Poets Online Archive



broken off

October 2023  -  Issue #313

This month's model poem was the shortest we have ever used as a writing prompt example for our submissions. Not even 17 syllables, it is shorter than a haiku.

"Two Linen Handkerchiefs" by Jane Hirshfield

How can you have been dead twelve years
and these still
The poem asks the reader to complete the thought, as poems often do. No ellipsis, no dash, just broken off.

In listening to a short interview with the poet, I discovered this poem and her explanation of how it came to be.
"The poem is broken off in exactly the way a life is broken off, in exactly the way grief breaks off, takes us beyond any possible capacity for words to speak. And yet it also, short as it is, holds all of our bewilderment in the face of death. How is it that these inanimate handkerchiefs — which did belong to my father and are still in a drawer of mine, and which I did accidentally come across — how can they still be so pristinely ironed and clean and existent when the person who chose them and used them and wore them is gone? ... Some poems have a way of, sometimes quite literally, looking out a window. They change their focus of direction, they change their attention. And by doing that, by glancing for a moment at something else, the field of the poem becomes larger."

Hirshfield is a poet I have used multiple times for prompts and she is a poet I have heard read in person multiple times. She seems to be a very gentle and compassionate soul, and that is often clear in her poetry. She is an ordained lay practitioner of Zen. ("I'm [also] a Universal Life minister, but that was just so I could marry some friends," she says, laughing.)

I think compassion, in a way, is one of the most important things poems do for me, and I trust do for other people. They allow us to feel how shared our fates are. If a person reads this poem when they're inside their own most immediate loss, they immediately — I hope — feel themselves accompanied. Someone else has been here. Someone else has felt what I felt. And, you know, we know this in our minds, but that's very different from being accompanied by the words of a poem, which are not ideas but are experiences."

We did not expect that all can be contained in a two-line poem, and we didn't expect submissions of two lines. Our call for submissions for the October issue was for poems about things "broken off." The poem might be about a relationship broken off. Maybe the poem will break off at some appropriate point, as Jane's poem does. Maybe it is about an actual object that has a part broken off, or more figuratively, a person with something broken off. What do those two words mean to you?

Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry, including her new & selected poems, THE ASKING (2023), THE BEAUTY,, longlisted for the National Book Award and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015, AFTER, named a Best Book of 2006 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England's Financial Times, and a finalist for England's prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize; GIVEN SUGAR, GIVEN SALT, finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of two now-classic essay collections, NINE GATES: ENTERING THE MIND OF POETRY and TEN WINDOWS: HOW GREAT POEMS TRANSFORM THE WORLD.
Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953 and was a member of the first graduating class at Princeton University to include women. She studied Soto Zen intensively for eight years, including three years in monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the wilderness inland from Big Sur, and received lay ordination in 1979. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

     
For more on all our prompts and other things poetic, check out the Poets Online blog.


DETAILS + MATERIALS
art exhibition by Claudine Granthem

Try to find something whole here. Every-
thing is splintered, torn, broken off
from something useful. Trashed.
A scavenger picks this & that, scrapes &
polishes, ties that to this - no jigsaw
puzzle / the pieces don’t fit. But
see how afternoon sun glints off crumpled
charred metal, ragged scraps of
painted burlap once-a-curtain bind
what once was window-frame to –
could it be a doorknob? Colors!
Textures! gone wild of themselves.
Hang this on the wall of your perfect
living room. Art draws the eye the gut
to wonder –
a beautiful flawed parable
of human life.

Taylor Graham



THE NOISE AND THE SIGNAL

She threaded string through two can bottoms
and handed the Jolly Green Giant to me
Chef Boyardee to my sister.

We paced apart enough for the string to tauten,
enough to mumble nonsense, mishear secrets.

Clearing out her garage lifetimes later we found the cans,
their icons faded yet confident in white toque and green leaf.

But the string had broken long ago,
sending us off into time’s maelstrom
and the constant roar of solitary silence.

Rob Friedman



MARCESCENSE
I try to be like
the ghost leaves of the beech,
witch hazel, and red oaks
that remain into winter,
resisting being broken off
by winds, rain and snow.
Everciduous, rather than
dropping leaves to become
a bare line drawing
against a cold, pale sky.

I think this year I will fail,
And unlike a mushroom
which can dry out
later revive and continue
to disperse its spores,
sexual seeds to keep life
going on.

Charles Michaels



SPLINTER
Because he felt nothing,
because he felt he couldn’t
feel, he felt he couldn’t
love — and he lifted the wooden
door of the garage
which housed the car which
housed the easeful death
which he was half in love with,
when a small, dark
insidious grace
entered his left palm
near the thumb
and lodged itself there,
and he winced in pain,
and let go of his plan,
holding the injured hand
in the uninjured one,
holding it up to his mouth
as though drinking from it,
or eating from it,
or weeping into it,
and in this attitude walked
back into his life.

Paul Hostovsky



CANDY APPLED
I wanted to cut it
But you said that was for babies
So, on the count of
One, two --
Hey, you didn’t wait for --

Uh, oh
Part of your front tooth --
Oh, shit
Only I didn’t say that because
I didn’t want you thinking I was a potty mouth

I thought served you right
Only I didn’t say that either
because I wanted you to like me

Quick, spit out the apple
You broke your tooth
Eyes wide, you spewed it out
a red-yellow chunky glob of slimy wetness

Do you see it? Help me look for it
Eww, I thought
Only I didn’t say that either
I said shit no and don’t tell me what to do

It's your fault I bit into that dumb apple
My fault! I told you we should’ve --
Found it!

You held it up like a prized artifact
Somehow still slick even after a millennium
Then you slipped it into your pocket and yelled
Don’t be a “told-you-so”
And off you walked

The memory breaks off there
But it was safe to say any grade school romance
Had broken off too- Dead in its tender tracks
- a victim of dental circumstance

It would be romantic in a kind of cheesy way to say
You’d broken off a piece of my heart that day as well
- but you didn’t

Hearts are way stronger
Than hardened sugar syrup and baby teeth
Sometimes it’s better to be a “me” than a “we”
And even a dumb – knows - that no one likes a told-you-so

Terri J. Guttilla


BROKEN LINK
Why you wrote that letter is still a
mystery, stark, unreal, flat as a
bed sheet, simple as a tot’s book.

Twenty years of friendship gone
in a scrawled page-and-a-half, outré,
disdainful, without sorrow or recourse.

We had taught together, drank
together, debated literature,
philosophy, supported one another.

Was it some Iago pouring poison
in your ear, a revulsion by your new
wife about some perceived wrong?

Did I say or do something in an off
moment, a remark thought harmless
that touched some hidden sore?

All these years I’ve wondered, as
in high dudgeon I did not reply,
a link gone in the chaos of time.

Glue dries and flakes, iron rusts,
ropes slacken and sag, cement
crumbles, wood rots, clay brittles.

What was once strong, enduring,
caves in to rubble, falls into
chaos, dissolves, scatters.

Only broken walls, chipped shards,
shreds left to flap in a dry wind
on rusty lines, only emptiness.

Rob Miller



DIS-ORGAN-IZED
They took it while I was asleep
Along with my identity, my sense of dignity
Cut from my open belly with a knife

When I woke up, the only evidence —
Zippered stitches, following a line
From my navel to my pubic bone

Raw flesh protruding from my abdomen
Covered by a plastic pouch
As if they thought I wouldn't notice

They told me it would be six months
Until I felt myself again
Accepted my disfigurement

When first diagnosed, I was ready to give up
Drive my pickup truck into a wall
End it all in one grand gesture

But there is one, another piece of me belongs to
And she

Frank Kelly



CHASING YESTERDAY
We broke it off, she told me.

Wait, what?
What about the food trucks
and the dancing
and the clandestine libations?
The hot Florida sun?
The curly-haired babies?

I thought
That you thought
That—

Part Two
Who did it? I asked her.

I did.
Because he did.

Somewhere in that addled head
Of constant noise.
Of ringing ears
And arrogant pride

Lay a choice

to stay

with mama.

The fool says in his heart—

Part Three
And now

Tear-stained cheeks.
A year-long lease.
And the beautiful tabula rasa.

Laurie Sitterding