Goldenrod

Poems

Maggie Smith

• Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982185060
• eBook ISBN: 9781982185077
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR

“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” —Time
“A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” —People

From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Keep Moving, and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life.

With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​

Slate called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

1.

This Sort of Thing Happens All the Time

You think you’ve memorized the calls

of North American birds, particularly

in the East, but one night you hear a call

like a whistle someone is not blowing

hard enough: the ball inside just rattling,

rolling. You see a forested mountain

and dusk is suddenly thick with words,

as if you could hover your cursor

above the pastiche of greens and see

each name pop up: juniper, citrine, celadon,

hunter, fern. I’d say only in a dream,

but doesn’t this sort of thing happen

all the time? One night you find yourself

on a dark street in the suburbs, with air

that smells like cut grass—jungle, myrtle,

viridian, spring—and laundry steam.

You’re standing too close to a lit house

which could be yours—is it yours?—

and through blue windows you watch

the evening news. The anchor’s mouth

is moving, but outside you hear only

crickets in the cold, dewy lawn.

Crickets and that broken-sounding bird.

Then one dog barking. Then two.

Goldenrod

I’m no botanist. If you’re the color of sulfur

and growing at the roadside, you’re goldenrod.

You don’t care what I call you, whatever

you were born as. You don’t know your own name.

But driving near Peoria, the sky pink-orange,

the sun bobbing at the horizon, I see everything

is what it is, exactly, in spite of the words I use:

black cows, barns falling in on themselves, you.

Dear flowers born with a highway view,

forgive me if I’ve mistaken you. Goldenrod,

whatever your name is, you are with your own kind.

Look—the meadow is a mirror, full of you,

your reflection repeating. Whatever you are,

I see you, wild yellow, and I would let you name me.

Animals

The president called undocumented immigrants

animals, and in the nature documentary

I watched this morning with my kids,

after our Saturday pancakes, the white

fairy tern doesn’t build a nest but lays

her single speckled egg in the crook of a branch

or a tree knot. It looks precarious there

because it is. And while she’s away,

because even mothers must eat, another bird

swoops in and pecks it, sips some of what now

won’t become. The tern returns and knows

something isn’t right—the egg crumpled,

the red slick and saplike running down the tree—

but her instinct is so strong, she sits. Just sits

on the broken egg. I have been this bird.

We have been animals all our lives,

with our spines and warm blood, our milky tits

and fine layers of fur. Our live births, too,

if we’re lucky. But what animal wrenches

a screaming baby from his mother?

Do we know anymore what it is to be human?

I’ve stopped knowing what it is to be human.

The Hum

It’s not a question

without the mark: How do we live

with trust in a world that will continue

to betray us. Hear my voice

not lift at the end. How do we trust

when we continue to be betrayed.

For the first time I doubt

we’ll find our way back. But how

can we not. See how the terminal

mark allows a question

to dress as statement and vice versa.

Sometimes if I am quiet and still,

I can hear a small hum

inside me, an appliance left running.

Years ago I thought it was coming

from my bones. The hum

kept me company, and I thought

thank god for bones, for the fidelity

of bones—they’ll be there

until the end and then some.

Now what. How to continue.

I’ve started calling the hum

the soul. Today I have to hold

my breath to hear it. What question

does it keep not asking

and not asking, never changing

its pitch. How do I answer.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright