How Else to Love the World
How else to love the world but to rise
each morning from the bed of your making
into the addle and dross the hours devise.
How else to love the world but to rise
as though order is the ardor that drives
this life between waking and waking.
How else to love the world but to rise
each morning from the bed of your making.
*This poem first appeared in The New Orleans Review
Epistle to the Dear Departed
First to you, Sister Josephina, my sincerest
greetings and regard. I pray this finds you
well and in full command of your senses,
and humbly report, on my part, no perplexities
of spirit, no lapses of conscience, no slippage
into the body’s sensual instruction
but the most abbreviated and occasional.
Surely, since your departure, you take pleasure
in knowing that neither the Prince of Sullage,
nor any one of his million minions, transforms
himself anew in the environs of St. Denis
School, not in the kitchen or the restrooms
or the hallways, not in the dark beneath
the stairs, not even in the hands of boys
probing their long pockets, does he dare
submit himself for your purview. Yet, dear
teacher, how your hickory rulers persist
in their brisk percussives. And now, kindly
convey to your elder, Sister Ambrosia
(who, even above, I am sure, clarifies
her wishes with action) that her reputation
grows, exceeding the notoriety it enjoyed
in life. Inform her that each of us
who occupied her sixth-grade classroom
speaks of her in the most vivid terms;
her crack methods for provoking veracity,
her military penchant, her brawn, her brash
are, quite simply, impossible to forget.
And to you, Sister Epiphania, our Mater
Dolorosa, a few words, I presume, of comfort:
male and female alike, we duly credit you
for our virginal disposition. Who among us
now succumbs, with any degree of rapidity
or ease, to the inducements of the fleshpots
abounding in and out of wedlock? Who
among us stood before you and did not imagine
the body’s daily sufferance of disgrace?
To you we owe our weightiest recompense
though it can never be dispensed. Finally,
Sisters, I ask your forgiveness for this abrupt
conclusion, and remain, as ever, your faithful
student who wishes you your just and proper due.
*This poem first appeared in Poetry Magazine
The Alewife’s Account
Each morning I wake
to the season’s thin gruel of light,
glad to be abroad in it,
glad that the man eventide
delivered, a tinker, a smith, Jack
the brewer, or his strapping
son, has risen, a goat
still ruttish from my bed, a dullard
whose presence lingers
malodorous in the yellow
flux brimming in my chamber pot.
It’s ale I barter for,
Jack’s kettle on the flame,
his infusion of malt, his wort astir.
I’ve seen him put a plum,
blue-black as a raven’s
eye, whole into his mouth, the blood-
flush in his cheeks as he bit
deep to the stony pip.
The heart is a pip, I say, my flesh,
I say, and a yard of ale
for him and every loose
windlestraw of a man, my post rate
a tuppence, a pittance, less
than you’d pay for a stale
cob-loaf or a posy of Michaelmas
daisies. In my house I offer
brown ale, pale ale, light
ale, mild ale, and thick cakes of rye
moist with ale, such spirits
as animate or subjugate.
In my house I entertain neither debt
nor death, but this living.
*This poem first appeared in Margie
The Spirits at Thornton House Are Preferable After All
for they are stubborn and marked by a distinct sincerity
which renders them refined while we are patently
crass as we veer into madness and conflict and likely
our own ongoing destruction. What then may endear
us to our neighbors in the cosmos? What can we trade
for their good will? Our bodies, our brains, our bravura
rhetoric in the face of danger, or our ample-minded
ability to concoct our future and drift blindly
into its foreign possibilities? All is well, darlings, we tell
our children and their progeny, our dreams embellished
with lies. Still, young or old, spirits may gather
here, for I welcome now each one who happily shelters
in Thornton’s house. And if I misjudged them I shall
ask their forgiveness. Perhaps, in light of that, they will
take us with them when they leave this plane for surely
the heavens are vast and can harbor us all. We can breathe
and sup and drink and never find ourselves alone again,
tethered as we are to our human kith and our haunted kin.
She has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry, a Full Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2017 New Letters Poetry Prize, and the 2002 Poetry Award from Weber, The Contemporary West. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, River Styx and Southwest Review, among many others. Myrna's poems have also appeared in sixteen anthologies including Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse.
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