Happy Thanksgiving!

and a poem

Dear friends and readers,

I am thankful for you! I am a lucky poet to have a readership at all, and this space has brought quite a few people to my work.

The poem below seems appropriate for the holiday, especially for those who struggle with the emotional pressure cooker of the season.

—JM

P.S. If you’d like a signed copy of my book America is the Poem (makes for a great gift! I am an awkward salesman!), feel free to send me a message. I have a few left.

The Last Poem

It is enough 
to be nothing,
porous
to what appears.
It is enough 

to sit on a bench
and watch a contrail
dissolve into dust, 
to make a day of it.

It is enough 
to look
in order to see,
and to know
there’s a difference. 

It is enough
to walk myself awake 
in sub-zero wind,

snow-blind 
and heartbroken.
It is enough 
to forget. 

It is enough
to borrow 
from the dead
a voice 

to sing through,
to survive the season.

It is enough,
the poems cramped 
in the margins 
of a water-stained
notebook—

leave them there
to be revised
by time. 

It is enough—

alone 
at the end of the year 
engulfed by a presence 
I am not compelled to name.


                        (from Decades: Selected Poems)