Poem for today

[Larry Robinson]

Where Does the Temple Begin,
Where Does It End?

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.

The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.

And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,
out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing
from the unreachable top of the tree.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
as though with your arms open.

And thinking: maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree –
they are all in this too.

And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.

At least, closer.

And, cordially.

Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky

of God, the blue air.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

House on a Red Cliff


There is no mirror in Mirissa
the sea is in the leaves
the waves are in the palms
old languages in the arms
of the casuarina pine
parampara
parampara, from
generation to generation

The flamboyant a grandfather planted
having lived through fire
lifts itself over the roof
unframed
the house an open net
where the night concentrates
on a breath
on a step
a thing or gesture
we cannot be attached to

The long, the short, the difficult minutes
of night
where even in darkness
there is no horizon without a tree
just a boat's light in the leaves
Last footstep before formlessness

- Michael Ondaatje

[Larry Robinson]

In A Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the deepening wood --
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks -- is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have

A steady stream of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is --
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul. like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, freeing in the tearing wind.

- Theodore Roethke

[Larry Robinson]

POEM

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The news would pour out of various devices
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Muriel Rukeyser

[Larry Robinson]

I am not I

I am not I. I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I forget;
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk where I am not,
The one who will remain standing when I die.

- Juan Ramón Jiménez

[Larry Robinson]

SAINT FRANCIS AND THE SOW

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
Put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessing of the earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the
hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken
heart to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the
fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

- Galway Kinnell

[Larry Robinson]

Expect Nothing

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
Become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny a human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.

- Alice Walker

[Larry Robinson]

Let America Be America Again



Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where it is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That anyone be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free".)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the people! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today-O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home-
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free".

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay-
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again-
The land that never has been yet-
And yet must be-the land where every one is free.
The land that's mine-the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain-
All, all the stretch of these great green states-
And make America again!

- Langston Hughes

[Larry Robinson]

Choices

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

- Tess Gallagher

[Larry Robinson]

America: A Prophecy (excerpt)

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.

- William Blake

[Larry Robinson]

The Thread

Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven't tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.

-Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

The Kingfisher

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world -- so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.


- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Lazy

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

- Ryokan

[Larry Robinson]

The House of Belonging

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could meet your love,

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like a fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

Just Enough

Soil for legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushrooms for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind

- Nanao Sakaki

[Larry Robinson]

Late Ripeness

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget - I kept saying - that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

- Czeslaw Milosz

(Translated by Robert Hass)

[Larry Robinson]

Let There Be New Flowering

let there be new flowering
in the fields let the fields
turn mellow for the men
let the men keep tender
through the time let the time
be wrested from the war
let the war be won
let love be
at the end

- Lucille Clifton

[Larry Robinson]

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another, in summer, and the
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either
knows enough already or knows enough to be
perfectly content not knowing. Song being born
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent
were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead
oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly
unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their - if you don't
mind my saying so - their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example - I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

To the Rose upon the Rood of Time


Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;
And thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old
In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,
Sing in their high and lonely melody.
Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

Come near, come near, come near—Ah, leave me still
A little space for the rose-breath to fill!
Lest I no more hear common things that crave;
The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,
The field-mouse running by me in the grass,
And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.
Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

Tiger Face

Because you can be what you're not
for only so long,
one day the tiger cub raised by goats

wandered to the lake and saw himself.
It was astounding
to have a face like that, cat-handsome,

hornless, and we can imagine he stared
a long time, then sipped
and pivoted, bemused yet burdened now

with choice. The mother goat had nursed him.
The others had tolerated
his silly quickness and claws.

And because once you know who you are
you need not rush,
and good parents are a blessing

whoever they are, he went back to them,
rubbing up against
their bony shins, keeping his secret to himself.

but after a while the tiger who'd found
his true face
felt the disturbing hungers, those desires

to get low in the reeds, swish his tail
charge.
Because he was a cat he disappeared

without goodbyes, his goat-parents relieved
such a thing was gone.
And we can imagine how, alone and beyond

choice, he wholly became who he was---
that zebra or gazelle
stirring the great blood rush and odd calm

as he discovered, while moving, what needed
to be done.


- Stephen Dunn

[Larry Robinson]

Come into animal presence

Come into animal presence
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track and into the palm brush.
What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

FINDING THE WAY





At the edge of the road

walking in the tracks of deer

on Bolinas Mesa,

above foliage so dense

everything becomes

one thing.

Slowing

to the slowness of the snake

crossing the path. When

heaven breathes it knows,

its whole body waving with wind.



It is good to be that sensitive,

then stop with the trees and see



morning glories rising like butterflies

from the bushes

on cloud white wings,



Miwok women

still

here,

they are poems,



from places that cannot hold,

like the moon.



- Judith Stone

[Larry Robinson]

Candles in Babylon

Through the midnight streets of Babylon
between the steel towers of their arsenals,
between the torture castles with no windows,
we race by barefoot, holding tight
our candles, trying to shield
the shivering flames, crying
"Sleepers Awake!"
hoping
the rhyme's promise was true,
that we may return
from this place of terror
home to a calm dawn and
the work we had just begun.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Ulysses
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

[Larry Robinson]

Sleeping and Waking

1.

All night someone is trying to tell you something.
The voice is a harbor, pulling you from underneath.

Where am I, you say, what's this and who are you?

The voice washes you up on the shore of your life.
You never knew there was land here.

2.

In the morning you are wakened by gulls.
Flapping at the window, they want you to feed them.
Your eyes blink, your own hands are pulling you back.

All day you break bread into small pieces,
become the tide covering your straight clear tracks.


- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Making Peace

A voice from the dark called out,
"The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war."
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can't be imagined before it is made,
can't be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses. . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light--facets
of the forming crystal.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

my dream about the second coming


mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble
and leave the print of a finger where
no man touches.
not when the snow in her hair melts away.
not when the stranger she used to wait for
appears dressed in lights at her
kitchen table.
she is an old woman and
doesn’t believe it.

when Something drops onto her toes one night
she calls it a fox
but she feeds it.

- Lucille Clifton

[Larry Robinson]

My Father’s Wedding


1924

Today, lonely for my father, I saw
a log, or branch,
long, bent, ragged, bark gone.
I felt lonely for my father when I saw it.
It was the log
that lay near my uncle’s old milk wagon.

Some men live with a limp they don’t hide,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons often are angry.
Only recently I thought:
Doing what you want ...
Is that like limping? Tracks of it show in sand.

Have you seen those giant bird-
men of Bhutan?
Men in bird masks, with pig noses, dancing,
teeth like a dog’s, sometimes
dancing on one bad leg!
They do what they want, the dog’s teeth say that.

But I grew up without dog’s teeth,
showed a whole body,
left only clear tracks in sand.
I learned to walk swiftly, easily,
no trace of a limp.
I even leaped a little. Guess where my defect is!

Then what? If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
somebody has to limp it. Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

On my father’s wedding day,
no one was there
to hold him. Noble loneliness
held him. Since he never asked for pity
his friends thought he
was whole. Walking alone he could carry it.

He came in limping. It was a simple
wedding, three
or four people. The man in black,
lifting the book, called for order.
And the invisible bride
stepped forward, before his own bride.

He married the invisible bride, not his own.
In her left
breast she carried the three drops
that wound and kill. He already had
his bark-like skin then,
made rough especially to repel the sympathy

he longed for, didn’t need, and wouldn’t accept.
So the Bible’s
words are read. The man in black
speaks the sentence. When the service
is over, I hold him
in my arms for the first time and the last.

After that he was alone
and I was alone.
Few friends came; he invited few.
His two-story house he turned
into a forest,
where both he and I are the hunters.

- Robert Bly


Robert Bly, “My Father’s Wedding” from The Man in the Black Coat Turns. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted with the permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

[Larry Robinson]

The Wedding Vow

I did not stand at the altar, I stood
at the foot of the chancel steps, with my beloved,
and the minister stood on the top step
holding the open Bible. The church
was wood, painted ivory inside, no people—God’s
stable perfectly cleaned. It was night,
spring—outside, a moat of mud,
and inside, from the rafters, flies
fell onto the open Bible, and the minister
tilted it and brushed them off. We stood
beside each other, crying slightly
with fear and awe. In truth, we had married
that first night, in bed, we had been
married by our bodies, but now we stood
in history—what our bodies had said,
mouth to mouth, we now said publicly,
gathered together, death. We stood
holding each other by the hand, yet I also
stood as if alone, for a moment,
just before the vow, though taken
years before, took. It was a vow
of the present and the future, and yet I felt it
to have some touch on the distant past
or the distant past on it, I felt
the wordless, dry, crying ghost of my
parents’ marriage there, somewhere
in the echoing space—perhaps one of the
plummeting flies, bouncing slightly
as it hit forsaking all others, then was brushed
away. I felt as if I had come
to claim a promise—the sweetness I’d inferred
from their sourness, and at the same time that I
had come, congenitally unworthy, to beg.
And yet, I had been working toward this hour
all my life. And then it was time
to speak—he was offering me, no matter
what, his life. That is all I had to
do, that evening, to accept the gift
I had longed for—to say I had accepted it,
as if being asked if I breathe. Do I take?
I do. I take as he takes—we have been
practicing this. Do you bear this pleasure? I do.

- Sharon Olds

[Larry Robinson]

A Maul for Bill and Cindy’s Wedding


Swung from the toes out,
Belly-breath riding on the knuckles,
The ten-pound maul lifts up,
Sails in an arc overhead,
And then lifts you!

It floats, you float,
For an instant of clear far sight—
Eye on the crack in the end-grain
Angle of the oak round
Stood up to wait to be split.

The maul falls—with a sigh—the wood
Claps apart
and lies twain—
In a wink. As the maul
Splits all, may

You two stay together.

- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

All the Little Hoof-Prints


Farther up the gorge the sea’s voice fainted and ceased.
We heard a new noise far away ahead of us, vague and metallic, it might have been some unpleasant bird’s voice
Bedded in a matrix of long silences. At length we came to a little cabin lost in the redwoods,
An old man sat on a bench before the doorway filing a cross-cut saw; sometimes he slept,
Sometimes he filed. Two or three horses in the corral by the streamside lifted their heads
To watch us pass, but the old man did not.

In the afternoon we returned the same way,
And had the picture in our minds of magnificent regions of space and mountain not seen before. (This was
The first time that we visited Pigeon Gap, whence you look down behind the great shouldering pyramid-
Edges of Pico Blanco through eagle-gulfs of air to a forest basin
Where two-hundred-foot redwoods look like the pile on a Turkish carpet.) With such extensions of the idol-
Worshipping mind we came down the streamside. The old man was still at his post by the cabin doorway, but now
Stood up and stared, said angrily “Where are you camping?” I said “We’re not camping, we’re going home.” He said
From his flushed heavy face, “That’s the way fires get started. Did you come at night?” “We passed you this morning.
You were half asleep, filing a saw.” “I’ll kill anybody that starts a fire here ...” his voice quavered
Into bewilderment ... “I didn’t see you. Kind of feeble I guess.
My temperature’s a hundred and two every afternoon.” “Why, what’s the matter?” He removed his hat
And rather proudly showed us a deep healed trench in the bald skull. “My horse fell at the ford,
I must ’a’ cracked my head on a rock. Well sir I can’t remember anything till next morning.
I woke in bed the pillow was soaked with blood, the horse was in the corral and had had his hay,”—
Singing the words as if he had told the story a hundred times. To whom? To himself, probably,—
“The saddle was on the rack and the bridle on the right nail. What do you think of that now?” He passed
His hand on his bewildered forehead and said, “Unless an angel or something came down and did it.
A basin of blood and water by the crick, I must ’a’ washed myself.” My wife said sharply, “Have you been to a doctor?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “my boy happened down.” She said “You oughtn’t to be alone here: are you all alone here?”
“No;” he answered, “horses. I’ve been all over the world: right here is the most beautiful place in the world.
I played the piccolo in ships’ orchestras.” We looked at the immense redwoods and dark
Fern-taken slip of land by the creek, where the horses were, and the yuccaed hillsides high in the sun
Flaring like torches; I said “Darkness comes early here.” He answered with pride and joy, “Two hundred and eighty-
Five days in the year the sun never gets in here.
Like living under the sea, green all summer, beautiful.” My wife said, “How do you know your temperature’s
A hundred and two?” “Eh? The doctor. He said the bone
Presses my brain, he’s got to cut out a piece. I said All right you’ve got to wait till it rains,
I’ve got to guard my place through the fire-season. By God” he said joyously,
“The quail on my roof wake me up every morning, then I look out the window and a dozen deer
Drift up the canyon with the mist on their shoulders. Look in the dust at your feet, all the little hoof-prints.”

- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

Spiritual Chickens

A man eats a chicken every day for lunch, and each day the ghost of another chicken joins the crowd in the dining room. If he could only see them! Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. At last there is no more space and one of the chickens is popped back across the spiritual plain to the earthly. The man is in the process of picking his teeth. Suddenly there is a chicken at the end of the table, strutting back and forth, not looking at the man but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens. The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken with a chair and the chair passes through her. He calls in his wife but she can see nothing. This is his own private chicken, even if he fails to recognize her. How is he to know this is a chicken he ate seven years ago on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July, with a little tarragon, a little sour cream? The man grows afraid. He runs out of his house flapping his arms and making peculiar hops until the authorities take him away for a cure. Faced with the choice between something odd in the world or something broken in his head, he opts for the broken head. Certainly, this is safer than putting his opinions in jeopardy. Much better to think he had imagined it, that he had made it happen. Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth at the end of the table. Here she was, jammed in with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when suddenly she has the whole place to herself. Even the nervous man has disappeared. If she had a brain, she would think she had caused it. She would grow vain, egotistical, she would look for someone to fight, but being a chicken she can just enjoy it and make little squawks, silent to all except the man who ate her, who is far off banging his head against a wall like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel, making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in or nothing of value falls out. How happy he would have been to be born a chicken, to be of good use to his fellow creatures and rich in companionship after death. As it is he is constantly being squeezed between the world and his idea of the world. Better to have a broken head--why surrender his corner on the truth?--better just to go crazy.

- Stephen Dobyns

[Larry Robinson]

The Time

Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.

A fish drifting upside down.
Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.

The Sanitary Mattress Factory says,
"Sleep is Life."
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?

Yesterday someone said, "It gets late so early."
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Finding a Teacher

In the woods I came on an old friend fishing

and I asked him a question

and he said Wait

fish were rising in the deep stream
but his line was not stirring
but I waited
it was a question about the sun

about my two eyes
my ears my mouth
my heart the earth with its four seasons
my feet where I was standing
where I was going

it slipped through my hands
as though it were water
into the river
it flowed under the trees
it sank under hulls far away
and was gone without me
then where I stood night fell

I no longer knew what to ask
I could tell that his line had no hook
I understood that I was to stay and eat with him



- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

City Psalm

The killings continue, each second
pain and misfortune extend themselves
in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly, and
the air
bears the dust of decayed hopes,
yet breathing those fumes, walking the thronged
pavements among crippled lives, jackhammers
raging, a parking lot painfully agleam
in the May sun, I have seen
not behind but within, within the
dull grief, blown grit, hideous
concrete facades, another grief, a gleam
as of dew, an abode of mercy, have heard not behind
but within noise
a humming that drifted into a quiet smile.

Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise;
not that the horror was not, not that the killings did
not continue, not that there was to be no more
despair, but that as if transparent all disclosed
an otherness that was blessed, that was bliss.
I saw paradise in the dust of the street.

- Denise Levertov

[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

Doug Stout, Healdsburg's first Literary Laureate, founder of the unique Local Literary Produce table of the Healdsburg Farmer's Market, poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, journalist, former professor of writing, and modest teacher/mentor of willing writers to his last days, breathed his last in this lifetime on Tuesday.

A literary tribute to him will be held at the next Third Sunday Salon of the Healdsburg Literary Guild on Sunday, August 19, 2007 at 2 to 4 PM at the City Hall chambers, 401 Grove Street, where writings by him, for him, and about him will be read by his friends and colleagues, along with short anecdotes that illuminate who he was.



"...a poem is only words
and you can imagine,
or can you,
a world without words." --- Doug Stout

[Larry Robinson]

Eyes Fastened with Pins

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death’s laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death’s supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address is somehow wrong,
Even death can’t figure it out
Among all the locked doors ...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death’s side of the bed.

- Charles Simic

Charles Simic has just been named America's new Poet Laureate.

[Larry Robinson]

I take a pen
(a poet writes you a poem)

I take a pen
or touch a key and then
smell the blossom,
taste the fruit,
bask in love's fore and after glow.
In the dark, I place a star;
in the light, I paint the sun,
sculpting portraits grand and small
landscaping all in poetry,
and in images then arising on the page,
redolent in the nose,
in the touch of flesh on flesh,
employing legend, symbol, metaphor,
I seek a naked awakening in
the mirror of the mind,
looking in and finding out
a way to go beyond myself
where we, poet and lover,
may come together.

- Doug Stout

[Larry Robinson]

Before evil

Before evil
my own goodness shrinks
before self-righteousness
my voice quavers
before those who know an angry God
with contempt for life
I tremble,
before those who hold
in their minds, in their hands
the lives of others
in hostage for their own,
before absolute Right
I am wrong
I am naked
without weapons
except for this determination
not to be defeated, but instead
to affirm the best in us,
to acknowledge our own power
to survive against whatever odds
and to seize the day
for love, for beauty, for humanity,
to make this day and the days following,
not theirs, not made by those who destroy,
but our own. We are the builders.
This day is in our hands.

- Doug Stout

[Larry Robinson]

How Could I Ever Forget That Flash

How could I ever forget that flash of light!
In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
The cries of fifty thousand killed
At the bottom of crushing darkness;

Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers.
Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
With hands on breasts;
Treading upon the broken brains;
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
There came numberless lines of the naked,
all crying.
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images of Jizo;
Crowds in piles by the river banks,
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun;
in the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky,
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on.
On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
Heaps, and God knew who they were?
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
off bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant ordure.
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
Amidst that calm,
How can I forget the entreaties
Of departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes,
Cutting through our minds and souls?

- Mitsuyoshi Toge



Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at age 36. His firsthand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).

[Larry Robinson]

Red Brocade

The Arabs used to say
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he's come from,
where he's headed.
That way, he'll have strength enough
to answer.
Or, by then you'll be such good friends
you don't care.

Let's go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That's the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Peach Pit


Peach pit

falls

into the quiet current

of design-

with-no-design,

hidden channel

of simply what

will

be,

flourishes

and comes into the kitchen

in a bowl

overflowing

with a dozen rose

blush morsels

of sweet summer surprise

to send juices

down smiling

satisfied

chins

together over the sink,

sending mmmmmhs and ooohs and ahhhs

of deep gratitude

and wonder

at the mystery

which annoints the one pit to

burst forth and thrive

with no help whatsoever

where a dozen other

carefully planned and tended

treelings

have

simply

not.

- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

Sweetness, always

Why such harsh machinery?
Why, to write down the stuff
and people of every day,
must poems be dressed up in gold,
in old and fearful stone?

I want verses of felt or feather
which scarcely weigh, mild verses
with the intimacy of beds
where people have loved and dreamed.
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.

Verses of pastry which melt
into milk and sugar in the mouth,
air and water to drink,
the bites and kisses of love.
I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour.

Vanity keeps prodding us
to lift ourselves skyward
or to make deep and useless
tunnels underground.
So we forget the joyous
love-needs of our bodies.
We forget about pastries.
We are not feeding the world.

In Madras a long time since,
I saw a sugary pyramid,
a tower of confectionery --
one level after another,
and in the construction, rubies,
and other blushing delights,
medieval and yellow.

Someone dirtied his hands
to cook up so much sweetness.

Brother poets from here
and there, from earth and sky,
from Medellin, from Veracruz,
Abyssinia, Antofagasta,
do you know the recipe for honeycombs?

Let's forget about all that stone.

Let your poetry fill up
the equinoctial pastry shop
our mouths long to devour --
all the children's mouths
and the poor adults' also.
Don't go on without seeing,
relishing, understanding
all these hearts of sugar.

Don't be afraid of sweetness.

With us or without us,
sweetness will go on living
and is infinitely alive,
forever being revived,
for it's in a man's mouth,
whether he's eating or singing,
that sweetness has its place.

- Pablo Neruda

[Larry Robinson]

Arise, Go Down


It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts
that brushed my face and I opened my eyes
to see from a cleft in rock His backside;

it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep
my eyes closed and stand perfectly still
in the garden till it leaves me alone,

not to contemplate how this century
ends and the next begins with no one
I know having seen God, but to wonder

why I get through most days unscathed, though I
live in a time when it might be otherwise,
and I grow more fatherless each day.

For years now I have come to conclusions
without my father’s help, discovering
on my own what I know, what I don’t know,

and seeing how one cancels the other.
I've become a scholar of cancellations.
Here, I stand among my father’s roses

and see that what punctures outnumbers what
consoles, the cruel and the tender never
make peace, though one climbs, though one descends

petal by petal to the hidden ground
no one owns. I see that which is taken
away by violence or persuasion.

The rose announces on earth the kingdom
of gravity. A bird cancels it.
My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything

might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war.
My father said, Never take your both eyes
off of the world, before he rocked me.

All night we waited for the knock
that would have signalled, All clear, come now;
it would have meant escape; it never came.

I didn’t make the world I leave you with,
he said, and then, being poor, he left me
only this world, in which there is always

a family waiting in terror
before they’re rended, this world wherein a man
might arise, go down, and walk along a path

and pause and bow to roses, roses
his father raised, and admire them, for one moment
unable, thank God, to see in each and
every flower the world cancelling itself.

- Li-Young Lee

[Larry Robinson]

Breakage


I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Blake

I watch William Blake, who spotted angels
every day in treetops
and met God on the staircase
of his little house and found light in grimy alleys--

Blake, who dies
singing gleefully
in a London thronged
with streetwalkers, admirals and miracles,

William Blake, engraver, who labored
and lived in poverty but not despair,
who received burning signs
from the sea and from the starry sky,

who never lost hope, since hope
was always born anew like breath,
I see those who walk like him on graying streets,
headed toward dawns rosy orchid.

- Adam Zagajewski
( translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh)

[Larry Robinson]

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

A BLESSING

May you awaken to the mystery of being here and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.
May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
May you respond to the call of your gift and find the courage to follow its path.
May the flame of anger free you from falsity.
May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame and may anxiety never linger about you.
May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.
May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.


- John O'Donohue

[Larry Robinson]

The Hidden Singer

The gods are less for their love of praise.
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing
but its own wholeness, its health and ours.
It has made all things by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come together --
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire,
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly and waits, and sings.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.

Drink all your passion
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
if you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd's love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.
Don't accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover's mouth in yours.

You moan, "She left me." "He left me."
Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.
Think who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

- Rumi

[Larry Robinson]

HOW THINGS WORK


Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars

To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,

A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,

Bus fare, rosin for your mother's violin.

We're completing our task. The tip I left

For the waitress filters down

Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child

Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go

Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.

As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:

You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples

From a fruit stand, and what coins

Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,

Tickets to a movie in which laughter

Is thrown into their faces.

If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat.

If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip. a small purchase here and there,

And things just keep going. I guess.

- Gary Soto

[Larry Robinson]

The Dovekie

Whatever
you know
about here
it doesn’t

tell you
anything
about
what happens

out there.
The dovekie,
for example,
is smaller

than the robin
who eats the cherries
in the tree
in your yard

and the worms
in your grass.
It is white and black.
It lays

a single egg
in cold country
in the brief summer;
its wings

buzz as it flies
over the waters.
Listen,
once again,

as again, and again,
we are given
this single wisdom:
to know

our world
is to be busy
all day long
with happiness.

If you are not
among us
I say
take boat;

go north;
row and stare
until you see him,
smaller than a robin,

in the burning cold,
in the black and white waters
singing his wren song
to the hungry waves.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God -

a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Driving Home

Minister of our coming doom, preaching
On the car radio, how right
Your Hell and damnation sound to me
As I travel these small, bleak roads
Thinking of the mailman's son
The army sent back in a sealed coffin.

His house is around the next turn.
A forlorn mutt sits in the yard
Waiting for someone to come home.
I can see the TV is on in the living room,
Canned laughter in the empty house
Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.

- Charles Simic

[Larry Robinson]

Let the saw do the work


Just a kid at the work bench,

in white shirt and blue jeans,

frowning as I struggled

to force my will

on some wiggling 2x4

of unyielding wood...

Dad came over.

"Here," he said.

"Like this.

Just keep to the line. See?

Let the saw do the work."


"Here," he said later on,

in the backyard

guiding my sweaty hand

lower on the hammer’s oaken grip.

"Like this.

Eye on the nail. Not so hard, now.

Let the hammer do the work."


This remembered

on the night freeway

late and tired,

as I ease into the slow lane

and yield five miles from the limit,


"Just keep between the lines,"

I can hear him say,

"Let the car do the work."


I arrive home

at last,

feeling like I never left.


- Scott O’Brien

[Larry Robinson]

Utopia

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.


- Wislawa Szymborska

(A Large Number, trans. by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh)

[Larry Robinson]

Sixtieth Birthday Dinner

If in the men's room of our favorite restaurant
while blissfully pissing riserva spumante
I punch the wall because I am so old,
I promise not to punch too carelessly.

Our friend Franco cooks all night and day
to transform blood and bones to osso buco.
He shouldn't have to clean them off his wall
or worry that a customer gone cuckoo

has mashed his knuckles like a slugger
whose steroid dosage needs a little tweaking.
My life with you has been beyond beyond
and there's nothing beyond it I'm seeking.

I just don't want to leave it, and I am
with every silken bite of tiramisu.
I wouldn't mind being dead
if I could still be with you.

- Michael Ryan

[Larry Robinson]

Expands His Being

All beings
are words of God,
His music, His
art.

Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps
in our
souls.

Every act reveals God and expands His Being.
I know that may be hard
to comprehend.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enought talk for the night.
He is laboring in me;
I need to be silent
for a while,

world are forming
in my heart.

- Meister Eckhart

[Larry Robinson]

The River of Objects


I cleaned out my car this morning,
and again the river of objects
flowing into my life leaves me
baffled and discouraged.

I am watershed and dam,
and I am also the engineer
who must channel the flow and decide
what to divert and where,
and what to dispose of,

and the truth is, I am sick of the flow.
Perhaps this means I am tired of living,
for where there is life this river runs,
and ours is only the choice: what to do?

There are executives, there are tycoons
whose whole careers are managing flow,
and whose offices and homes
have not a mote of dust,
not a shred of strewn paper,

and if it's because they hire maids,
those workers too are part of the ecology,
hired from the surplus that exists
because of efficient management.

We're all managers, they
and my elderly neighbor
whose oven the Complex had disconnected
for fear she'd burn down the building,
on the floor of whose den you can read
yellow, trampled-over newspapers from two years ago,
whose meatloaf was a color that turned my stomach,
whose carpets are being eaten away by mold
and whose opened door sends forth a terrible odor.
This is all a picture of her mind,

and I don't like what I see of my mind
in the boxes of books, old papers, plastic cups,
undershirts, lunchboxes,6-packs of toilet paper,
old music that I can't use and don't want to throw away,
tennis shoes, and dozens of other, random objects

that I must now bring up to the house
that's already full, into my office,
whose filing system broke down long ago.

While I write poems and sing
about the elegant Order of the universe,
the life I'm living in has gotten clogged with garbage.
This is my secret, that I live in
these doldrum latitudes
where nothing wants to move,
where I survey dead objects
and can't summon the magic
to bring them back to life,
to command them to get up,
find their own kind and march with them
onto a shelf, into a drawer or closet.

I long to escape from my own trail,
from the feeling that life is so long
every thrill finally plays out
into such a glutted slough,
but where could I go?

I struggle for an upbeat
ending to these musings,
but they will only end in the resignation
that sighs, puts down the pen,
and starts doing what has to be done.

- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
- Rudyard Kipling

[Larry Robinson]

The Uninvited


There are two ghosts in the house
Ray Milland and his sister move into
at the beginning of the movie.
They don't know that, of course,
and they're both skeptical when things
start happening—the weeping
before dawn, the room their dog won't go near,
that elusive scent of mimosa.
It's all pretty tame by today's standards,
where you can count on somebody
getting a spike through her head as soon
as she's had sex with her boyfriend. But in 1944
there was time to be unsettled.
There were good mothers and bad ones,
and it took a while, as it does
in this movie, to figure that out.
At the end you looked back at your life and saw
how the pieces fit together—why there was weeping,
and what made it stop. So the past isn't over
until you understand it, which is one of the reasons
ghosts keep appearing. They need you to see
who they were, and sometimes
they won't rest until you forgive them.

- Lawrence Raab

[Larry Robinson]

All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.

And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.

No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.

- Ranier Maria Rilke


(Rilke’s Book of Hours:Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

[Larry Robinson]

A Map to the Next World

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map
for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields,
from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can't be read by ordinary light.
It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land,
how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money.
They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; a fog steals our children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression, the monsters are born there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here,
how to speak to them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map.
Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us,
leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother's blood,
your father's small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine --
a spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death,
smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast
of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X,
no guide book with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother's voice, renew the song she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history,
a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers
where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will come to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.

Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth
who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

- Joy Harjo

[Larry Robinson]

What The Dog Perhaps Hears

If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn't a shudder
too high for us to hear.

What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.

- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

Instructions

Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God.
Find god in rhododendrons and rocks,
passers-by, your cat.
Pare your beliefs, your absolutes.
Make it simple; make it clean.
No carry-on luggage allowed.
Examine all you have
with a loving and critical eye, then
throw away some more.
Repeat. Repeat.
Keep this and only this:
what your heart beats loudly for
what feels heavy and full in your gut.
There will only be one or two
things you will keep,
and they will fit lightly
in your pocket.

- Sheri Hostetler
(A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry)

[Larry Robinson]

Speaking of the fall . . .
upon reading Jeffers’ Original Sin

It’s not so much that human beings are despicable,
tainted with original sin,
odious and stinking—
though if I look around
I could, as well, make a compelling argument
for that point of view.

The vocabulary of just my own life time
includes Treblinka and Auschwitz,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Khmer Rouge and the cultural revolution,
Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur,
the Gulag, the Mussad, the BOSS
Anfal, Abu ghraib, Mutanabbi Street, 9/11 and al qaeda —
this list seems endless
and I could bring it closer to home, as well,
by looking in the mirror
at who I have been and who I am today.

Yet to these eyes, that see this world
and see myself a part of it,
it’s more that we are bound together,
all of us, in suffering.
I can’t say, for sure,
I know how things are as they are—
but I can say what it looks like to me.
And to me, it looks like we are all in pain,
we human beings,
admittedly, some more so than others, perhaps,
but when that pain—whether great or small—
becomes too much for us to bear,
I’d say we are quite likely to pass it on,
in one way or another,
in big ways or small ways,
to someone else.

So, from where I’m standing, that means
our effort surely must be
to know our pain—
to know our pain
and hold it close unto ourselves,
as life’s most precious gift.

- Bill Denham

[Larry Robinson]

At the Public Market Museum: Charleston, South Carolina


A volunteer, a Daughter of the Confederacy,

receives my admission and points the way.

Here are gray jackets with holes in them,

red sashes with individual flourishes,

things soft as flesh. Someone sewed

the gold silk cord onto that gray sleeve

as if embellishments

could keep a man alive.


I have been reading War and Peace,

and so the particulars of combat

are on my mind--the shouts and groans

of men and boys, and the horses' cries

as they fall, astonished at what

has happened to them.

Blood on leaves,

blood on grass, on snow; extravagant

beauty of red. Smoke, dust of disturbed

earth; parch and burn.


Who would choose this for himself?

And yet the terrible machinery

waited in place. With psalters

in their breast pockets, and gloves

knitted by their sisters and sweethearts,

the men in gray hurled themselves

out of the trenches, and rushed against

blue. It was what both sides

agreed to do.

- Jane Kenyon

[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 Douglass—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]

Bird

A sudden

flutter

of birds’ voices,

feathers flying...

Bird chatter

scatters

To safe branches.

A streak of blue grey,

in hooded cap

and cream belly - - -

A raptor

has landed

with talons bared

atop

a writhing

dark form...

Who’d just been

kicking back straw

to find its breakfast

beneath an apple tree,

in company,

and despite all avian alarm, still

so completely unaware.

Unbelievably, I hesitate for a second

to choose:

save the victim at risk of

the sparrow hawk going hungry?

I step out

lock eyes with the hawk,

quickly and silently

waive a wide threat with my arms.

The hawk flies off - all hot defiance,

but still cool enough

to carry away the small bird

who shits with fear,

borne away to the eucalyptus row,

and joins the merciless, endless cycle.

- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

Dedication

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.

- Czeslaw Milosz

[Larry Robinson]

In our souls everything
moves guided by a mysterious hand.
We know nothing of our own souls
that are ununderstandable and say nothing.

The deepest words
of the wise man teach us
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows
or the sound of the water when it is flowing.

- Antonio Machado

(Translation by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

The Fish

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

PITY THE NATION (After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose
sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully
as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by
torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but
its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation--oh, pity the people who allow
their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[Larry Robinson]

No one came home

1.
Max was in bed that morning, pressed
against my feet, walking to my pillow
to kiss my nose, long and lean with aqua-
marine eyes, my sun prince who thought

himself my lover. He was cream and golden
orange, strong willed, lord of the other
cats and his domain. He lay on my chest
staring into my eyes. He went out at noon.

He never came back. A smear of blood
on the grass at the side of the road
where we saw a huge coyote the next
evening. We knew he had been eaten

yet we could not know. We kept looking
for him, calling him, searching. He
vanished from our lives in an hour, My cats
have always died in old age, slowly

with abundant warning. Not Max.
He left a hole in my waking.

2.
A woman leaves her children in day care,
goes off to her secretarial job
on the 100th floor, conscientious always
to arrive early, because she needs the money

for her children, for health insurance,
for rent and food and clothing and fees
for all the things kids need, whose father
has two new children and a great lawyer.

They are going to eat chicken that night
she has promised, and the kids talk of that
together, fried chicken with adobo, rice
and black beans, food rich as her love.

The day is bright as a clean mirror.

3.
His wife has morning sickness so does
not rise for breakfast. He stops for coffee,
a yogurt, rushing for the 8:08 train.
Ignoring the window, he writes his five

pages, the novel that is going to make
him famous, cut him loose from the desk
where he is chained to the phone
eight to ten hours, making cold calls.

In his head, naval battles rage. He
has been studying Midway, the Coral
Sea, Guadalcanal. He can recite
tonnage, tides, the problems with torpedoes.

For five years, he has prepared.
His makeshift office in the basement
is lined with books and maps. His book
will sing with bravery and error.

The day is blue and whistles like a robin.

4.
His father was a fireman and his brother.
He once imagined being a rock star
but by the end of high school, he knew
it was his calling, it was his family way.

As there are trapeze families, clans
who perform with tigers or horses,
the Irish travelers, tinkers, gypsies,
those born to work the earth of their farm,

and those who inherit vast fortunes
built of the bones of others, so families
inherit danger and grace, the pursuit
of the safety of others before their own.

The morning smelled of the river,
of doughnuts, of coffee, of leaves.

5.
When a man fell into the molten steel
the company would deliver an ingot
to bury. Something. Where I live
on the Cape, lost at sea means no body.

You can't bury a coffin length of sea
water. There are stones in our grave
yards with lists of names, the sailors
from the ships gone down in a storm.

MIA means no body, no answer,
hope that is hopeless, the door
that can never be quite closed.
Lives are broken off like tree limbs

in a storm. Other lives simply dissolve
like salt in warm water and there is
no shadow on the pavement, no trace
They puff into nothing. We can't believe.

We die still expecting an answer.

6.
Los desparecidos. Did we notice?
Did we care? in Chile, funded,
assisted by the CIA, a democratic
government was torn down and thousands

brought into a stadium and never seen
again. Reports of torture, reports of graves
in the mountains, bodies dumped at sea
reports of your wife, your son, your

father arrested and then vanished
like cigarette smoke, gone like
a whisper you arenít quite sure you
heard, a living person who must, who

must be somewhere, anywhere, lost,
wounded, boxed in a cell, in exile,
under a stone, somewhere, bones,
a skull, a button, a wisp of cloth.

In Argentina, the women marched
for those who had disappeared.
Did we notice? That happened
in those places, those other places

where people didn't speak English,
ate strange spicy foods, had dictators
or Communists or sambas or goas.
They didnít count. We didn't count

them or those they said had been
there alive and now who knew?
Not us. The terror has come home.
Will it make us better or worse?

7.
When will we understand what terrorists
never believe, that we are all
precious in our loving, all tender
in our flesh and webbed together?

That no one should be torn
out of the fabric of friends and family,
the sweet and sour work of loving,
burnt anonymously, carelessly

because of nothing they ever did
because of hatred they never knew
because of nobody they ever touched
or left untouched, turned suddenly

to dust on a perfect September
morning bright as a new apple
when nothing they did would
ever again make any difference.

- Marge Piercy

[Larry Robinson]

The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

- Billy Collins

(Reprinted from Sailing Alone Around the Room, Random House, 2001)

[Larry Robinson]

To World War Two

Early on you introduced me to young women in bars
You were large, and with a large hand
You presented them in different cities,
Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk
On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafe's.
It was a time of general confusion
Of being a body hurled at a wall.
I didn't do much fighting. I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole.
I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning.
It felt unusual
Even if for a good cause
To be part of a destructive force
With my rifle in my hands
And in my head
My serial number
The entire object of my existence
To eliminate Japanese soldiers
By killing them
With a rifle or with a grenade
And then, many years after that,
I could write poetry
Fall in love
And have a daughter
And think about these things
From a great distance
If I survived
I was "paying my debt
To society" a paid
Killer. It wasn't
like anything I'd done
Before, on the paved
Streets of Cincinatti
Or on the ballroom floor
At Mr. Vathe's dancing class
What would Anne Marie Goldsmith
Have thought of me
If instead of asking her to dance
I had put my BAR to my shoulder
And shot her in the face
I thought about her in my foxhole--
One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night
We take precautions but it is night and it is you.
The typhoon continues and so do you.
"I can't be killed--because of my poetry. I have to live on in order to write
it."
I thought--even crazier thought, or just as crazy--
"If I'm killed while thinking of lines, it will be too corny
When it's reported" (I imagined it would be reported!)
So I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me on the beach on
Leyte
Was "The surf comes in like masochistic lions."
I loved this terrible line. It was keeping me alive. My Uncle Leo wrote to me,
"You won't believe this, but some day you may wish
You were footloose and twenty on Leyte again." I have never wanted
To be on Leyte again,
With you, whispering into my ear,
"Go on and win me! Tomorrow you might not be alive,
So do it today!" How could anyone win you?
You were too much for me, though I
Was older than you were and in camouflage. But for you
Who threw everything together, and had all the systems
Working for you all the time, this was trivial. If you could use me
You'd use me, and then forget. How else
Did I think you'd behave?
I'm glad you ended. I'm glad I didn't die. Or lose my mind.
As machines make ice
We made dead enemy soldiers, in
Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands
That produced fire and kept going straight through
I was carrying one,
I who had gone about for years as a child
Praying God don't let there be another war
Or if there is, don't let me be in it. Well, I was in you.

All you cared about was existing and being won.
You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades.

- Kenneth Koch

[Larry Robinson]

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her
in a bar once in Iowa City.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe. I heard her singing Kiowa war
dance songs at the corner of Fourth and Central once.
Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.
Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.
Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.
Remember.

- Joy Harjo

[Larry Robinson]

At the Lake

A fish leaps
like a black pin --
then -- when the starlight
strikes its side --

like a silver pin.
In an instant
the fish's spine
alters the fierce line of rising

and it curls a little --
the head, like scalloped tin,
plunges back,
and it's gone.

This is, I think,
what holiness is:
the natural world,
where every moment is full

of the passion to keep moving.
Inside every mind
there's a hermit's cave
full of light,

full of snow,
full of concentration.
I've knelt there,
and so have you,

hanging on
to what you love,
to what is lovely.
The lake's

shining sheets
don't make a ripple now,
and the stars
are going off to their blue sleep,

but the words are in place --
and the fish leaps, and leaps again
from the black plush of the poem,
that breathless space.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Wheat

Let a stalk of wheat
be your witness
to every difficult day.
Since it was a flame
before it was a plant,
since it was courage
before it was grain,
since it was determination
before it was growth,
and, above all, since it was prayer
before it was fruition,
it has nothing to point to
but the sky.
Remember the incredibly gentle wheat stalk
which holds its countless arrows fixed
to shoot from the bowstring --
you, standing in the same position
where the wind holds it.

- Ishihara Yoshiro

(Translated by N. Koriyama and E. Lueders, Like Underground Water)

[Larry Robinson]

Nefarious War

Last year we fought by the head-stream of the Sang-kan,
This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.
We have washed our armor in the waves of the Chiao-chi lake,
We have pastured our horses on Tien-shan's snowy slopes.
The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home,
Our three armies are worn and grown old.

The barbarian does man-slaughter for plowing;
On this yellow sand-plains nothing has been seen but
blanched skulls and bones.
Where the Chin emperor built the walls against the Tartars,
There the defenders of Han are burning beacon fires.
The beacon fires burn and never go out,
There is no end to war!?

In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.
So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,
And the generals have accomplished nothing.

Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms
Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns.

- Li Po

[Larry Robinson]

Little Father

I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.

I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.

I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won’t drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.

- Li-Young Lee

[Larry Robinson]

The Things That Return

I've been down this road a time or two. I've seen the green
grass the green grass and the rabbits running and the deer
coming down from the hills to eat the last of the garden's harvest.
I've trained my eyes to catch the gold of sunset,
the silver moon rising, (the silver moon) rising over dry grass
the dry grasses and the leaves that swirl in gusts of surprise
when the tired stars open their eyes wide and dream in 4/4 time.
I've seen the frost slip in without so much as a peep
and leave us wondering where the warm days have fled,
where the warm nights have hunkered down beneath the earth.
Beneath the earth to wait out another winter.
I have closed my eyes and wondered too where the days have gone,
how the days and the nights and the stars of my dreams have blinked out
and left me standing here before that night as black
as the waiting shadow of death - inscrutable as my lover's eyes
the day he said he needed to leave because it was just too hard.
I've waited thinking everything comes around, everything
revolves like the sun and the moon and the tiny round seeds
of the dandelion that rise each spring in my morning garden.
But some things go and never come back.
My darling children's rooms stand empty still.
Empty of them and their yarn tied braids and their lithe
moon spirit bodies shining in their beds at midnight.
And no turnings of the moon's bright face smiling through
veiled windows bring back the tiny fingers and toes,
the endless songs of honeyed childhood soprano.
My love has not returned, not come round through the eternal
revolving door of love's spring scent blossoming pink on cherry boughs.
The things that return it seems are the truths that ring round our cabin doors
ring round our frost-pained windows with each new season of life.
Not the personal grasping for yesterday's love that lies darkening
the fallen leaf, but fresh new petals, a different shade of rose,
a silver hand opening that leads fall toward winter -
that sometimes startles with its clarity as the crisp cold descends,
as the bright leaves flee before it toward their dark beds.

- Diane LaRae Bodach (May 2007)


Our dear friend Diane, gifted poet and lover of life, has made her
transition. Diane died at 5:50 p.m. September 18, peacefully, with her daughter
by her side.

From 1 p.m. tomorrow until Friday evening, there will be visiting hours.
People will be decorating the box in which Diane will be cremated and Love
Choir will come and sing one of the evenings.

If you need more information, you can call Jenessa at Diane's number,
707- 539-7258, or Tom and Linda Meyskens at 707- 823-0582.

Arrangements are being made for a memorial on October 21.

[Larry Robinson]

When Your True Heart


When you find yourself
at the bottom of the ocean
no one has to say,
"Swim! Swim for your life
toward the light!"

Your arms, your heart, your legs
your lungs, your brain, your eyes,
every part of you is fixated
on that point of light,

and your body works
with all the efficiency of which
it is capable
to propel you toward it.

When your true heart
reveals to you
that which you really want,

though a lioness stand at the gate
with teeth like snow white daggers
pointing up and down,

she will not keep you from entering.

Ancient chains of clinging, judgment,
"This is how I do it," mind, and fear
slip away like silk off silk.

Open to your true heart
and the Surging Tide that
knows no season
will fill you up with Joy.

When you stop being
separate and can speak
from inside things,

all of creation will be
nothing but mouth singing
songs of joy and praise.

- Diane La Rae Bodach

[Larry Robinson]

Shifting the Sun

When your father dies, say the Irish,
you lose your umbrella against bad weather.
May his sun be your light, say the Armenians

When your father dies, say the Welsh,
you sink a foot deeper into the earth.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Canadians,
you run out of excuses.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the French,
you become your own father.
May you stand up in his light, say the Armenians.

When you father dies, say the Indians,
he comes back as the thunder.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Russians,
he takes your childhood with him.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the English,
you join his club you vowed you wouldn't.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Armenians,
your sun shifts forever.
And you walk in his light.


- Diana Der-Hovanessian

[Larry Robinson]

The Rain


All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.


- Robert Creeley

[Larry Robinson]

Once There Was Light

Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great
river of light that undulates through time.

I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors -- those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few

moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist.

Like a crow who smells hot blood
you came flying to pull me out
of the glowing stream.
"I'll hold you up. I never let my dear
ones drown!" After that, I wept for days.

- Jane Kenyon

[Larry Robinson]

September Meditation

I do not know if the seasons remember their history or if the days and
nights by which we count time remember their own passing.
I do not know if the oak tree remembers its planting or if the pine
remembers its slow climb toward sun and stars.
I do not know if the squirrel remembers last fall's gathering or if the
bluejay remembers the meaning of snow.
I do not know if the air remembers September or if the night remembers
the moon.
I do not know if the earth remembers the flowers from last spring or if
the evergreen remembers that it shall stay so.
Perhaps that is the reason for our births -- to be the memory for
creation.
Perhaps salvation is something very different than anyone ever expected.
Perhaps this will be the only question we will have to answer:
"What can you tell me about September?"

- Burton D. Carley

[Larry Robinson]

Ode to the Tomato

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
the light
splits
in two halves
of tomato,
the juice
runs
through the streets.
In June
the tomato
cuts loose,
invades
the kitchens,
takes over lunches,
sits down
comfortably
on sideboards,
among the glasses,
the butter dishes,
the blue saltshakers.
It has its own light,
a benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we have to
assassinate it;
the knife plunges
into its living flesh,
it is a red
viscera,
a cool,
deep,
inexhaustible
sun
fills the salads
of Chile,
is cheerfully married
to the clear onion
and to celebrate,
oil lets itself
fall,
son and essence
of the olive tree,
onto the half-open hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism:
it is the day's
wedding,
parsley
raises
little flags,
potatoes
vigorously boil,
with its aroma
the steak
pounds
on the door,
it's time!
let's go!

- Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Oda al tomate

La calle
se llenó de tomates,
mediodía,
verano,
la luz
se parte
en dos
mitades
de tomate,
corre
por las calles
el jugo.
En diciembre
se desata
el tomate
invade
las concinas,
entra por los almuerzos,
se sienta
reposado
en los aparadores,
entre los vasos,
las mantequilleras,
los saleros azules.
Tiene
luz propia,
majestad benigna.
Debemos, por desgracia
asesinarlo;
se hunde
el cuchillo
en su pulpa viviente,
en una roja
vícera,
un sol
fresco,
profundo,
inagotable,
llena las ensalades
de Chile,
se casa alegremente
con la clara cebolla,
y para celebralo
se deja
caer
aceite,
hijo
esencial del olivo,
sobre sus hemisferios entreabiertos,
agrega
la pimienta
su fragancia,
la sal su magnetismo:
son las bodas
del día
el perejil
levanta
banderines,
las papas
hierven vigorosamente,
el asado
golpea
con su aroma
en la puerta,
es hora!
vamos!

- Pablo Neruda

[Larry Robinson]

Still

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!

- A. R. Ammons

[Larry Robinson]

How to Stuff a Pepper


Now, said the cook, I will teach you
how to stuff a pepper with rice.

Take your pepper green, and gently,
for peppers are shy. No matter which side
you approach, it's always the backside.
Perched on green buttocks, the pepper sleeps.
In its silk tights, it dreams
of somersaults and parsley,
of the days when the sexes were one.

Slash open the sleeve
as if you were cutting a paper lantern,
and enter a moon, spilled like a melon,
a fever of pearls,
a conversation of glaciers.
It is a temple built to the worship
of morning light.

I have sat under the great globe
of seeds on the roof of that chamber,
too dazzled to gather the taste I came for.
I have taken the pepper in hand,
smooth and blind, a runt in the rich
evolution of roses and ferns.
You say I have not yet taught you

to stuff a pepper?
Cooking takes time.

Next time we'll consider the rice.

- Nancy Willard

[Larry Robinson]

The Poetry Reading

I answered a call
for a poetry gathering
hosted at the home (as I’d misread)
of a woman who bore the name
of the street on which she lived.
Expecting perhaps a home
gracious and well settled,
a hostess adorned with baubles,
poets reading from their work,
and ... how would it be?
I arrived late
at a simple home,
Buddhist prayer flags,
heads silhouetted inside
a picture window at dusk.
I paused outside,
was beckoned silently
through the screen door
into the living room,
stood, listening as a voice
seeming to read, instead reciting
with feeling and at length a work
not by him. Ah.
I was offered
the sole remaining chair
in a circle surrounding
a hospital bed
on which lay the thin form
of a member of the group,
her eye patched,
her left arm wrapped completely
in bandages, overhead a steel triangle.
Voices arose, each in random turn, and
offered from beyond the walls
words from the deepest waters
of human experience. We grew dark, disembodied.
The bed glowed in the center.
Her voice, at last, spoke her own poem. Fluttered, whispered.
We grew quiet.
Our breath held her spirit
poised between this world and beyond.

-Scott O’Brien

[Larry Robinson]

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?


Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives --
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!


Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?


Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!


To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!



Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.



Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!



A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.



Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

TIRED OF SPEAKING SWEETLY

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.
God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is in such a "playful drunken mood"
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.

- Hafiz

(The Gift - versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

[Larry Robinson]

In the Absence of Bliss


Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv

The roasting alive of rabbis
in the ardor of the Crusades
went unremarked in Europe from
the Holy Roman Empire to 1918,
open without prerequisite
when I was an undergraduate.

While reciting the Sh’ma in full
expectation that their souls
would waft up to the bosom
of the Almighty the rabbis burned,
pious past the humming extremes
of pain. And their loved ones with them.
Whole communities tortured and set aflame
in Christ’s name
while chanting Hear, O Israel.

Why?
Why couldn’t the rabbis recant,
kiss the Cross, pretend?
Is God so simple that He can’t
sort out real from sham?
Did He want
these fanatic autos-da-fé, admire
the eyeballs popping,
the corpses shrinking in the fire?

We live in an orderly
universe of discoverable laws,
writes an intelligent alumna
in Harvard Magazine.
Bliss is belief,
agnostics always say
a little condescendingly
as befits mandarins who function
on a higher moral plane.

Consider our contemporary
Muslim kamikazes
hurling their explosives-
packed trucks through barriers.
Isn’t it all the same?
They too die cherishing the fond
certitude of a better life beyond.

We walk away from twenty-two
graphic centuries of kill-the-jew
and hail, of all things, a Mercedes
taxi. The driver is Yemeni,
loves rock music and hangs
each son’s picture—three so far—
on tassels from his rearview mirror.

I do not tell him that in Yemen
Jewish men, like women, were forbidden
to ride their donkeys astride,
having just seen this humiliation
illustrated on the Museum screen.

When his parents came
to the Promised Land, they entered
the belly of an enormous
silver bird, not knowing whether
they would live or die.
No matter. As it was written,
the Messiah had drawn nigh.

I do not ask, who tied
the leaping ram inside the thicket?
Who polished, then blighted the apple?
Who loosed pigs in the Temple,
set tribe against tribe
and nailed man in His pocket?

But ask myself, what would
I die for and reciting what?
Not for Yahweh, Allah, Christ,
those patriarchal fists
in the face. But would
I die to save a child?
Rescue my lover? Would
I run into the fiery barn
to release animals,
singed and panicked, from their stalls?

Bliss is belief, but where’s
the higher moral plane I roost on?
This narrow plank given to splinters.
No answers. Only questions.

- Maxine Kumin

[Larry Robinson]

God's Grief

Great parent
who must have started out
with such high hopes.
What magnitude of suffering,
the immensity of guilt,
the staggering despair.
A mind the size of the sun,
burning with longing,
a heart huge as a gray whale
breaching, streaming
seawater against the pale sky.
Man god or beast god,
god that breathes in every pleated leaf,
throat sac of frog, pinfeather and shaft--
god of plutonium and penicillin, drunk
sleeping on the subway grate,
god of Joan of Arc, god of Crazy Horse,
Lady Day, bringing us to our knees,
god of Houdini with hands
like a river, of Einstein, regret
running thick in his veins,
god of Stalin, god of Somoza,
god of the long march,
the Trail of Tears,
the trains,
god of Allende and god of Tookie,
the strawberry picker, fire in his back,
god of midnight, god of winter,
god of rouged children sold
with a week's lodging
and airfare to Thailand,
god in trouble, god at the end of his rope--
sleepless, helpless--
desperate god, frantic god, whale heart
lost in the shallows, beached
on the sand, parched, blistered, crushed
by gravity's massive weight.

- Ellen Bass

[Larry Robinson]

Villanelle for Our Time


From bitter searching of the heart,
Quickened with passion and with pain
We rise to play a greater part.

This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.

We loved the easy and the smart,
But now with tender brain
We rise to play a greater part.

The lesser loyalties depart
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart.

Not steering by the venal chart
that tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.

Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitterr searching of the heart
We rise to play a greater part.

- Frank Scott (1899 - 1985)

[Larry Robinson]

Ripeness
*
Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.
*
To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
*
And however sharply
you are tested --
this sorrow, that great love --
it too will leave on that clean knife.
*
- Jane Hirshfield

[Larry Robinson]

Humpbacks

There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.

You know what I mean.

The sky, after all, stops at nothing so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away.

Off Stellwagan
off the Cape,
the humbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage
of barnacles and joy
they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it
like children
at play.

They sing, too.
And not for any reason
you can’t imagine.

Three of them
rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their huge scarred flukes
tipped to the air.

We wait, not knowing
just where it will happen; suddenly
they smash thorugh the surface, someone begins
shouting for joy and you realize
it is yourself as they surge
upward and you see for the first time
how huge they are, as they breach,
and dive, and breach again
through the shining blue flowers
of the split water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a moment against the sky —
like nothing you’ve ever imagined —
like the myth of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness, pouring
heavenward, spinning; then

they crash back under those black silks
and we all fall back
together into that wet fire, you
know what I mean.

I know a captain who has seen them
playing with seaweed, swimming
through the green islands, tossing
the slippery branches into the air.

I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and nudge it gently along the bow
with her long flipper.

I know several lives worth living.

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Ode to Groucho

What you had was a voice
To double-talk faster,
Twanging hypnotic
In an age of nagging voices --
And bold eyes to dart around
As you shambled supremely
Muscular moth-eaten panther!

Black eyebrows, black cigar,
Black painted moustache --
A dark code of elegance
In an age of nagging moustaches --
To discomfit the coarse mayor,
Un-poise the suave headmaster
Reduce all the old boys to muttering fury.

A hero for the young,
Blame if you wish the human situation --
Subversivest of con-men
In an age of ersatz heroes:
Be talkative and shabby and
Witty; bully the bourgeois;
Act the obvious phoney . . .

O splendid and disreputable father!

- Martin Bell