, these things
are right, and flattening, and dearly necessary,
and inasmuch as they’re anyone’s,
they’re yours.
How to Be Married
Think of rain: the gathering sheer fall
on a quaking plain. Like a kiss,
the long slake. Here we stand
in blissful drench. It only falls;
no calling it back from here.
River infinite, grinding belly on bedrock,
paring the plain to a canyon,
changing the shape of the world.
Love is no granite boulder, praised
for its size. It’s the water that parts
around it, moving mountains.
Nothing new, a marriage. This union
is as old as it gets: ocean floor,
the wave and shore that can’t be still
and can’t come apart. Think of
blue-gray horizons, heavy-lidded.
Don’t rule out surprising possibilities.
An ocean can rise up whole
into the firmament, given eternity.
No going back from today.
Water flows downhill and still
we are here, new as naked children
standing in the cool precipitous fall: think of rain.
How to Knit a Sweater (a Realist’s Prayer)
O Lord
(whether male, female,
animate, all-knowing,
unreasonable or just
whether or not),
we are practical people
who hedge our bets.
As I hold my loved ones
this day in my thoughts,
meditating on our hopes
and wild adversities,
I also hold a skein
of good wool,
needles that click like
rosary beads working
through Hail Marys
of knit and purl.