Grace Bauer
Grace Bauer has published six books of poems–most recently, Unholy Heart: New & Selected Poems (Backwaters Press). She also co-edited the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her poems, essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.
Birthday Ode
Old friend, much younger than I,
but getting – as we all do if we’re tough
enough and lucky – older, though not necessarily
wiser, as the saying goes, unless a growing
appreciation for friends is a kind of wisdom—
which, come to think of it, it surely must be,
because what would we be without them—
meaning you, meaning us—
and several select others we both know—
and I would second that emotion for many
and add to the list of names and times
we might recall as the time of our lives,
which we have had and are always having,
and so: Here’s to you and the Big Five-Oh—
a birthday I recall mostly because my present
to myself that year was Paris—city of light,
which is one of the things I wish you may
continue to have—meaning illumination,
meaning an absence of too much weighing down,
meaning those candles on the cake you may
wish upon – as in once upon a time—which I
have always wondered about—the upon part—
though for the ever after of this particular tale,
happily is another thing I wish for you, and more,
old friend, adventures in the world, in words, in friends—
which brings me back to my beginning. I recall
one bright day on top of a mountain in the Blue Ridge
we had climbed to stare out over more mountains,
more sky—and how we stood there above and in
the midst of all that blue and said nothing
for a moment—and both of us women of words—
that’s another wish I’ll wish for you: more moments
to knock you speechless and, later, more poems
in which you put those speechless moments into words:
the being alive twice someone smart once said poems
were like, the being (or feeling) more alive in the more
of life, which is another wish I wish for you, my young
old friend—meaning all the best, I hope it’s plain,
(cue the chorus from the Velvet Underground): sweet Jane.
