What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, 

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. 

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

- Marie Howe

The end of the year

has always felt distinct to me,
the quiet of the week between Christmas and the new year.

Here’s a poem I’ve never published
that’s been on my mind—

Poem for the End of the Year

The year comes back, or won’t let go.
December in the quietest hours, Monday evening,
dark before its time. The letters arrive
in cold bundles: greetings, cards, late notes
from high school social chairs
all bringing the same news: the places we belonged to
grasp toward us from the past,
trapped in their time.

It’s good to think about those you haven’t
thought of in a while. I think down
into my childhood: Sierra Lurie
twirling in December
at the bluegrass gathering
in the cavernous tent. I watched her spin
amidst the candles,
though she hardly knew I existed.

Years later and there’s smoke
coming from the hospital grates,
a street of dead traffic lights,
a pale trail in the darkening sky.
You can feel how close it is to the solstice:
The trains moan from far away,
the thin cranes rise like scaffolding
for spaceships awaiting departure,
the shopkeepers in their empty stores
gaze through their phones,
lonely for anything.

I feel sometimes how unreal
the lives of strangers are.
I try to imagine their front doors,
their faces around a kitchen table,
the people that they love,
the beds in which they sleep.
I want their lives, in this way,
to become more knowable.  

I speak to you earnestly from this cold late date
though my complaints seem vapid. I miss
my sister. I miss those I once knew. I’m lonely
for places I once existed in
inside the past.

Sierra’s father’s name is on all the city’s hospitals.
His daughter took her life. I think about that
sometimes: If she’d been given more
kindness. If the phone had rung that afternoon
as she sat on her bed and considered what to do. 

I have to imagine it. The dead don’t rise
like marionettes. The sky stays furrowed
and goes on forever. It is Monday night
in the empty kitchens. The line of gravestones
stick up in the dark like raised hands.

The Dancing

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a post-war Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart, the world at last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop—in 1945— in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany— oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

— Gerald Stern

Joan Didion

“I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning light, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor.”

- Joan Didion, from “Goodbye to All That”

From The Inferno

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.


Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --
the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.

How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.

But when I reached the foot of a hill,
there where the valley ended
that had pierced my heart with fear,

looking up, I saw its shoulders
arrayed in the first light of the planet
that leads men straight, no matter what their road.

Then the fear that had endured
in the lake of my heart, all the night
I spent in such distress, was calmed.

And as one who, with laboring breath,
has escaped from the deep to the shore
turns and looks back at the perilous waters,

so my mind, still in flight,
turned back to look once more upon the pass
no mortal being ever left alive.

- Dante, trans. by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander

If you've liked what you've seen on the site...

Consider checking out my book of poems, NORTH AMERICAN STADIUMS (paperback version now available).

Published by Milkweed Editions (2018), the book is described by Booklist as “Exquisite…Chambers executes a magic that is perhaps unique to poetry: he conjures a moment from nothing, draws the reader inside, and disperses the spell with something as gentle as a shift in the wind direction, or a quiet revelation…A crackling first act by a promising new poet.” 

Thanks so much, and I hope you continue to enjoy the photos, poems, prose, and music here!