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Excerpt from Late for the Gratitude Meeting

Life Is a Banjo
 
Just ask the banjo players
and they’ll tell you
they didn’t choose the banjo
so much as the banjo
chose them--and now
they carry it around with them,
this conjoined twin
whose big round head,
pale skin, funny-looking
fifth tuning peg like a misplaced
thumb halfway up a forearm,
is part of them. Like
the body you didn’t choose.
Like the life you didn’t choose either.
Nobody gets to choose.
But you pick it up, you
dust it off, you put your
arms around it and you try
to love it. And you try to make it
sing. You get yourself
some fingerpicks and you
pick that damn thing like
the life you didn’t pick
depended on it.
 
Gray Day
 
It’s the almost that I love
about a gray day
like today. In weather
like this, I almost
feel a kind of joy:
the heavy sky, the feeling
in the air of imminent release.
I feel like I could almost
cry. Cry as I haven’t
since I was a boy.
Because I haven’t let myself.
The overcast sky says almost.
The charged air says could.
You could do this.
You could let yourself go,
feel the thunderous sobs,
wave after wave, shoulders
heaving, lungs emptying
in that jagged way
that almost looks like
laughter. And the hiccuping
like a child that comes after.
It could feel so good,
says this feeling in the air.
Almost like joy, says the sky.
 
This Tree
 
I never noticed this tree before.
Was it always here?
Look how huge it is. Even the upper branches  
as thick around as grown men--
strongmen in a circus with thigh-thick arms
holding up the canopy. You can’t
miss this tree, and yet I think I’ve been missing it
for years, driving past it on my way to work
without seeing it. Now my car is
running quietly over there where
I pulled over because this tree
was standing here where I never
saw it. I see it now though. I see it all
now: How I couldn’t see before because
of the understory--all those stories I was telling myself
were true. All the grasping and the wanting
and the dying. But now I think
there must have been something dead inside of me
if I couldn’t see this tree. It’s so
beautiful I want to die. I want to live
differently. I want to take this tree
back to my car, back into my life, keep it
always in view. But of course that’s impossible.
That would be as impossible as this tree itself
being here and yet not being here.
Which is why I can’t stop staring at it.

© Paul Hostovsky

Praise for Late for the Gratitude Meeting

“In the end of days, what you need is a good first line”––like that one, and the first lines in so many of these exuberant, confident poems in Paul Hostovsky’s tenth collection. It is tempting to quote many great lines from these poems, but they deserve to be discovered in the contexts of their own fine explorations, as Hostovsky’s ideas can turn on a dime, revealing perfect surprises. He both exhorts us not to miss the small miracles in our often-quotidian lives and introduces us to lives that most of us do not know well, such as his extraordinary insights gleaned from work as a sign language interpreter. In the end, here we are, “just standing here all alone like a verb/ of being,” eager to see where this terrific mind will take us next.

-Steve Straight, author of The Almanac (Curbstone/Northwestern)

A Paul Hostovsky poem has a way of welcoming you in, swinging the door wide open and making you comfortable, ready for anything. There will be surprises, some poems turning you gently one way and then another, others “bungee jumping boing-boing off the walls and ceiling... leaping singing windmilling right out the door.” Poets don’t have agents. But if I were an agent, I’d represent Paul Hostovsky’s poems and sell the movie rights.

-Sally Fisher, author of Good Question (Bright Hill Press)

Paul Hostovsky’s amiable voice, wry humor, and snappy wordplay are on full display in this new collection. But the humor and verbal gymnastics serve a larger purpose: poem after poem shows us that even the smallest events of everyday life are both (and often simultaneously) wondrous and absurd, beautiful and ugly, simple and complex. Above all, the poems remind us that life is a wide-angle “spectacular view” to be grateful for. And as the title poem vividly illustrates, it is never too late for gratitude, no matter how difficult or delayed it may be. When you read this book, you’ll be grateful for it, immediately.

-Eric Nelson, author of Some Wonder (Gival Press)

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Author Biography

Paul Hostovsky’s poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter.