Poem for today

[Larry Robinson]

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never
even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a
bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Grief

As out of compost does the lily grow,
so from the refuse of our lives, beauty
can be born. The seed does not spurn the low
earth, excrement of worms, but completely

gives itself, is buried in it, fortified,
and transformed, taking refuge in that which
the world casts off. Therefore lay not aside
your griefs, but ike the good gardener, gather rich

green weeds of mind, dung of low and mean intent
dry bones of despair, ashes of burnt out desire,
twisted thorned prunings, which your heart rent.
Water with tears, while the alchemical fire

Burns and purifies until you are not weed,
but humus; rich, black and sweet, ready for seed.

- Diane Bodach

[Larry Robinson]

Courage

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

- Anne Sexton

[Larry Robinson]

One Art



The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

- Elizabeth Bishop

[Larry Robinson]

Eyes

My most honorable eyes, you are not in the best of shape.
I receive from you an image less than sharp,
And if a color, then it's dimmed.
And you were a pack of royal greyhounds once,
With whom I would set out in the early mornings.
My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things,
Lands and cities, islands and oceans.
Together we greeted immense sunrises
When the fresh air set us running on the trails
Where the dew had just begun to dry.
Now what you have seen is hidden inside me
And changed into memories or dreams.
I am slowly moving away from the fairgrounds of the world
And I notice in myself a distaste
For the monkeyish dress, the screams and drumbeats.
What a relief. To be alone with my meditation
On the basic similarity in humans
And their tiny grain of dissimilarity.
Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point,
That grows large and takes me in.

- Czeslaw Milosz

[Larry Robinson]

The Want of Peace


All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.

- WENDELL BERRY

[Larry Robinson]

Now is the winter


Now is the winter of my content
with what is and what is not.
I count the fallen leaves as
timely indications of a spring
and summer past on the way to
succeeding seasons.

In my storage room, the walnut,
olives, fig and apple canned.
In my kitchen the smell of baking bread
and coffee in the pot
and other promises on table.
In my closet, a heavy coat, rain gear
promising warm and dry, shelter from the rain,
amd woolen mittens to test the frost
and catch the flakes of falling snow.

In the winter of my content
on calendar pages I find
fond names of time and place
of appointments made, those past and due
and I listen to the tune of falling rain
on the path ahead in failing light,
though my voice weakens
and my beard grows white,
I see glimmers yet of still another year
with friends and books and yet-to-be discoveries

I've known both fire and ice
on brimstone nights and ice-flow mornings,
spent down-time on confusion hill
bog-waded in swampy hollows
chased insubstantial dreams
made wayward turns on unmapped roads
and dropped the ball short of the goal
and yet survived, sometimes stronger than before.

I have left behind
those needs no longer needed
ways no longer serving,
replaced selfpity and regret,
made room for new priorities,
prepared for final challenges.


I count the fallen leaves as
timely indications of a spring
and summer past on the way to
succeeding seasons
and am content.

- Doug Stout

[Larry Robinson]

Half-And-Half



You can't be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So, half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can't love
anyone else. Says he.

At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,
he's sweeping. The rubbed stones
feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar
across faces of date-stuffed mamool.

This morning we lit the slim white candles
which bend over at the waist by noon.
For once the priests weren't fighting
in the church for the best spots to stand.
As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
This is partly why he prays in no language
but his own. Why I press my lips
to every exception.

A woman opens a window—here and here and here—
placing a vase of blue flowers
on an orange cloth. I follow her.
She is making a soup from what she had left
in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
She is leaving nothing out.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Making a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Riprap


Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

- Gary Snyder


Gary Snyder, “Riprap” from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. Copyright 2003 by Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

ARS POETICA


To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

- Jorge Luis Borges

[Larry Robinson]

Kiss



I want to be kissed!

I want to be kissed!

God, I want to be kissed all over my bumpy skin.

I want to be kissed deep inside to the part that glows within.

I want to be kissed till my smooth pearl skin stands glistening in the light.

I want to be kissed to break this spell.

I want to be kissed like all men desire, but few receive.

I want to be kissed, because I need to be kissed,

because some blessings you just can't do yourself.

I want to be kissed in this life, now! not the next.

I want to be kissed before it's too late.

The trick in kissing is there can be no trick.

Willing kiss to warty skin frees the pearl within.

And the prize?

The kisser becomes the kissed!

Two blessings, one act.

I want to be kissed like every human deserves to be kissed.

I want the blessing of the human in this life, I can wait for God's in the next.

I want to be kissed!



- Clay Kirchenbauer

[Larry Robinson]

A Day is Coming

A day is coming
in which misery will end.
A day is coming
in which poverty
will open bank accounts
in every nation.
A day is coming.
I hear it coming.
A day is coming
in which the
campesino
will gather his children a green spring
and go on vacations.
I believe it.
I see it.
A day is coming
in which a soldier will be
decorated
for helping
instead of killing
his poor brother.
A day is coming
in which lovers
will serve themselves from large bowls
warm love and faithfulness.
A day is coming
in which the Christ who returns
is the Christ who never left.
A day is coming
in which the father will ask the son
for friendship
instead of respect.
A day is coming
in which the student
and a poor laborer
will be half and half.
A day is coming
in which the prisoners
come out
running in the fields and shouting
about their freedom.
A day is coming,
I see it coming.

- Lalo Delgado, 1994
( From A Day is Coming, 32 days of Abelardo)

[SEELOVE]

Thank you for this, i will post it on my blog together with Art that will do it justice, (perhaps not but they work well together) Namasté nan

[Larry Robinson]

Bombs Away


Outside my window the world is falling.

First the leaves followed by stars, then sky,

maybe snow. Well, yes, the snow.

And then, of course, bombs.

Bombs? Well, what I know

are not bombs, per se, though

this morning in slippers and robe

I perused the morning papers

and wondered: Why is that child—

“Brown as a berry, my Joanna Banana”—

skipping towards detonation while men

assemble with tact and persuasion,

discuss bombs over coffee—or tea?

My own life falls away.

What is left? Husks of hope or at least

two feet that move me towards something—

even my own life falling away.

More than her sliced body will know.



- Amy Small-McKinney

[SEELOVE]

Posted another ONE of your gems today with more ART, here is ONE for you:

ONE ART

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-- Elizabeth Bishop (https://www.cs.rice.edu/%7Essiyer/minstrels/index_poet_B.html#Bishop)

[Larry Robinson]

We Are The Guardians Of His Beauty

We are the protectors
Of the Sun.

There is only one reason
We have followed God into this world:

To encourage laughter, freedom, dance
And love.

Let a noble cry inside of you speak to me
Saying,

"Hafiz,
Don't just sit there on the moon tonight
Doing nothing -

Help unfurl my heart into the Friend's Mind,
Help, Old Man, to heal my wounded wings!"

We are the companions of His Beauty
We are the guardians
Of Truth.

Every man, plant and creature in Existence,
Every woman, child, vein and note
Is a servant of our Beloved -

A harbinger of joy,
The harbinger of
Light.

- Hafiz

[Larry Robinson]

Above Pate Valley
by Gary Snyder

We finished clearing the last
Section of trail by noon,
High on the ridge-side
Two thousand feet above the creek
Reached the pass, went on
Beyond the white pine groves,
Granite shoulders, to a small
Green meadow watered by the snow,
Edged with Aspen—sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
Black volcanic glass—obsidian—
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
Head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer,
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousand years.

[Larry Robinson]

#118

She first came to me pure,
arrayed in innocence.
I loved her as a child.

Then she began to dress
in outlandish robes.
Unwittingly, I began to hate her.

She came to be a queen,
ostentatious of riches.
What senseless wrath I felt, how full of gall!

...But she began disrobing,
and I smiled at her.

She left on only the tunic
of ancient innocence.
My trust in her returned.

And she removed the tunic,
and appeared wholly nude...
O passion of my life, Poetry,
naked, mine forever.

- Juan Ramon Jiminez


(Translated by Eloise Roach)

[Larry Robinson]

A Sleep of Prisoners


The human heart can go the lengths of God,
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere.
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size,
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake
But will you wake for pity's sake?

- Christopher Fry

[Larry Robinson]

Morel Mushrooms

Softly they come
thumbing up from
firm ground

protruding unharmed.
Easily crumbled
and yet

how they shouldered
the leaf and mold
aside, rising

unperturbed,
breathing obscurely,
still as stone.

By the slumping log,
by the dappled aspen,
they grow alone.

A dumb eloquence
seems their trade.
Like hooded monks

in a sacred wood
they say:
Tomorrow we are gone.

- Jane Whitledge

(Reprinted from "Wilderness Magazine," Spring, 1993, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1993.)

[Larry Robinson]

The Wave


I want to feel like,
Be like, a wave:
Come, not rolling or riding,
But gravely assuming mass,
Growing even of a sudden larger
Toward the shore;
Pealing over pounding in a line like bells forever;
Raging wet and shouting whitely
Spread out fanlike flat in a rush
On sand, on sand at the feet of –
Those who stand watching;
Then slip back quickeningly hissing, and
Personally, be gone.

- John Argue

[Larry Robinson]

Daily

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world


- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

The Sonnets to Orpheus
Sonnet XIII, First Part,


Plump apple, smooth banana, melon, peach,
gooseberry…How all this affluence
speaks death and life into the mouth…I sense…
Observe it from a child’s transparent features

while he tastes. This comes from far away.
What miracle is happening in your mouth?
Instead of words, discoveries flow out
from the ripe fruit, astonished to be free.

Dare to say what “apple” truly is.
This sweetness that feels thick, dark, dense at first;
then, exquisitely lifted in your taste

grows clarified, awake and luminous,
double-meaninged, sunny, earthy, real -
Oh knowledge, pleasure - inexhaustible.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

[Larry Robinson]

Crossing

Every stone is a doorway to the wilderness, an ancient crossing point to
another place, through which I can sometimes pass
and sometimes not.
I imagine great rivers of time
once poured from them,
and what we now have left
are the prehistoric pieces
of a cosmic egg that cracked open
in some now long-forgotten,
Once-upon-a-time;
the fossilized shells
of a primeval wind and rain
that you can still feel
in your bones when you stand
naked in your own life,
a stranger in a strange land,
who lost part of himself
crossing between worlds,
and then one day, picking up a stone,
heard the sound
of his own breathing from within.

- Michael Whan

[Larry Robinson]

Home Burial

He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again. He spoke

Advancing toward her: “What is it you see
From up there always—for I want to know.”
She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,
And her face changed from terrified to dull.
He said to gain time: “What is it you see,”


Mounting until she cowered under him.
“I will find out now—you must tell me, dear.”
She, in her place, refused him any help
With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.
She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see,

Blind creature; and a while he didn’t see.
But at last he murmured, “Oh,” and again, “Oh.”


“What is it—what?” she said.

“Just that I see.”

“You don’t,” she challenged. “Tell me what it is.”


“The wonder is I didn’t see at once.
I never noticed it from here before.
I must be wonted to it—that’s the reason.
The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.


Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?
There are three stones of slate and one of marble,
Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight
On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.
But I understand: it is not the stones,

But the child’s mound——”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” she cried.


She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm
That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs;
And turned on him with such a daunting look,

He said twice over before he knew himself:
“Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”



“Not you! Oh, where’s my hat? Oh, I don’t need it!
I must get out of here. I must get air.
I don’t know rightly whether any man can.”


“Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time.
Listen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.”
He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.
“There’s something I should like to ask you, dear.”


“You don’t know how to ask it.”


“Help me, then.”
Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.


“My words are nearly always an offence.
I don’t know how to speak of anything
So as to please you. But I might be taught


I should suppose. I can’t say I see how.
A man must partly give up being a man
With women-folk. We could have some arrangement
By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you’re a-mind to name.


Though I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love.
Two that don’t love can’t live together without them.
But two that do can’t live together with them.”
She moved the latch a little. “Don’t—don’t go.
Don’t carry it to someone else this time.


Tell me about it if it’s something human.
Let me into your grief. I’m not so much
Unlike other folks as your standing there
Apart would make me out. Give me my chance.
I do think, though, you overdo it a little.


What was it brought you up to think it the thing
To take your mother-loss of a first child
So inconsolably—in the face of love.
You’d think his memory might be satisfied——”


“There you go sneering now!”


“I’m not, I’m not!
You make me angry. I’ll come down to you.
God, what a woman! And it’s come to this,
A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.”



“You can’t because you don’t know how.
If you had any feelings, you that dug

With your own hand—how could you?—his little grave;
I saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap and leap in air,
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly


And roll back down the mound beside the hole.

I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.
And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs
To look again, and still your spade kept lifting.
Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice


Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why,
But I went near to see with my own eyes.
You could sit there with the stains on your shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave
And talk about your everyday concerns.


You had stood the spade up against the wall
Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.”



“I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.
I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.”


“I can repeat the very words you were saying.


‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.’
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlour.


You couldn’t care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.
No, from the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone.


Friends make pretence of following to the grave,
But before one is in it, their minds are turned
And making the best of their way back to life
And living people, and things they understand.

But the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so
If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!”

“There, you have said it all and you feel better.
You won’t go now. You’re crying. Close the door.
The heart’s gone out of it: why keep it up.
Amy! There’s someone coming down the road!”


“You—oh, you think the talk is all. I must go—
Somewhere out of this house. How can I make you——”


“If—you—do!” She was opening the door wider.
Where do you mean to go? First tell me that.
I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—”

- Robert Frost

[Larry Robinson]

Be Suspicious of Yourself

Everything you do has a quality
which comes back to you in some way.

Every action takes a form in the invisible world,
which may be different from how you thought

it would appear. A crime is committed,
and a gallows begins to be built. One does not

look like the other, but they correspond.
Accept the results of what you've done in anger,

or for greed, or to elevate your ego. Don't blame
fate! That dog lies in the kennel

and will not respond to anyone's calling.
Be suspicious of yourself! Inquire

about your hidden motives. It takes courage
to repent, and more courage to change.

But realize this: just as dustgrains shine
in sunlight coming through this window,

so there's a light of reality, within which ideas,
hidden hypocrisies, and the qualities

of every action become clear. All you've done
and will do will be seen in the light of that sun.


- Rumi

[Larry Robinson]

THE GREAT MYSTERY

Spring
Rolls away the stone
From winter’s tomb

And I . . .
Emerge
Blinking, full of shadows
Daring to bloom again

Though I have lost my heart’s voice
A hundred times
Nay, a thousand times,
Hope rises again
Like Kundalini

Ignites a birth
Of exotic flowers all over my skin
Intoxicating with their fragrance
Fresh from the Great Mystery

Deep within these flower centers
A vital energy flows
And in my heart,
The fluttering of new wings.

- Kay Christa

[Larry Robinson]

I Tell You
(excerpt)

I could not predict the fullness
of the day. How it was enough
to stand alone without help
in the green yard at dawn.

How two geese would spin out
of the ochre sun opening my spine,
curling my head up to the sky
in an arc I took for granted.

And the lilac bush by the red
brick wall flooding the air
with its purple weight of beauty?
How it made my body swoon,

brought my arms to reach for it
without even thinking.

*
In class today a Dutch woman split
in two by a stroke - one branch
of her body a petrified silence,
walked leaning on her husband

to the treatment table while we
the unimpaired looked on with envy.
How he dignified her wobble,
beheld her deformation, untied her

shoe, removed the brace that stakes
her weaknesses. How he cradled
her down in his arms to the table
smoothing her hair as if they were

alone in their bed. I tell you -
his smile would have made you weep.

*

At twilight I visit my garden
where the peonies are about to burst.

Some days there will be more
flowers than the vase can hold.



- Susan Glassmeyer

[Larry Robinson]

A Country Incident
by May Sarton

Absorbed in planting bulbs, that work of hope,
I was startled by a loud human voice,
“Do go on working while I talk. Don’t stop!”
And I was caught upon the difficult choice—
To yield the last half hour of precious light,
Or to stay on my knees, absurd and rude;
I willed her to be gone with all my might,
This kindly neighbor who destroyed a mood;
I could not think of next spring any more,
I had to re-assess the way I live.
Long after I went in and closed the door,
I pondered on the crude imperative.

What it is to be caught up in each day
Like a child fighting imaginary wars,
Converting work into this passionate play,
A rounded whole made up of different chores
Which one might name haphazard meditation.
And yet an unexpected call destroys
Or puts to rout my primitive elation:
Why be so serious about mere joys?
Is this where some outmoded madness lies,
Poet as recluse? No, what comes to me
Is how my father looked out of his eyes,
And how he fought for his own passionate play.

He could tear up unread and throw away
Communications from officialdom,
And, courteous in every other way,
Would not brook anything that kept him from
Those lively dialogues with man’s whole past
That were his intimate and fruitful pleasure.
Impetuous, impatient to the last,
“Be adamant, keep clear, strike for your treasure!”
I hear the youthful ardor in his voice
(And so I must forgive a self in labor).
I feel his unrepentant smiling choice,
(And so I ask forgiveness of my neighbor).

[Larry Robinson]

Why Then Do We Not Despair

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.


- Anna Akhmatova

(Poems of Akhmatova, edited and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max
Hayward)

[Larry Robinson]

Another Spring

The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision.
The moon, without taking thought,
Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.

The white moon enters the heart of the river;
The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;
Deep in the night a pine cone falls;
Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.

The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;
The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;
High in the sky the Northern Crown
Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.

O heart, heart, so singularly
Intransigent and corruptible,
Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,
And moments that should each last forever

Slide unconsciously by us like water.

- Kenneth Rexroth

[Larry Robinson]

Easter Morning In Wales

A garden inside me, unknown, secret,
Neglected for years,
The layers of its soil deep and thick.
Trees in the corners with branching arms
And the tangled briars like broken nets.

Sunrise through the misted orchard,
Morning sun turns silver on the pointed twigs.
I have woken from the sleep of ages and I am not sure
If I am really seeing, or dreaming,
Or simply astonished
Walking toward sunrise
To have stumbled into the garden
Where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

Tomorrow

Tomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeds
poking through
our skulls.

Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.

Drunk on music,
who needs wine?

Come on,
Sweetheart,
let’s go dancing
while we’ve still
got feet.

- David Budbill

[Dixon]

The Jaws of Empathy

The wind sounds like a demon as it howls through the trees.
You and I just love to watch the storm.
Through the rain-spattered window we can see the lightning flash,
from our living room where we stay dry and warm.
But a different demon howls in a storm inside my head.
It won’t let me enjoy the lightning show.
It keeps saying “There are people out there shivering in the dark.
They don’t have a warm place they can go.”

Empathy
tears apart the heart of me.
A part of me wants to be free
from the jaws of empathy.

Those cows and pigs keep marching to the slaughterhouse and then
they come apart and end up on my plate.
Those Mexicans keep picking fruit and vegetables for us.
It must be their fault that I’m gaining weight.
I’m unfulfilled until I eat my fill, and now I’m fat.
My belly aches. It’s bursting at the seams.
But somewhere children’s bellies ache for lack of any food.
I ate their share. Their crying haunts my dreams.

Empathy
eats a hole inside of me.
Still, I don’t really want to flee
from the jaws of empathy.

Your closet’s filled with pretty clothes. You always dress with class.
Your clothing’s made by kids in foreign lands.
No human rights or labor unions ever are allowed
to slow the flow of clothes into your hands.
The sweatshop system keeps it cheap. The government’s in line,
to keep us all supplied with skirts and shirts.
You can snicker at me, and call me a bleeding heart,
but when I think about those kids, it hurts.

Empathy
feels like it’s killing me,
but it beats sociopathy.
I’ll face the jaws of empathy.

Money talks and bullshit walks and things are tough all over.
It’s a jungle out there, so they say.
The booming war economy is fattening the vultures,
and in the palace, golden asses bray.
The party’s in full swing. They’re doing the domination thing.
They dance upon the losers in the dust,
whose sunken eyes and mangled limbs and broken dreams compel me
to sing about their lives. Somebody must.

Empathy
Tears apart the heart of me.
Still, I don’t really want to flee
I’ll face the jaws of empathy.

-- Dixon Wragg

[Larry Robinson]

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

Of Love and Other Disasters

The punch-press operator from Flint
met the assembler from West Virginia
in a bar near the stadium. Neither
had anything in mind, so they conversed
about the upcoming baseball season
about which neither cared. We could
be a couple, he thought, but she was
all wrong, way too skinny. For years
he’d had an image of the way a woman
should look, and it wasn’t her, it wasn’t
anyone he’d ever known, certainly not
his ex-wife, who’d moved back south
to live with her high-school sweetheart.
About killed him. I don’t need that shit,
he almost said aloud, and then realized
she’d been talking to someone, maybe
to him, about how she couldn’t get
her hands right, how the grease ate
so deeply into her skin it became
a part of her, and she put her hand,
palm up, on the bar and pointed
with her cigarette at the deep lines
the work had carved. “The life line,”
he said, “which one is that?” “None,”
she said, and he noticed that her eyes
were hazel flecked with tiny spots
of gold, and then—embarrassed—looked
back at her hand, which seemed tiny
and delicate, the fingers yellowed
with calluses but slender and fine.
She took a paper napkin off the bar,
Spit on it and told him to hold still
while she carefully lifted his glasses
up on his forehead, leaving him half
blind, and wiped something off
above his left cheekbone. “There,”
she said, lowering his glasses, “I
got it,” and even with his glasses on
what she showed him was nothing
he could see. He thought, better
get out of here before it’s too late, but
knew too late was what he wanted.

- Philip Levine

[Larry Robinson]

It Felt Love

How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give the world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise,
We all remain
Too
Frightened.

- Hafiz

[Larry Robinson]

Between Poems

A lady asked me
what poets do
between poems.
Between passions
and visions.
I said
that between poems
I provided for death.

She meant as to jobs
and commonly.
Commonly, I provide
against my death,
which comes on.
And give thanks
for the women I have
been privileged to
in extreme.

- Jack Gilbert

[Larry Robinson]

Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal


After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,

I heard the announcement:

If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any

Arabic,

Please come to the gate immediately.


Well -- one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own

gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,

Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor,

wailing loudly.

Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her.

What is her

Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four

hours late and she

Did this.


I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.

Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway,

min fadlick,

Sho bit se-wee?



The minute she heard any words she knew -- however

poorly used -

She stopped crying.



She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely.

She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical

treatment the

Following day. I said no, no, we're fine, you'll get

there, just late,



Who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him.

We called her son and I spoke with him in English.

I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on

the plane and

Would ride next to her -- southwest.



She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just

for the fun of it.



Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while

in Arabic and

Found out of course they had ten shared friends.



Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call

some Palestinian

Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took

up about 2 hours.



She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her

life. Answering

Questions.



She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies --

little powdered

Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts --

out of her bag --

And was offering them to all the women at the gate.



To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It

was like a

Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler

from California,

The lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered

with the same

Powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better

cookies.



And then the airline broke out the free beverages from

huge coolers --

Non-alcoholic -- and the two little girls for our

flight, one African

American, one Mexican American -- ran around serving

us all apple juice

And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar

too.



And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were

holding hands --

Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some

medicinal thing,



With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling

tradition. Always

Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.



And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones

and thought,

This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.



Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of

confusion stopped

-- has seemed apprehensive about any other person.



They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other

women too.

This can still happen anywhere.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Song of a Second April

April, this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
The grey woodpecker taps and bores;
The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep,
Noisy and swift the small brooks run
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun,
Pensively -- only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

[Larry Robinson]

Fishing for Poems




I love to go fishing for poems,
out into the world with no agenda
and follow my nose, walk or drive
or sometimes even dance
to where I can feel
the poems will be biting.

Then all I need to do
is sit there lazy
with a line
tied to my bare foot,

and they come, they come,
eager for the bait
of my unbusied mind,

knowing they are safe,
that I will give them back
more lovely than ever,
pristine
as the day God made them

- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: "Go on, cry. What's the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!"

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't
Escape from silence? If we don't lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we've listened to the great criers-Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglas-and now
We're silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

- Robert Bly

[Larry Robinson]

El Nautilo


Ayer leí un cuento

del nautilo

que vive al fondo del mar

construyendo su casa

un caracol espiral

cámara por cámara


como crece el nautilo

así crece la próxima cámara

y las viejas ya cerradas

llenas de gases

ayudan el nautilo

quedar a flote


y este cuento del nautilo

quien vive en su última cámara

me intriga

la cuenta me inspira

que una criatura

que corre suavemente por el océano

ni olvide ni vive en el pasado

sino sabe

como usar este pasado

para quedar buoyante


quizás es posible que nosotros

podemos descomponernos

nuestros pasados

hasta que no pesan tanto . . .


amores caídos, peccados,

celos, dolores, la furia . . .

y podemos ponerlos

en una cámara cerrada,

menos denso cada día


imagínese un mundo

en lo cual

el descontento global

vecino a vecino

país a país

sería transformado

por el método del nautilo

cada cámara

cada memoria

más ligera

más capaz

de soportarnos

en la vida presente

cada minuto

cada inspiración

las cámaras de nuestra corazón



The Nautilus


Yesterday I read a story

of the nautilus

who lives at the bottom of the sea

building his house

a spiral shell

chamber by chamber


as the nautilus grows

so grows the next chamber

and the old ones, closed up

filled with gasses

help the nautilus

stay afloat


and this story of the nautilus

who lives in his last chamber

intrigues me

the story inspires me

that a creature

who moves slowly through the ocean

neither forgets nor lives in the past

but knows

how to use the past

to stay buoyant


perhaps it’s possible that we

can breakdown

our past

until it doesn’t weigh so much . . .



fallen love, sins,

jealousy, pain, fury . . .

and we can put them

in a closed chamber

less dense each day

imagine a world

in which

global discontent

neighbor by neighbor

country by country

could be transformed

by the method of the nautilus

each chamber

each memory

lighter

more capable

of supporting us

in present life

each moment

each breath

the chambers of our heart


- Sharon Bard

[Larry Robinson]

2 tsp. lemon rind

Have you ever held a lemon entirely
stripped of its zest?
Have you ever been given
so pale a gift?
Something so tender
it frightens you,
like a bird
fallen from the nest
before its wings—
suddenly there it is in your path
and what are you
to do with it?
or the transparent skin
of your mother
in the hospital bed?
You have been told not to touch
but you must touch
because touch is the only thing
required of you:
the palm of your hand.
The naked, almost skinless fruit
fills it perfectly and jiggles
with juice.
You think of a painting you love:

six bright lemons set in royal blue—
something your eye adores—
but this, this
is sculpture for the blind,
and it has been given
to you.

–Susan Windle

[Larry Robinson]

Unwise Purchases

They sit around the house
not doing much of anything: the boxed set
of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread:

The French-cut silk shirts
which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
and make me look exactly
like the kind of middle-aged man
who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:

The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
the mysteries of the heavens
but which I only used once or twice
to try to find something heavenly
in the windows of the high-rise down the road,
and which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
when it could be examining the Crab Nebula:

The 30-day course in Spanish
whose text I never opened,
whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,

save for Tape One, where I never learned
whether the suave American
conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
at a Madrid hotel about the possibility
of obtaining a room
actually managed to check in.

I like to think
that one thing led to another between them
and that by Tape Six or so
they're happily married
and raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.

But I'll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
for a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,

and I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
there lives a woman with, say,
a fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
drying in their tubes

on the table where the violin
she bought on a whim
lies entombed in the permanent darkness
of its locked case
next to the abandoned chess set,

a woman who has always dreamed of becoming
the kind of woman the man I've always dreamed of becoming
has always dreamed of meeting.

And while the two of them discuss star clusters
and Cézanne, while they fence delicately
in Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,

she and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
fixing up a little risotto,
enjoying a modest cabernet,
while talking over a day so ordinary
as to seem miraculous.

- George Bilgere

[Larry Robinson]

ALL DAY A MYSTERY DAWNS

It cheered me to be mistaken, to believe that water gurgling in the coffee pot
was the lonesome song of mourning doves just outside the cottage window.

And when a glass tumbled off the shelf and fell unbreakably into these purely
thoughtless hands, I couldn’t say for sure if anything was clearly right, or
wrong.

So by the time I’m fooled on Empire Bluff Trail by a moss-covered buckeye, not
really a snail on the move after all, I begin to welcome an unpreoccupied mind.

Come evening I climb the grand She-Bear Dune, a hundred times taller than I
and I lie on her back facing west and the long deep blue of the greatest lake I
love.

Here, under the spill of the Milky Way, and before I fall into an ingenious dream
about a broken garden where even the unexpected can thrive, I want to know this—

Who is it that walks alone, without accompaniment of soliloquy, those running
commentaries about future hopes and all past sorrows? Who is it that walks alone?

Great Ursula shakes the sky with her laughter, lightening every story, true or
conjured, now scattered, as rain drops below us on miles and miles of shifting sand.

- Susan Glassmeyer

[Larry Robinson]

The War Works Hard

How magnificent the war is
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning,
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places,
swings corpses through the air,
rolls stretchers to the wounded,
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers,
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins...
some are lifeless and glistening,
others are pale and still throbbing ...
it produces the most questions
in the minds of children,
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missiles
into the sky,
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters,
urges families to emigrate,
stands beside the clergymen
as they curse the devil
(poor devil, he remains
with one hand in the searing fire)...
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed,
teaches lovers to write letters,
accustoms young women to waiting,
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures,
builds new houses
for the orphans,
invigorates the coffin makers,
and gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
paints a smile on the leader's face.
It works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.

- Dunya Mikhail
(translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow

Mikhail is an Iraqi poet who teaches Arabic in Detroit.

[Larry Robinson]

Beginners
Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea—“

But we have only begun
To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
—so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
—we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

How Everything Adores Being Alive
*
What
if you were
a beetle,
and a soft wind
*
and a certain allowance of time
had summoned you
out of your wrappings,
and there you were,
*
so many legs
hardening,
maybe even
more than one pair of eyes
*
and the whole world
in front of you?
And what if you had wings
and flew
*
into the garden,
then fell
into the up-tipped
face
*
of a white flower,
and what if you had
a sort of mouth,
a lip
*
to place close
to the skim
of honey
that kept offering itself -
*
what would you think then
of the world
as, night and day,
you were kept there -
*
oh happy prisoner -
sighing, humming,
roaming
that deep cup?
*
- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. Against the shadow
of veiled possibility my workdays stand
in a most asking light. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

There is No One But Us

There is no one but us.
There is no one to send,
nor a clean hand nor a pure heart
on the face of the earth, nor in the earth,
but only us,
a generation comforting ourselves
with the notion that we have come at an awkward time,
that our innocent fathers are all dead
--as if innocence had ever been--
and our children busy and troubled,
and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready,
having each of us chosen wrongly,
made a false start, failed,
yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures,
and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved.
But there is no one but us.
There never has been.

- Annie Dillard

[Larry Robinson]

this amazing day

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

- e.e. cummings

[Larry Robinson]

Returned To Say

When I face north a lost Cree
on some new shore puts a moccasin down,
rock in the light and noon for seeing,
he in a hurry and I beside him

It will be a long trip; he will be a new chief;
we have drunk new water from an unnamed stream;
under little dark trees he is to find a path
we both must travel because we have met.

Henceforth we gesture even by waiting;
there is a grain of sand on his knifeblade
so small he blows it and while his breathing
darkens the steel his become set

And start a new vision: the rest of his life.
We will mean what he does. Back of this page
the path turns north. We are looking for a sign.
Our moccasins do not mark the ground.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.

And nothing
happens!
Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

-- Nothing happens?
Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

- Juan Ramon Jimenez

[Larry Robinson]

A Postcard from the Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being; breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

-Wallace Stevens

[Larry Robinson]

Ripening

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.


- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

WITNESS

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

The Land's Prayer

Our Father, Our Mother,
We are on Heaven;
Hallowed be this ground.
Your Kingdom will come
If our will is one
on Earth,
As it is our Heaven.
Give all this day their daily bread,
And forgive us our excesses,
As we forgive those whose excess exceeds ours.
And lead us not into consumption
But deliver us from avarice,
For ours is the power
To preserve Your Kingdom
In all its glory,
Forever and ever.
Amen.

- Layne Longfellow

[Larry Robinson]

The Turtle Shrine Near Chittagong


Humps of shell emerge from dark water.
Believers toss hunks of bread,
hoping the fat reptilian heads
will loom forth from the murk
and eat. Meaning: you have been
heard.

I stood, breathing the stench of mud
and rotten dough, and could not feel
encouraged. Climbed the pilgrim hill
where prayers in tissue radiant tubes
were looped to a tree. Caught in
their light, a hope washed over me
small as the hope of stumbling feet
but did not hold long enough
to get me down.

Rickshas crowded the field,
announced by tinny bells.
The friend beside me, whose bread
floated and bobbed,
grew grim. They’re full, I told him.
But they always eat mine.

That night I told the man I love most
he came from hell. It was also
his birthday. We gulped lobster
over a white tablecloth in a country
where waves erase whole villages, annually,
and don’t even make our front page.
Waiters forded the lulling currents
of heat. Later, my mosquito net
had holes.

All night, I was pitching something,
crumbs or crusts, into that bottomless pool
where the spaces between our worlds take root.
He would forgive me tomorrow.
But I wanted a mouth to rise up
from the dark, a hand,
any declarable body part, to swallow
or say, This is water, that is land.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Report to Crazy Horse


All the Sioux were defeated. Our clan
got poor, but a few got richer.
They fought two wars. I did not
take part. No one remembers your vision
or even your real name. Now
the children go to town and like
loud music. I married a Christian.

Crazy Horse, it is not fair
to hide a new vision from you.
In our schools we are learning
to take aim when we talk, and we have
found out our enemies. They shift when
words do; they even change and hide
in every person. A teacher here says
hurt or scorned people are places
where real enemies hide. He says
we should not hurt or scorn anyone,
but help them. And I will tell you
in a brave way, the way Crazy Horse
talked: that teacher is right.

I will tell you a strange thing:
at the rodeo, close to the grandstand,
I saw a farm lady scared by a blown
piece of paper; and at that place
horses and policemen were no longer
frightening, but suffering faces were,
and the hunched-over backs of the old.

Crazy Horse, tell me if I am right:
these are the things we thought we were
doing something about.

In your life you saw many strange things,
and I will tell you another: now I salute
the white man's flag. But when I salute
I hold my hand alertly on the heartbeat
and remember all of us and how we depend
on a steady pulse together. There are those
who salute because they fear other flags
or mean to use ours to chase them:
I must not allow my part of saluting
to mean this. All of our promises,
our generous sayings to each other, our
honorable intentions—those I affirm
when I salute. At these times it is like
shutting my eyes and joining a religious
colony at prayer in the gray dawn
in the deep aisles of a church.

Now I have told you about new times.
Yes, I know others will report
different things. They have been caught
by weak ways. I tell you straight
the way it is now, and it is our way,
the way we were trying to find.

The chokecherries along our valley
still bear a bright fruit. There is good
pottery clay north of here. I remember
our old places. When I pass the Musselshell
I run my hand along those old grooves in the rock.

- WILLIAM STAFFORD

[Larry Robinson]

Picnic, Lightning

It is possible to be struck by a
meteor or a single-engine plane while
reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians
are flattened by safes falling from
rooftops mostly within the panels of
the comics, but still, we know it is
possible, as well as the flash of
summer lightning, the thermos toppling
over, spilling out on the grass.
And we know the message can be
delivered from within. The heart, no
valentine, decides to quit after
lunch, the power shut off like a
switch, or a tiny dark ship is
unmoored into the flow of the body's
rivers, the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore. This is
what I think about when I shovel
compost into a wheelbarrow, and when
I fill the long flower boxes, then
press into rows the limp roots of red
impatiens -- the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth from the
sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then
the soil is full of marvels, bits of
leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam. Then
the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the
clouds a brighter white, and all I
hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone, the small
plants singing with lifted faces, and
the click of the sundial as one hour
sweeps into the next.

- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

Bone

1.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out

what the soul is,

and where hidden,

and what shape –

and so, last week,

when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died

hundreds of years ago, I thought

maybe I was close

to discovering something –

for the ear bone

2.

is the portion that lasts longest

in any of us, man or whale; shaped

like a squat spoon

with a pink scoop where

once, in the lively swimmer’s head,

it joined its two sisters
in the house of hearing,
it was only

two inches long –

and thought: the soul

might be like this –

so hard, so necessary –

3.

yet almost nothing.

Beside me

the gray sea

was opening and shutting its wave-doors,

unfolding over and over

its time-ridiculing roar;
I looked but I couldn’t see anything
through its dark-knit glare;

yet don’t we all know, the golden sand

is there at the bottom,

though our eyes have never seen it,

nor can our hands ever catch it

4.

lest we would sift it down

into fractions, and facts –

certainties –

and what the soul is, also

I believe I will never quite know.

Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,

but looking, and touching, and loving,

which is the way I walked on,

softly,

through the pale-pink morning light.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

What the Heart Wants

See then
what the heart wants,
that pliable iron
sprung to the poppy's redness,
the honey's gold, winged
as the heron-lit water is:
by reflecting.
As an aged elephant answers
the slightest, first gesture of hand,
it puts itself at the mercy --
utterly docile, the forces
that brought it there vanished,
fold into fold.
And the old-ice ivory, the unstartlable
black of the eye that has traveled so far
with the fringed, peripheral howdah
swaying behind, look mildly back
as it swings the whole bulk of the body
close to the ground. Over and over
it does this, bends to what asks.
Whatever asks, heart kneels and offers to bear.

- Jane Hirschfield

[Larry Robinson]

The Great Blue Heron

M.A.K., September 1880-September 1955

As I wandered on the beach
I saw the heron standing
Sunk in the tattered wings
He wore as a hunchback’s coat.
Shadow without a shadow,
Hung on invisible wires
From the top of a canvas day,
What scissors cut him out?
Superimposed on a poster
Of summer by the strand
Of a long-decayed resort,
Poised in the dusty light
Some fifteen summers ago;
I wondered, an empty child,
“Heron, whose ghost are you?”

I stood on the beach alone,
In the sudden chill of the burned.
My thought raced up the path.
Pursuing it, I ran
To my mother in the house.
And led her to the scene.
The spectral bird was gone.
But her quick eye saw him drifting
Over the highest pines
On vast, unmoving wings.
Could they be those ashen things,
So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,
A pair of broken arms
That were not made for flight?
In the middle of my loss
I realized she knew:
My mother knew what he was.

O great blue heron, now
That the summer house has burned
So many rockets ago,
So many smokes and fires
And beach-lights and water-glow
Reflecting pinwheel and flare:
The old logs hauled away,
The pines and driftwood cleared
From that bare strip of shore
Where dozens of children play;
Now there is only you
Heavy upon my eye.
Why have you followed me here,
Heavy and far away?
You have stood there patiently
For fifteen summers and snows,
Denser than my repose,
Bleaker than any dream,
Waiting upon the day
When, like gray smoke, a vapor
Floating into the sky,
A handful of paper ashes,
My mother would drift away.

-Carolyn Kizer

“The Great Blue Heron” from Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer.

[Larry Robinson]

The Task

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.
We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair -
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task
we've taken on,
though also vast:
from dusk to dawn,

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.

- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

To My Mother


I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

1994


i was leaving my fifty-eighth year
when a thumb of ice
stamped itself hard near my heart

you have your own story
you know about the fears the tears
the scar of disbelief

you know that the saddest lies
are the ones we tell ourselves
you know how dangerous it is

to be born with breasts
you know how dangerous it is
to wear dark skin

i was leaving my fifty-eighth year
when i woke into the winter
of a cold and mortal body

thin icicles hanging off
the one mad nipple weeping

have we not been good children
did we not inherit the earth

but you must know all about this
from your own shivering life

- Lucille Clifton

[Larry Robinson]

Credo


Creo que si ... I believe
it will rain
tomorrow ... I believe
the son of a bitch


is going into the river ...
I believe All men are
created equal—By your
leave a leafy

shelter over the exposed
person—I’m a
believer creature
of habit but without

out there a void of
pattern older
older the broken
pieces no longer

salvageable bits
but incommensurate
chips yet must
get it back together.

In God we
trust emptiness privilege
will not not perish
perish from this earth—


In particular echo
of inside pushes
at edges all these years
collapse in slow motion.

The will to believe,
the will to be good,
the will to want
a way out—

Humanness, like
you, man. Us—pun
for once beyond reflective
mirror of brightening prospect?

I believe what it was
was a hope it could be
somehow what it was
and would so continue.

A plank to walk out on,
fair enough. Jump! said the pirate.
Believe me if all
those endearing young charms ...


Here, as opposed to there,
even in confusions there seems
still a comfort,
still a faith.

I’d as lief
not leave, not
go away, not
not believe.

I believe in belief ...
All said, whatever I can think of
comes from there,
goes there.

As it gets now impossible
to say, it’s your hand
I hold to, still
your hand.

-Robert Creeley

[Larry Robinson]

At a Country Funeral


Now the old ways that have brought us
farther than we remember sink out of sight
as under the treading of many strangers
ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while
they are cast clear again upon the mind
as at a country funeral where, amid the soft
lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive
solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,
persist the usages of old neighborhood.
Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,
knowing the extremity they have come to,
one of their own bearing to the earth the last
of his light, his darkness the sun’s definitive mark.
hey stand and think as they stood and thought
when even the gods were different.
And the organ music, though decorous
as for somebody else’s grief, has its source
in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,
and on naked hillsides by the open grave,
eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,
and across the sea. How long a time?
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide my
self in Thee. They came, once in time,
in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned
to the world. The fields and the work
remained to be returned to. Now the entrance
of one of the old ones into the Rock
too often means a lifework perished from the land
without inheritor, and the field goes wild
and the house sits and stares. Or it passes
at cash value into the hands of strangers.
Now the old dead wait in the open coffin
for the blood kin to gather, come home
for one last time, to hear old men
whose tongues bear an essential topography
speak memories doomed to die.
But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,
is one of the land’s seeds, as a seed
is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,
to pass on into life the knowledge
of what has died. What we owe the future
is not a new start, for we can only begin
with what has happened. We owe the future
the past, the long knowledge
that is the potency of time to come.
That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.
The community of knowing in common is the seed
of our life in this place. There is not only
no better possibility, there is no
other, except for chaos and darkness,
the terrible ground of the only possible
new start. And so as the old die and the young
depart, where shall a man go who keeps
the memories of the dead, except home
again, as one would go back after a burial,
faithful to the fields, lest the dead die
a second and more final death.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

The Lake Isle of Innisfree


I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above the Sultan’s Pool
in the valley between us. Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

- Yahuda Amichai

[Larry Robinson]

Broken Dreams

There is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake—that all heart’s ache have known,
And given to others all heart’s ache,
From meagre girlhood’s putting on
Burdensome beauty—for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.

Your beauty can but leave among us
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
A young man when the old men are done talking
Will say to an old man, ‘Tell me of that lady
The poet stubborn with his passion sang us
When age might well have chilled his blood.’

Vague memories, nothing but memories,
But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.
The certainty that I shall see that lady
Leaning or standing or walking
In the first loveliness of womanhood,
And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,
Has set me muttering like a fool.

You are more beautiful than any one,
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful,
And I am afraid that you will run
And paddle to the wrist
In that mysterious, always brimming lake
Where those that have obeyed the holy law
Paddle and are perfect; leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed
For old sake’s sake.

The last stroke of midnight dies.
All day in the one chair
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged
In rambling talk with an image of air:
Vague memories, nothing but memories.

- Robert Browning

[Larry Robinson]

Briefly It Enters, And Briefly Speaks

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .

I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

I am the heart contracted by joy. . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .

- Jane Kenyon

[Larry Robinson]

In the Evening

The heads of roses begin to droop.
The bee who has been hauling his gold
all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

In the sky, traces of clouds,
the last few darting birds,
watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.
The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.
I take another sip of wine.
I pick up an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?
Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

At the Border


At the border between the past and the future
No sign on a post warns that your passport
Won’t let you return to your native land
As a citizen, just as a tourist
Who won’t be allowed to fraternize with the locals.

No guard steps out of a booth to explain
You can’t bring gifts back, however modest,
Can’t even pass a note to a few friends
That suggests what worries of theirs are misguided,
What expectations too ambitious

Are you sure you’re ready to leave,
To cross the bridge that begins
Under a clear sky and ends in fog?
But look, you’ve started across already
And it’s one-lane wide, with no room for U-turns.

No time even to pause as drivers behind you
Lean on their horns, those who’ve convinced themselves
Their home awaits them on the other side.

- Carl Dennis

[Larry Robinson]

Student

The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into wave after wave of responsibility,
and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,

paddling ahead. He has extended his neck
to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak,
breaks the cold surf. He's got his baseball cap on

backward as up he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.


- Ted Kooser

[Larry Robinson]

DO NOT BE ASHAMED

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
"I am not ashamed." A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Love This Miraculous World

Our understandable wish
to preserve the planet
must somehow be
reduced
to the scale of our
competence.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere
to the universe
or the planet
or the nation
or the institution
or the profession,
but to the singular
sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these
my brethren.”
Love this
miraculous world
that we did not make,
that is a gift to us.

-Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

There Is No Going Back

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.


-Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Ripening

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

*A Man's A Man for A' That
*
Is there for honest poverty
That hings his head, an a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by -
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an a' that,
Our toils obscure, an a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an a' that?
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine -
A man's a man for a' that.
For a' that, an a' that.
Their tinsel show, an a' that,
The honest man, tho e'er sae poor,
Is king o men for a' that.

Ye see you birkie ca'd 'a lord,'
What struts, an stares, an a' that?
Tho hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a cuif for a' that.
For a' that, an a' that,
His ribband, star, an a' that,
The man o independent mind,
He looks an laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an a' that!
But an honest man's aboon his might -
Guid faith, he mauna fa' that!
For a' that, an a' that,
Their dignities, an a' that,
The pith o sense an pride o worth.
Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may
[As come it will for a' that],
That Sense and Worth o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree an a' that.
For a' that, an a' that,
It's comin yet for a' that,
That man to man, the world, o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that.

- Robert Burns

[Larry Robinson]

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
and our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
or our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

The Last One

Well they made up their minds to be everywhere because why not.
Everywhere was theirs because they thought so.
They with two leaves they whom the birds despise.
In the middle of stones they made up their minds.
They started to cut.

Well they cut everything because why not.
Everything was theirs because they thought so.
It fell into its shadows and they took both both away.
Some to have some for burning.

Well cutting everything they came to the water.
They came to the end of the day there was one left standing.
They would cut it tomorrow they went away.
The night gathered in the last branches.
The shadow of the night gathered in the shadow on the water.
The night and the shadow put on the same head.
And it said Now.

Well in the morning they cut the last one.
Like the others it fell into its shadow.
It fell into its shadow on the water.
They took it away its shadow stayed on the water.

Well they shrugged they started trying to get the shadow away.
They cut right to the ground the shadow stayed whole.
They laid boards on it the shadow came out on top.
They shone lights on it the shadow got blacker and clearer.
They exploded the water the shadow rocked.
They built a huge fire on the roots.
They sent up black smoke between the shadow and the sun.
The new shadow flowed without changing the old one.
They shrugged they went away to get stones.

They came back the shadow was growing.
They started setting up stones it was growing.
They looked the other way it went on growing.
They decided they would make a stone out of it.
They took stones to the water they poured them into the shadow.
They poured them in they poured them in the stones vanished.
The shadow was not filled it went on growing.
That was one day.

The next day was the same it went on growing.
They did all the same things it was just the same.
They decided to take its water from under it.
They took away water they took it away the water went down.
The shadow stayed where it was before.
It went on growing it grew onto the land.
They started to scrape the shadow with machines.
When it touched the machines it stayed on them.
They started to beat the shadow with sticks.
Where it touched the sticks it stayed on them.
They started to beat the shadow with hands.
Where it touched the hands it stayed on them.
That was another day.

Well the next day started about the same it went on growing.
They pushed lights into the shadow.
Where the shadow got onto them they went out.
They began to stomp on the edge it got their feet.
And when it got their feet they fell down.
It got into eyes the eyes went blind.

The ones that fell down it grew over and they vanished.
The ones that went blind and walked into it vanished.
The ones that could see and stood still
It swallowed their shadows.
Then it swallowed them too and they vanished.
Well the others ran.

The ones that were left went away to live if it would let them.
They went as far as they could.
The lucky ones with their shadows.

- W. S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Something I've Not Done



Something I’ve not done

is following me

I haven’t done it again and again

so it has many footsteps

like a drumstick that’s grown old and never been used


In late afternoon I hear it come closer

at times it climbs out of a sea

onto my shoulders

and I shrug it off

losing one more chance


Every morning

it’s drunk up part of my breath for the day

and knows which way

I’m going

and already it’s not done there


But once more I say I’ll lay hands on it

tomorrow

and add its footsteps to my heart

and its story to my regrets

and its silence to my compass.



- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

A Single Secret Word

When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer keys to living things,
When people who about singing or kissing
Know deeper truths than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To the unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
and people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.

- Novalis (1800)
(Translated by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above the Sultan’s Pool
in the valley between us. Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

- Yahuda Amichai

[Larry Robinson]

Bugs in a Bowl


Han Shan, that great and crazy Chinese poet a thousand years ago said -
We're all like bugs in a bowl.
I say that's right.
Every day climbing up the side, sliding back, over and over again.
Sit in the bottom of the bowl, head in your hands, cry, moan, feel sorry for
yourself,
Or, look around, see your fellow bugs.
Say - hey, how ya doin'?
Say - nice bowl.

- David Budbill

[Larry Robinson]

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

-Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

Inscription on a Norman Crucifix
1632

I am the Great Sun
but you do not see me.
I am your husband
but you turn away.
I am the Captive
but you do not free me.
I am the Captain
you will not obey.
I am the Truth
but you do not believe me.
I am the City
where you will not stay.
I am your Wife, your Child
but you will leave me.
I am the God
to whom you will not pray.
I am your Counsel
but you do not hear me.
I am the lover
you will betray
I am the Victor
but you do not cheer me.
I am the Holy dove
that you will slay.
I am your Life
but if you will not name me
seal up your soul with tears
and do not blame me.

[Larry Robinson]

Credo


I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
And there is not a whisper in the air
Of any living voice but one so far
That I can hear it only as a bar
Of lost, imperial music, played when fair
And angel fingers wove, and unaware,
Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.
No, there is not a glimmer, nor a call,
For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,
The black and awful chaos of the night;
For through it all, -- above, beyond it all, --
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light!

- Edwin Arlington Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

October 1917

- Wilfred Owen

[Larry Robinson]

The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive

- N. Scott Momaday

[Larry Robinson]

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long, difficult repentance, realisation of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

- D. H. Lawrence

[Larry Robinson]

Everything is Going To Be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling.
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

- Derek Mahon

[Larry Robinson]

Extra, Extra


All hail the yellow flag of spring waving on the earth,
the fields striking light against the bell of the sky
in one triumphant peal announcing revolution.
Sing hail to the marching band in its rows of thousands,
hail to the buds on the branches like droplets of milk
about to bloom in a cup of black tea. Hail breakfast.

All praise to weeds, to fennel, thistle, miner's lettuce,
to foxtail and rattlesnake grass, horseradish, duckweed,
to moss and lichen, to goldenback fern. Praise outlaws.
Praise their persistence and their disregard for safety,
the way they pass through fences as if through open doors.
Praise to the uncountable numbers of their beauty.

And thanks for nothing. Thank you for this embarrassment
of useless gifts, this bright paper covering the box
of earth. Thank you for the fecund grave, the open mouth
of the river in constant, irresponsible flood.
Thanks for all that goes to waste, unasked for, unwanted:
this love, in such profusion, that does not care for us.

- Yosha Bourgea

[Larry Robinson]

GETTING THERE

You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You're there. You've arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.
What did you want
To be? You'll remember soon. You feel like tinder
Under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change. The sky is pulsing
Against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you've made a lasting impression
On the self you were
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.
What have you learned so far? You'll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveller's dream
Under the last bill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.
You've earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another journey without
regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings.

- David Wagoner

[Larry Robinson]

Happiness

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not FORGIVE ?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

- Jane Kenyon

[Larry Robinson]

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and, finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

- Goethe /1814
( translated by Robert Bly)