Passing Love - Poems by Rick Benjamin

Now available from Wolf Ridge Press

"The artful compression in these fine poems enriches insight, magnifies detail, and allows for more spacious contemplation. Word by word, revelation after revelation, Rick Benjamin has given us a memorable collection of poems." – Margaret Gibson
"Passing Love is deceptive in its down-to-earth honesty and simplicity. Rick Benjamin's clear-cut language brims and sings, and one is taken to the edge of reckoning before he or she realizes what has happened. There's a needful celebration of everyday life at the core of Passing Love." – Yusef Komunyakaa
"There is a fantastic eye for detail here, whether Rick Benjamin is close to home watching over his children, or gazing off to the Bamiyan Buddhas. His poems sing the most ancient themes: vulnerable love, the primal lair of family, heartbreaking affection for children, fear for fragile things when danger appears. This is poetry for the twenty-first century, blazing with irises, cranberries, and mineral salt." – Andrew Schelling

Read samples

25% of all proceeds from Passing Love —from now until it goes out of print—will go to Partners in Health, an organization that works in Haiti

Contents

I. Begging Bowl

Still Life with Grapes
Just the Lemons
Growing Up
Dry Memory
Begging Bowl
Personal Reference
Before Making Love They Compare Scars
The Juice in It
The Caves at Idaho Springs
Pentimento
Balancing Act
Winter
Standing Guan Yin
The Last
Bamiyan Buddhas
Fears
Inside the Bamiyan Buddhas
Head-to-Head Communication
Trust Walk, D.C.

II. Animal Instinct

What It's All About
Asleep on a Beach in Mojave
Work
Farm Field Trip
Animal Cruelty
One Dark Side
Desert Ants, Walking
Lice Love
Feeding Time
Alligator in the Swamp
Alligator Swamped
Alligator Still Swamped
Alligator Thinks of Swamp as Worth Leaving
Swamp to Alligator

III. Passing Love

Saturn
Prayer for Safe Passage
Delivery
Dream of My Twin's Allergic Reaction
Boy in a Bathtub
Girl Missing Two Front Teeth
Double Digits
9.75
One Sign That Things Are Changing
Spitting Image
Witness Protection
Hiding Places
First Prostate Exam
One (Other) Art
Cranberry Harvest, Edaville
Dear,
Ukiyo-e

Before Making Love They Compare Scars

for Margaret

At forty-nine, he thinks he's got
his share, holds up his right
hand where, alone, he's got ten.

She's traced the map
of his forehead like a path
that leads to some place

she wants to go. & the year
a knife entered his hip is a time
toward which she would

travel. What he wants
just now is not to think
about the blows

his body has taken, & as if on cue
she says, me, I've only got
these two: the line

beneath her navel where they
lifted out twin sons, &
the scar that is the same

line deepened where
their daughter rose up
thirteen months later.

You got me, he says,
as their skins start
to knit together

a path toward longing,
their bodies already
lost to the places

where love
has left
its indelible marks.

The Juice in It

for Reed

When the woman in the parable runs
from the tigers to the cliff-edge she is
simply jumping toward the saving
vine. Only later does she notice
the strawberries.

When my twin brother hands me
a ripe strawberry in California
he wants me to admire every bit
of its sweetness before tossing it
tongue-ward, which he knows

I will not do, & that is why he is
already disappointed. In the letter
he writes weeks later he says
he knew I'd just pop it, whole,
into my mouth without even

thinking about it, juice
dripping down my chin.

Which is what she does
in the parable when she knows
she's going to die: tigers
on the cliff-edge, tigers
on the ground, & a mouse

eating through the stem
of the vine.

What should she do but reach
for the ripest strawberry
she can find?

He wants me
to linger. I can
already taste it.

Pentimento

In memory of Peter De Jode

means regret, one buried
under years of longing
or two or three making
skin tingle as from touches
you will never forget.

A painter carves into layers
past memories frozen
in tableau: a brother's
suicide, a mother's electric
shock treatment. Abstract,

we say, because the world
as we've seen it can be so
unbearable. Which is why
we try to read into dusty
ghosts where perhaps old

appliances sat, tarred
rooflines still on sides
of row-houses long
after next-doors
have been demolished,

charcoal shadows of what
were once craters,
eruptions erasing
edges, only rims
remaining. There

are hundreds of
texts bereft of their
past lives, wax tablets
where countless
scribes left their

delible marks. He sees
gold leaf on the surface &
wonders how to mine
those few veins.
No regrets.

About the Author

Rick Benjamin's poems have appeared in Ars Poetica (Logolalia), Berkeley Poetry Review, Blackletter, Chalkboard, Creature Comforts, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Paterson Literary Review, Urthona: The Buddhist Journal of the Arts, Watershed, Poem, Home: An Anthology, and Haiku Year. His essays have appeared most recently in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press) and Watershed, and his latest review appeared in La Petite Zine. He teaches at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design and Goddard College.