The Essentials: Poetry in Our October Issue

“I know nothing much,” Leath Tonino says in his poem “Skill Set.” While he notes a lack of practical abilities, like fixing a car or using a chainsaw, it turns out he does have some less-utilitarian but maybe more-important skills: He notices beauty everywhere and can carry a tune. Rebecca Baggett wishes for just such a Tonino-esque gift in one of her two poems in our October issue; she wants to listen to the rain without being distracted by her own thoughts. This month’s poetry offers meditations on essential things, asking us to consider what we value about ourselves and our experience of the world. To hear the authors read their work, click the Play buttons below.

Take care and listen well,
Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor

 

Skill Set
By Leath Tonino

I know nothing much. Couldn’t fix your Toyota.
Wouldn’t be confident handling your chain saw.

And if you left me and the horse alone, one of us
might get hurt, or both. I love books and ideas,

and potatoes, and certainly understand a bit
about people, but my understanding is dwarfed

by confusion. What it amounts to is that I feel
beauty all over, almost everywhere, the grass

growing from a mud puddle earlier today,
the shadows shifting on distant mountains,

the sad lady walking her happy dog. It won’t fix
your pickup, won’t bring the wood in for winter,

won’t giddyap. Odds are I’ll die with ignorance
beside my bed. Yet if I were allowed to linger after

the end and take the urn out across the meadow,
I’d probably excel at spreading my ashes. Once

or twice, maybe on a million occasions, I’ve done this
for a friend. I can carry a tune. I can cry while I sing.

I can carry a tune and set the tune down gently
when the time for setting tunes down gently comes.

I Try to Listen to the Rain
By Rebecca Baggett

I wanted to listen to the rain—
really listen, ears and pores and mind
wide open, as if I were a dry creek,
a newly planted seed, a sapling
desperate for water—
but already my mind
natters away at language, floods
with sounds of swoosh and rush and patter,
cannot hush, busy with its clumsy translation,
an approximation of what the rain might tell me
if I could be a patch of moss, a mountain laurel,
if I could listen without inserting myself into
every conversation.

Those Questions
By Rebecca Baggett

Warm enough in October to sit
outside without a jacket, barefoot.
The seasons broken.

A mourning dove calls: Why
do you grieve? This world,
I answer. And what makes you

rejoice? This world, I answer.
Always those same questions,
that same response.