From the collection Furs Not Mine (Four Way Books, 2015)

“…as if/ this time/ there will be/ no autumn.”

My partner and I are trying to remember a poem we loved years ago, probably found on tumblr but cannot find anywhere. It was a scene of someone undressing their husband who worked outdoors after he came home. There was definitely an image of taking off his boots or shoes, and a double ententre about his smell and "taking him in". Not an erotic poem per se, but definitely sensual and sexy. I wonder if anyone has any idea!

Where I Am a Woman

Ellee Adams

Yes yes I know about a woman’s body 
I understand their feet
are generally smaller than a man’s 
and their lungs are smaller
and their hearts and even their livers are smaller 
they can’t metabolize
waste as quickly as a man’s 
and the hips are wider
making the waist dip more than a man’s
generally speaking
like a valley turned 
sideways I know about the 
breasts
in all their hanging varieties
and the milk that waits at the nipples 
I know about the cheekbones
the mouth the smooth neck
and that place where life begins 
where the cells split and split 
and grow white as a ghost 
orchid in a greenhouse

Yes I know
except for the breasts 
I have none of this

But a woman is also 
a woman inside
where the fires are barely contained 
where the voice emerges hot
as newly blown glass 
no not from the lungs
but from that deeper place 
where her love is
and her anger and hurt and wisdom 
no not from the brain
from that other place
that place that is hidden from us 
as God is hidden
or what came before light

Thanks.

I don't know if this is the right spot for it, but I really love the sound of Gwen Harwood's poems and have been working through and rereading her book of selected poems for ages now. This is my favourite one, but the line "Why add salt to salt?" has always had me stumped. What's your take on it? Worth checking her works out if you haven't, she's just lovely.

Edit: There's a typo in the poem, it's "The sea anemones" in the fourth line, I believe. Sorry!

In the poem she says she wishes we were "good to the core like bananas" Instead, Piercy says, we are brother and murderous other (I'm not certain that's exact so it's not in quotes) and something about minds filled with the static something something "of our race".

Her bittersweet take on our cruelty to each other as human beings has been echoing in my head for weeks but I cannot find the poem. I've googled all of that extensively with no luck and looked through all her collections that I have. I assume I must have gotten it from the library years ago. Can you help?

I came across a poem where a man who is married and with children comes across his past love by accident on the street and is haunted by her memories. He is content in his marriage but cant help thinking about what if's. It's an old poem from 1800s I think.

Please help me find it

Thank You

Born in 1950 in Rochester, New York, Marie Howe attended the socially progressive, parochial all-girls Sacred Heart Convent School and the University of Windsor. She earned her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she studied with poet Stanley Kunitz, whom she refers to as “my true teacher.”

Howe's first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, stating that she writes “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.” It is a collection of "oracular yet self-doubting speakers," who "often voice their concerns through Biblical and mythical allusions". (Poetry)

When Kunitz chose the book for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets in 1988, he observed, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.”

Academy of American Poets Chancellor Arthur Sze said:

A year later, in 1989, Howe's brother John died of an AIDS-related illness. Speaking in an AGNI interview, she stated “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic completely.” An elegy to John, her second collection of poetry What the Living Do (1997), was praised as one of the five best poetry collections of the year by Publishers Weekly. The collection is a raw, laid-bare-of-metaphor, documentation of loss and everything stemming from it.

Speaking about poetry and everyday life, Howe notes:

In her third collection, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), Howe changed her focus from the personal narrative to, what she describes in an AGNI interview as the “obsess[ion] with the metaphysical, the spiritual dimensions of life as they present themselves in this world.” In Publishers Weekly, Brenda Shaughnessy observes that these are poems in which Howe “makes metaphor matter and material metaphysical.”

Howe published her fourth book of poetry Magdalene in 2017. In 2024, New and Selected Poems appeared, for which she was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and NYU, and co-edited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Academy of American Poets.

She was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014. She lives in New York City.

Celebrating her Pulitzer Prize Win for Poetry, I selected her poems "The Copper Beech," "Bad Weather," "The Gate," and "One Day" along with an overview of all her published collections, a reading, and an interview, as rest-stops on the journey into her masterly poetic world.

[POEM] The Copper Beech - Marie Howe

Immense, entirely itself,

it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it

and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell

darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,

I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.

^{Copyright Credit: Reprinted from What the Living Do, W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. Copyright © by Marie Howe.}

^{Source: What the Living Do (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997})

[POEM] Bad Weather - Marie Howe

What does it matter that this cold June breaks, another dish

on the kitchen floor, skittering under the table legs.

So it requires the long strawed broom, the extra stoop.

It will have out. When the sun comes back. When the rain stops.

But something doesn't fit. Something isn't fitting.

The washing machine jams and hums too loudly. The chickadees

fall from the trees. A swallow is caught in the chimney.

The smallest ram lamb isn't eating. The days pass.

June is too cold. The spiders threaten to overrun the nest

lodged in the rafters. They can't be eaten fast enough.

The mother, beside herself, has seen this happen only once before,

the eggs draped with gauze.

No letters come. The small tin flag is down. The house creeps

farther from the road. The grass rises in the rain. The scythes

rust and will not cut. The blades squeak and sigh, nothing

to be done. We close the porch doors, but every night

they open just a little. We hear it from the bedroom,

a small creak. no one there. The cold lies down in the meadow

where the sheep are credulous and sturdy and dumb, but

the ram lamb will not eat. His mother has already forgotten him.

The windows will not stay shut. Even the small nails

we bang in are loose in the morning, and the screens flap

a little in the small cold wind. From under the covers,

I watch you move around the house, fixing the broken things:

the desk lamp, the toaster, the radio that still will not speak.

The red hens haven't laid in a week. There's nothing we can do.

Nothing. It could be ten years ago. I could be dreaming.

This could be last winter all over again

with the wood stacked and the snow rushing from miles away.

Then too, the trees leaned a little funny and the cat

disappeared for days. Nothing would make him come back.

^{Copyright Credit: Marie Howe, "Bad Weather" from The Good Thief. Copyright © 1988 by Marie Howe.}

Marie Howe reads "The Gate"

[POEM] The Gate - Marie Howe

I had no idea that the gate I would step through

to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother's body made. He was

a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,

done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold

and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.

And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.

And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.

Copyright Credit: Marie Howe, "The Gate" from What the Living Do. Copyright © 1997 by Marie Howe.

^{Source: What the Living Do (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997})

[POEM] One Day - Marie Howe

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.

^{Copyright © 2017 by Marie Howe. From} *^Magdalene*^{​ (W. W. Norton, 2017}

Marie Howe: Essential Books

1. New and Selected Poems (hardback)

Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

Characterized by "a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions" (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe's poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of Howe's four previous collections--including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award-longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood--and contains twenty new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about ageing while walking the dog, Howe is "a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy" (Dorianne Laux).

^{Product Details}

^{Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company}

^{Publish Date: April 02, 2024}

^Pages: 192

^{Language: English}

^{TypeBook: Hardback}

^{EAN/UPC: 9781324075035}

^{Dimensions: 9.1 X 6.2 X 0.9 inches | 0.9 pounds}

^{BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry}

SHOP THE BOOK FROM BOOKSHOP

2. Magdalene (paperback)

Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

Magdalene imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as a woman who embodies the spiritual and sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape--hailing a cab, raising a child, and listening to the news on the radio. Between facing the traumas of her past and navigating daily life, the narrator of Magdalene yearns for the guidance of her spiritual teacher, a Christ figure, whose death she continues to grieve. Erotic, spirited, and searching for meaning, she is a woman striving to be the subject of her own life, fully human and alive to the sacred in the mortal world.

^{Product Details}

^{Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company}

^{Publish Date: August 28, 2018}

^Pages: 96

^{Language: English}

^{TypeBook: Paperback / Softback}

^{EAN/UPC: 9780393356038}

^{Dimensions: 8.2 X 6.0 X 0.2 inches | 0.3 pounds}

^{BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry}

SHOP THE BOOK FROM BOOKSHOP

3. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (paperback)

Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

Hurrying through errands, attending to a dying mother, and helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time--during those apparently unmiraculous periods of everyday trouble and joy?

^{Product Details}

^{Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company}

^{Publish Date: September 01, 2009}

^Pages: 80

^{Language: English}

^{TypeBook: Paperback / Softback}

^{EAN/UPC: 9780393337341}

^{Dimensions: 8.2 X 6.1 X 0.2 inches | 0.3 pounds}

^{BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry}

SHOP THE BOOK FROM BOOKSHOP

What the Living Do (paperback)

Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, and stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form . . . a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation (Boston Globe).

^{Product Details}

^{Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company}

^{Publish Date: April 17, 1999}

^{Pages: 96}

^{Language: English}

^{TypeBook: Paperback / Softback}

^{EAN/UPC: 9780393318869}

^{Dimensions: 8.1 X 5.4 X 0.3 inches | 0.3 pounds}

^{BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry}

SHOP THE BOOK FROM BOOKSHOP

The Good Thief (paperback)

Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

The heralded debut collection of poems by the author of What the Living Do (Norton, 1997). Selected by Margaret Atwood as a winner in the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, this unique collection was the first sounding of a deeply authentic voice. Howe's early writings concern relationship, attachment, and loss, in a highly original search for personal transcendence. Many of the thirty-four poems in The Good Thief appeared in such prestigious journals and periodicals as The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Agni Review, and The Partisan Review.

^{Product Details}

^{Publisher: Persea Books}

^{Publish Date: January 17, 1988}

^{Pages: 54}

^{Language: English}

^{TypeBook: Paperback / Softback}

^{EAN/UPC: 9780892551279}

^{Dimensions: 8.7 X 5.2 X 0.2 inches | 0.2 pounds}

^{BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry}

SHOP THE BOOK FROM BOOKSHOP

References:

Poetry Foundation, Marie Howe

The Academy of American Poets, Marie Howe,

The Pulitzer Prizes, 2025

A RAY OF SIGH ^{is part of the Bookshop affiliate program and may earn a commission from qualifying purchases}