Marie Howe, poet

I may be sharing more poetry the next couple of months. Tomorrow I'm starting an eight-week craft workshop with Mark Doty (see a few of his poems here and here and here and here)—which vaguely terrifies me (I am not a poet), but it also feels like a good challenge: sort of like when I travel abroad by myself. Call me crazy. 

Today we got our first packet of poems to read; apparently we will discuss such things as "the movement of sentences across lines, for example, or the use of questions, or the role of white space." Then Mark will ask us to write a poem of our own, based on whatever craft topic we focus on, to submit for next week's class and discussion. Given that I am not a poet, I may be reading more about poetry the next few weeks as well. I have no shortage of books on the subject. This could be fun, if I can keep the terror under control.

The poems he sent include ones by writers I've heard of and have read a bit of: Gwendolyn Brooks, Dorianne Laux, Honor Moore, and Doty's personal hero (he wrote a book about him, What Is the Grass) Walt Whitman. But there was a new one to me, Marie Howe (b. 1950), and of the five poems, hers moved me the most. So, here it is:

One Day

One day the patterned carpet, the folding chairs,
the woman in the blue suit by the door examining her split ends,

all of it will go on without me. I’ll have disappeared,
as easily as a coin under lake water, and few to notice the difference

—a coin dropping into the darkening—
and West 4th Street, the sesame noodles that taste like too much peanut butter

lowered into the small white paper carton—all of it will go on and on—
and the I that caused me so much trouble? Nowhere

or grit thrown into the garden
or into the sticky bodies of several worms,

or just gone, stopped—like the Middle Ages,
like the coin Whitman carried in his pocket all the way to that basement

bar on Broadway that isn’t there anymore.
Oh to be in Whitman’s pocket, on a cold winter day,

to feel his large warm hand slide in and out, and in again.
To be taken hold of by Walt Whitman! To be exchanged!

To be spent for something somebody wanted and drank and found delicious.