Meghan O'Rourke

Meghan O'Rourke Poems

1.

Even now I can't grasp "nothing" or "never."
They're unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing.
...

Stone by stone, body by body in the grass:
For this we trade our lone compass,
...

Grew up on the Jersey Shore in the 1970s.
Always making margaritas in the kitchen,
always laughing and doing their hair up pretty,
...

Because I was born in a kingdom,
there was a king. At times
the king was a despot; at other times,
...

Inventing a horse is not easy.
One must not only think of the horse.
One must dig fence posts around him.
...

6.

Pawnbroker, scavenger, cheapskate,
come creeping from your pigeon-filled backrooms,
past guns and clocks and locks and cages,
...

I tried to live that way for a while, among
the trees, the green breeze,
chewing Bubblicious and by the edge of the pool spitting it out.
...

Was it like lifting a veil
And was the grass treacherous, the green grass
...

9.

We had a drink and got in bed.
That's when the boat in my mouth set sail,
my fingers drifting in the shallows of your buzz cut.
...

You can only miss someone when they are present to you.

The Isle of the Dead is both dark and light.
...

What you did wasn't so bad.
You stood in a small room, waiting for the sun.
At least you told yourself that.
I know it was small,
but there was something, a kind of pulped lemon,
at the low edge of the sky.

No, you're right, it was terrible.
Terrible to live without love
in small rooms with vinyl blinds
listening to music secretly,
the secret music of one's head
which can't be shared.

A dream is the only way to breathe.
But you must
find a more useful way to live.
I suppose you're right
this was a failure: to stand there
so still, waiting for—what?

When I think about this life,
the life you led, I think of England,
of secret gardens that never open,
and novels sliding off the bed
at night where the small handkerchief
of darkness settles over
one's face.
...

Grew up on the Jersey Shore in the 1970s.
Always making margaritas in the kitchen,
always laughing and doing their hair up pretty,
sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets;
always splitting the bills to the last penny,
stealing each other's clothes,
loving one another then turning and complaining
as soon as they walked out the door. Each one with her doe eyes,
each one younger than the last,
each older the next year, one year
further from their girlhoods of swimming
at Sandy Hook, doing jackknives off the diving board
after school, all of them
being loved by one boy and then another,
all driving further from the local fair, further from Atlantic City.
They used to smoke in their cars,
rolling the windows down and letting their red nails
hang out, little stop lights:
Stop now, before the green
comes to cover your long brown bodies.
...

You look up from a mind of men chasing a whale
through an ocean of type: summer, an ambulance stopped
by a VW station wagon, a couple slumped beside it.
It is silent here, with stars, and all the old pure things that watched over us.
It would take so much money to furnish my house,
to be free and clear and somehow small, yet modern.
Some weeks I barely leave, despite all there is to see.
On the couch I eat a scone: too sweet and cheap.
Large animals swish in the grasses.
The planes disappear into the dark velvet ocean.
Once, I went to the top of a mountain to find myself.
It was cold and beautiful, the firs fringed. Later I came down.
As a child I studied the Bermuda Triangle, where planes disappeared.
The commenters were arguing about authenticity.
It was probably a hoax, all that talk of secret magnets.
Are you watching me? The savannah is dark and large and pure of,
I mean never beyond itself, the way we are in cities.
On the radio, a woman enunciating carefully, says,
air power not air force. I watch
myself watching; I clean the dirt from my fingernails.
When you are young you think regalia, you think glowworm,
firefly, mountaintop, you watch and for once you see.
An incidental resemblance, a person you might have been.
Time for the sun-screen, time to go out.
What disturbs me, honestly, is how much my own mind
(the person who once climbed the mountain with another person)
I don't speak to anymore and almost cannot imagine.
...

The difference between fear and terror is hard to understand.

The winter was coming. I knew this, and hoped it might not affect me.

In many ways, it didn't. Snow came down

in the California mountains. I went to my exercise classes,

avoided the cameras at stop-lights.

In the park my dog slipped her collar and hid among the banana palms.

She was afraid of something I couldn't see.

The difference between fear and terror: something to do with the irrational.

In those months of winter sun, a sun much stronger than I was used to,

I was alone, more peaceful than I had ever been.

I walked among the hills, letting the sun

settle on my skin like detergent. The houses were still underwater.

The ex-police officer, who had gone mad after being fired, slipped the dragnet.

All week the helicopters roam above us, machine skies, sniper sights.

Around me people stay inside, never hang the laundry on the line,

will not send their children out to play in the yards.

On the street, a man with a gun is approaching a woman's home -

I hear it on the radio as it is happening.
...

Our fears are often irrational.

One hot afternoon, I toured the old prison for POWs.

(In this desert there are no people, only facilities for holding them.)

One doesn't think of the Underworld as being bright.

But it's possible to live in the desert, under that big sky, that sun, as if you were
belowground, surrounded by barracks, under watch.

I watched a film of a Becket play. I love order, Clov says at one point. It's my dream.

A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the dust.

In the desert there is order. All the prisoners were silent and still and in their places.

And then you know what. The blisterfire bombs, shudder-thuds, floodlights, dazed
cracks, canines.

Of course, this chaos is their minds.

They lie on cots the long, hot afternoons, and paint murals

of what they see out their windows. It's this detail I find so—

Imagine drawing what lies just outside your window: humps of nothing, dun-yellow
needles, flat vulture sky.

We must accept who we are.

Proust said, The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in
having new eyes.

When I dream, I dream that my mother was never frightened for me.

In the painting at the house I stay in there is a film being shown, a celluloid film.

A child asks for more. Then she's leaving the orphanage,

a suitcase in her tiny hand, a box of food, a waiting train.

She is rubbing her eyes, trying to see, and my mother

is rubbing her back, warm hand on bone.

No one is thinking of the land they left behind.

We're all painting the desert before us. Look:

the dry scrub the yellows and blues the walls

crawling with spiders ranch-bit roadkill and ocotillos

the dead eyes of cactus needles
...

Meghan O'Rourke Biography

Meghan O'Rourke (born 1976 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American poet and critic. O'Rourke was formerly a fiction editor at The New Yorker and from 2005-2010 was poetry co-editor at The Paris Review. She is also an occasional contributor to The New York Times. O'Rourke has written on a wide and eclectic range of topics, including horse racing, gender bias in the literary world, the politics of marriage and divorce, and the place of grief and mourning in modern society. She has published poems in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, and Poetry. Her first book of poems, Halflife, was published by Norton in 2007. O'Rourke's book, The Long Goodbye, a memoir of grief and mourning written after the death of her mother, was published to wide critical acclaim in April 2011. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. O'Rourke suffers from an autoimmune disorder which she has written about for The New Yorker.)

The Best Poem Of Meghan O'Rourke

Ever

Never, never, never, never, never.
—King Lear

Even now I can't grasp "nothing" or "never."
They're unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing.
Never? Never ever again to see you?
An error, I aver. You're never nothing,
because nothing's not a thing.
I know death is absolute, forever,
the guillotine—gutting—never to which we never say goodbye.
But even as I think "forever" it goes "ever"
and "ever" and "ever." Ever after.
I'm a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you
is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver:
You're not "nothing." But neither are you something.
Will I ever really get never?
You're gone. Nothing, never—ever.

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