Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

I, Coyote, Stilled Wonder


When did I get that bejawed look,
that flashes up out of creeks and pools?
Was it when I fled across
pasture and through woods,
up to ledge, and came out
in the world to let myself think events
back into their right sequence again?
Man glaring into bloody mess on ground,
cow, who has birthed calf, I,
Coyote, actually tasted,
ate of it well past demarcating line
where calf becomes aftermatter.
I think it was then, when I fled
singing, happy, to wood's edge.
I could see Man raise arms,
steady his over-and-under, and squeeze.
I, Coyote, I was there, yes, I saw it all,
even the flock of tiny lead
that went scattering past.
I felt in me all those that hit,
nearly shattered wraith, clinging
to crushed jawbone, invisibly
slickering through trees, from here on
alone, I, Coyote, stilled wonder.


- Galway Kinnell

[Larry Robinson]

In My Spare Time


During my long, boring hours of spare time
I sit to play with the earth’s sphere.
I establish countries without police or parties
and I scrap others that no longer attract consumers.
I run roaring rivers through barren deserts
and I create continents and oceans
that I save for the future just in case.
I draw a new colored map of the nations:
I roll Germany to the Pacific Ocean teeming with whales
and I let the poor refugees
sail pirates’ ships to her coasts
in the fog
dreaming of the promised garden in Bavaria.
I switch England with Afghanistan
so that its youth can smoke hashish for free
provided courtesy of Her Majesty’s government.
I smuggle Kuwait from its fenced and mined borders
to Comoro, the islands
of the moon in its eclipse,
keeping the oil fields in tact, of course.
At the same time I transport Baghdad
in the midst of loud drumming
to the islands of Tahiti.
I let Saudi Arabic crouch in its eternal desert
to perserve the purity of her thoroughbred camels.
This is before I surrender America
back to the Indians
just to give history
the justice it has long lacked.


I know that changing the world is not easy
but it remains necessary nonetheless.


- Fadhil al-Azzawi
(translation: Khaled Mattawa)

[edie]

In My Spare Time


During my long, boring hours of spare time
I sit to play with the earth’s sphere.
I establish countries without police or parties
and I scrap others that no longer attract consumers.
I run roaring rivers through barren deserts
and I create continents and oceans
that I save for the future just in case.
I draw a new colored map of the nations:
I roll Germany to the Pacific Ocean teeming with whales
and I let the poor refugees
sail pirates’ ships to her coasts
in the fog
dreaming of the promised garden in Bavaria.
I switch England with Afghanistan
so that its youth can smoke hashish for free
provided courtesy of Her Majesty’s government.
I smuggle Kuwait from its fenced and mined borders
to Comoro, the islands
of the moon in its eclipse,
keeping the oil fields in tact, of course.
At the same time I transport Baghdad
in the midst of loud drumming
to the islands of Tahiti.
I let Saudi Arabic crouch in its eternal desert
to perserve the purity of her thoroughbred camels.
This is before I surrender America
back to the Indians
just to give history
the justice it has long lacked.


I know that changing the world is not easy
but it remains necessary nonetheless.


****- Fadhil al-Azzawi
****(translation: Khaled Mattawa)

I would keep the continents and oceans where they are
but ship the $banks$ to Alcatraz and sink the Island after that.*
No credit cards or printed money,
barter only with solid goods, handy work and mind-creations.
I would strew the seeds of magic-*
to enhance our human minds and hearts
to keep all the goodness and more of it to add.
Just keep a tiny bit of mean to balance of it all...
and wars would fade away...

edith

[Larry Robinson]

Voices from the Trees


Deep roots
Wide reach


Listen to the whispering wind,
the raging gale.
Feel the quiet in your depths.


Release your seeds into the breeze
You probably won't see
where they land and grow.


Your reaction to inevitable wounds
engenders the face you show the world.


Offer your fruit
to all who need it.


When old, remember the suppleness of youth.
When young, imagine the strength of age.


Grow ever toward flaming passion
as we reach toward the sun.


- Alan Cohen

[Larry Robinson]

To A Friend whose Work Has Come To Nothing


Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours' eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.


- William Butler Yeats

[edie]

To A Friend whose Work Has Come To Nothing

True happiness is of a retired nature,
and an enemy to pomp and noise;
it arises, in the first place,
from enjoyment of one's self,
and in the next
from the friendship
and conversation
of a few selected companions.

Joseph Addison

[Larry Robinson]

In the Yuzgir Pass




For Karim Minu

As my eyes followed her,
The dragonfly
Rose and fled.
The preying mantis
Did not reach her.
If he had,
Nothing would remain of her
Save for a colorful pair of wings.

When the foolish hunter
Was sleeping in his hiding-place
In the Yuzgir Pass,
The pretty gazelle,
Under my gaze,
Drank deeply from the spring
And went away
And nothing remained of her
But her recent droppings.

On our return,
I found a goat-bell.
I hung it round my neck
And we ran down the goat trail:
I wanted to be the dragonfly's wings
I wanted to be the gazelle's legs.


- Majid Naficy

[Larry Robinson]

The Ordinary Path to the Limitless

The child learning the bird
is not just naming it,
She is for a fleeting moment
escaping the prison of the small,
the self suddenly become vast
in the bird’s wing and the flying
song in the secret branches of a tree.
That song is heard in the ear of a heart
learning a brown bird’s name, for the first time,
a brown bird that is neither outside
nor inside, nor imagined, as it flies off,
as it merges into the familiar
magnificence, that is everywhere
and they are both the size of the sky.


- Judith Stone

[Larry Robinson]

Alone among mountains and hills,
coiling like dragons and snakes,
I've come to live.
All day, I know nothing
but joy.
Sometimes, I climb
a solitary peak,
and let loose a howl
that chills
the Universe.

- Khong Lo (?-1119)
Vietnam

[Larry Robinson]

The Price of Right


So much grace available, but how we receive it depends on what we can let go of.
- Joi Sharp


Inside the place where we are right, the rain
can never fall. Inside the place where we
are right, the leaves fall yellowed off the trees.
No breeze. No bells. No peaches. We explain.
We judge, contend, defend and claim, maintain
our certainty. And meanwhile, we don't see
the lilacs wilting, grasses browning, bees
without their hives, lost crows, the sunset drained.
But sometimes in this shrinking cage of right
wings in a doubt. A question. Nothing's clear.
And see how soon the crows return, a slight
of breeze, a scent of rain. I'll meet you here,
this open place, exposed, unclosed. How light
comes spilling in as our defenses disappear.


- Rosemerry Trommer

[Larry Robinson]

You Are Not Christ
New Orleans, Louisiana
For the drowning, yes, there is always panic.
Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinct
alone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing out
a need to know. You only feel you need to live.
That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chest
fills with a strange new air, you will not ask
what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,
but you are not the lamb. You are what’s in the lamb
that keeps it kicking. Let it.


- Ricky Laurentiis

[Larry Robinson]

There is also this to see:
They will live on, they will increase,
No longer pawns of time.
They will grow like the sweet wild berries
The forest ripens as its treasure.

Then blessed are those who never turned away
And blessed are those who stood quietly in the rain.
Theirs shall be the harvest; for them the fruits.

They will outlast the pomp and power
Of lawmakers, whose meanings will crumble.
When all else is exhausted and bled of purpose,
They will lift their hands,
that have survived.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

[Larry Robinson]

Pentimenti

"Pentimenti of an earlier position of the
arm may be seen."—Frick Museum


It's not simply
that the top image
wears off or
goes translucent;
things underneath
come back up
having enjoyed the
advantages of rest.
That's the hardest
part to bear, how
the decided–against
fattens one layer down,
free of the tests
applied to final choices.
In this painting,
for instance, see how
a third arm––
long ago repented
by the artist**––
is revealed,
working a flap
into the surface
through which
who knows what
exiled cat or
extra child
might steal.

- Kay Ryan

[Larry Robinson]

I never get enough of laughing with you,
that wild humor.


Thirsty and dry, I complain, but everything is made of
water!
Lonely, yet my head leans against your shirt!
My wounded hands, your hands.


Do something drastic.


You say, "Come and sit in the innermost room,
where you'll be safe from the love-thief."


I reply, "But I've tried to be the ringknocker
on your door, so you won't have to
always be letting me in and out."


You say, "No. You stand on the threshold waiting,
and you're here in the inner chamber too.
You're at home in both places."


I love the quietness of such an answer.
Come to this table of quietness.


- Jelelludin Rumi
Ode 2244
Version by Coleman Barks


Hitch up your camel. It is time again for Rumi's Caravan, a magical evening of poetry and music, returns. This event usually sells out. Tickets are $25 and are available at the Rug Gallery in Santa Rosa at 514 B Street, at Many Rivers Books and Tea in Sebastopol at 130 S. Main St. and at brown paper tickets. See the attached flyer for more details.


Where: Glaser Center, 547 Mendocino Ave, Santa Rosa
When: February 9. Doors open at 6 pm for pre-show wine and appetizers, and the performance begins at 7 pm.
Tea and cake will be served at intermission.

Lavish attire encouraged.

Performers:

Carol Fitzgerald
Claressa Darden Morrow
Doug von Koss
Gwynn O'Gara
Kay Crista
Larry Robinson
Maja Apolonia Rodé
Richard Naegle

Musicians:
Cynthia Albers
Kim Atkinson

[Larry Robinson]

Twilight Under Pine Ridge

Earth between two lights,
one just now draining away
from tiny trees on the western shoulder
and one to come,
as the stars begin to open in the field of night.
On every slope great trees are flowering
in beautiful relation and yet
all solitary. In the green darkness
clear voices leave off
and fold inward toward sleep.
The grass
parts.
Lord God slides forward on his belly.


- Robert Mezey

[Larry Robinson]

Descant

“We, the people…” he intoned, like a master chorister,
long, lean hands arcing slowly, gracefully,
pointing upward to that place where sparrows,
eyed from on high,
pursue their simple song of happiness and freedom.

“He wants to annihilate us,” whines the weepy Speaker to his obstinate troops,
as if turning from tedious, tiresome talk of guns, butter, and sour statistics
would so disentangle their gnarly grip on the ship of state
that they and it would sink together,
like water-logged wooden weights,
to the dark depths of memory’s vast ocean.

“We, the people…” over and over he calmly calls us back,
back from the brink of life-sapping fear,
back from shallow slogans’ thin air,
back to that place where confidence reins,
like boy sopranos singing above the gloom,
their harmonious descant lifting us skyward
with a vibrant ancient song.

- Bill Dickinson

[Larry Robinson]

The Boy Died In My Alley


to Running Boy


The Boy died in my alley
without my Having Known.
Policeman said, next morning,
"Apparently died Alone."


"You heard a shot?" Policeman said.
Shots I hear and Shots I hear.
I never see the Dead.


The Shot that killed him yes I heard
as I heard the Thousand shots before;
careening tinnily down the nights
across my years and arteries.


Policeman pounded on my door.
"Who is it?" "POLICE!" Policeman yelled.
"A Boy was dying in your alley.
A Boy is dead, and in your alley.
And have you known this Boy before?"


I have known this Boy before.
I have known this boy before, who ornaments my alley.
I never saw his face at all.
I never saw his futurefall.
But I have known this Boy.


I have always heard him deal with death.
I have always heard the shout, the volley.
I have closed my heart-ears late and early.
And I have killed him ever.


I joined the Wild and killed him
with knowledgeable unknowing.
I saw where he was going.
I saw him Crossed. And seeing,
I did not take him down.


He cried not only "Father!"
but "Mother!
Sister!
Brother."
The cry climbed up the alley.
It went up to the wind.
It hung upon the heaven
for a long
stretch-strain of Moment.


The red floor of my alley
is a special speech to me.


- Gwendolyn Brooks

[Larry Robinson]

To Be a Slave of Intensity


Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think. . .and think. . .while you are alive.
What you call “salvation’ belongs to the time before death.


If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?


The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten--
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of
Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you
will have the face of satisfied desire.


So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!


Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.


- Kabir
(version by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

Bent to the Earth
They had hit Ruben
with the high beams, had blinded
him so that the van
he was driving, full of Mexicans
going to pick tomatoes,
would have to stop. Ruben spun

the van into an irrigation ditch,
spun the five-year-old me awake
to immigration officers,
their batons already out,
already looking for the soft spots on the body,
to my mother being handcuffed
and dragged to a van, to my father
trying to show them our green cards.

They let us go. But Alvaro
was going back.
So was his brother Fernando.
So was their sister Sonia. Their mother
did not escape,
and so was going back. Their father
was somewhere in the field,
and was free. There were no great truths

revealed to me then. No wisdom
given to me by anyone. I was a child
who had seen what a piece of polished wood
could do to a face, who had seen his father
about to lose the one he loved, who had lost
some friends who would never return,
who, later that morning, bent
to the earth and went to work.


- Blas Manuel De Luna

[Larry Robinson]

State Of The Union (2005)


Today the President speaks
of his plan to liberate us all.
The bodhisattvas have a similar plan,
but theirs will take a little longer:
endless lifetimes, in fact.


His, of course, is more urgent
due to the coming Rapture,
when all true believers will be lifted
out of their cars and clothes
and credit card debt.


I, too, pray for the Rapture.
After they’re gone we’ll untangle
the wrecked cars and the broken bodies.
We’ll wash their clothes and give them to the poor.
We’ll write off their debts and open their homes to the
homeless.


Then we’ll get on with rebuilding
our bombed cities and shattered lives,
our schools, our libraries and our poisoned soil.
We’ll clean our rivers, plant rice and bake bread.
We’ll sing and make love and drink red wine.
We’ll raise our children and do the laundry
and argue about much smaller things.


As for me, I want to smell
the just open daphne and go for a walk with Cynthia.
I want to prune the apricot tree
and talk with my neighbor
about the unseasonably delicious foretaste of Spring
this second day of February, 2005.


- Larry Robinson 2/2/05

[Larry Robinson]

an orphan & the Dharma do well together
last week the odd couple gave birth to a divine child
old friends don’t recognize me
“how different you look”, they say
on Cold Mountain it is Spring
naked I chase butterflies & moonbeams
mountain outside, mountain inside
all is wholeness dreaming itself alive

- Robert Leverant

[Larry Robinson]

The Song of Wandering Aengus




I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.


When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name;
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.


Though I am old from wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.


- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Amo Ergo Sum

Because I love
The sun pours out its rays of living gold
Pours out its gold and silver on the sea.

Because I love
The earth upon her astral spindle winds
Her ecstasy-producing dance.

Because I love
Clouds travel on the winds through wide skies,
Skies wide and beautiful, blue and deep.

Because I love
Wind blows white sails,
The wind blows over flowers, the sweet wind blows.

Because I love
The ferns grow green, and green the grass, and green
The transparent sunlit trees.

Because I love
Larks rise up from the grass
And all the leaves are full of singing birds.

Because I love
The summer air quivers with a thousand wings,
Myriads of jewelled eyes burn in the light.

Because I love
The iridescnt shells upon the sand
Takes forms as fine and intricate as thought.

Because I love
There is an invisible way across the sky,
Birds travel by that way, the sun and moon
And all the stars travel that path by night.

Because I love
There is a river flowing all night long.

Because I love
All night the river flows into my sleep,
Ten thousand living things are sleeping in my arms,
And sleeping wake, and flowing are at rest.

- Kathleen Raine

[Larry Robinson]

Silence


There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.


The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.


The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.


The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.


And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night


like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.


- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Love
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.
- Czeslaw Milosz
(translated by Robert Hass)

[Larry Robinson]

Famous
The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.


- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don’t gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying—friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Cave
(for Werner Herzog)

300 century-ago paintings
six times aged over any after.
Happy 32,000^th year since
artists first conceived art as I do
while the dormant years bore no
handmade eyes, soul or elevation
until other tastes beholding them
transformed at once to wings.

Handprints of red dot
crooked finger
white horse
bison with eight legs
signifying movement,
likewise a rhino’s
many tusks, and
a spinal column.

Glacial time
sunny cold
calcite skull bones of ibis
and bits of golden eagles
carried here by bears who
later scratched the walls white,
hyenas watching noisily.

Paleolithic odors
imagined and real
of cave dwellers
envisioned and everywhere,
small boy with wolf,
white calcite,
eyes upon us, while

The hotel next door
to the art gallery
where my own paintings hang
in Glen Ellen, California
congruently is named
“Chauvet.”


- Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

Sweet Darkness


When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.


When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.


There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.


You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.


Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.


Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness


to learn


anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive


is too small for you.


- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

Abandoned Farmhouse
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm--a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.


- Ted Kooser