Poem for today

[Larry Robinson]

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.

- Wislawa Szymborska

(Translated by Stanislaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh)

[Larry Robinson]

The Orchid Flower


Just as I wonder
whether it's going to die,
the orchid blossoms

and I can't explain why it
moves my heart, why such pleasure

comes from one small bud
on a long spindly stem, one
blood red gold flower

opening at mid-summer,
tiny, perfect in its hour.

Even to a white-
haired craggy poet, it's
purely erotic,

pistil and stamen, pollen,
dew of the world, a spoonful

of earth, and water.
Erotic because there's death
at the heart of birth,

drama in those old sunrise
prisms in wet cedar boughs,

deepest mystery
in washing evening dishes
or teasing my wife,

who grows, yes, more beautiful
because one of us will die.

- Sam Hamill

[Larry Robinson]

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

- Ellen Bass

[Larry Robinson]

ABSCHIEDS SYMPHONY

Someone I love is dying, which is why,
when I turn the key in the ignition
and back the car out of the parking space
in the underground garage, and the radio
comes on, sudden and loud, something
by Haydn, a diminishing fugue, and maneuver
the car through the dimly lit tunnels
with their low ceilings, following the yellow arrows
stenciled at intervals on the gray cement walls,
I think of him, moving slowly through the last
hard days of his life and I can't stop crying.
When I arrive at the toll gate I have to make myself
stop thinking as I dig in my pockets for the last
of my coins, turn to the attendant, indifferent
in his blue smock, his white hair curling like smoke
around his weathered neck, and say Thank you,
like an idiot, and drive into the blinding midday light.
Everything is hideously symbolic,
and everything reminds me of cancer:
the Chevron truck, its rounded underbelly
spattered with road grit and the sweat
of last night's rain, the dumpster
behind the flower shop, its sprung lid
pressing down on dead wedding bouquets--
even the smell of something simple, coffee drifting
from the open door of a cafe and my eyes
glaze over, ache in their sockets.
For months now all I've wanted is the blessing
of inattention, to move carefully from room to room
in my small house, numb with forgetfulness.
To eat a bowl of cereal and not imagine him,
scrubbed thin and pale, unable to swallow.
How not to imagine the tumors
ripening beneath his skin, flesh
I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,
pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights
so hard I thought I could enter him, open
his back at the spine like a door or a curtain
and slip in like a small fish between his ribs,
nudge the coral of his brain with my lips,
brushing over the blue coils of his bowels
with the fluted silk of my tail.
Death is not romantic. He is dying,
no matter how I see it, no matter
what I believe, that fact is stark
and one dimensional, atonal,
a black note on an empty staff.
My feet are cold, but not as cold as his,
and I hate this music that floods
the cramped insides of my car, my head,
slowing the world down with its
lurid majesty, transforming everything I see
into some sort of memorial to life,
no matter how ugly or senseless--
even the old Ford in front of me,
its battered rear end thinning to scallops of rust,
pumping black classical clouds of exhaust
into the shimmering air-- even the tenacious
nasturtiums clinging to a fence, vine and bloom
of the insignificant, music spilling
from their open faces, spooling upward, past
the last rim of blue and into the still pool
of another galaxy, as if all that emptiness
were a place of benevolence, a destination,
a peace we could rise to.

- Dorianne Laux

[Larry Robinson]

Grace

Thanks & blessings be
to the Sun & the Earth
for this bread & this wine,
this fruit, this meat, this salt,
this food;
thanks be & blessing to them
who prepare it, who serve it;
thanks & blessings to them
who share it
(& also the absent & the dead).
Thanks & Blessing to them who bring it
(may they not want),
to them who plant & tend it,
harvest & gather it
(may they not want);
thanks & blessing to them who work
& blessing to them who cannot;
may they not want - for their hunger
sours the wine & robs
the taste from the salt.
Thanks be for the sustenance & strength
for our dance & work of justice, of peace.

- Rafael Jesus Gonzalez

[Larry Robinson]

Bi-Focal


Sometimes up out of this land
a legend begins to move.
Is it a coming near
of something under love?

Love is of the earth only,
the surface, a map of roads
leading wherever go miles
or little bushes nod.

Not so the legend under,
fixed, inexorable,
deep as the darkest mine
the thick rocks won't tell.

As fire burns the leaf
and out of the green appears
the vein in the center line
and the legend veins under there,

So, the world happens twice—
once what we see it as;
second it legends itself
deep, the way it is.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Girl With Cello

There had been no such music here until
A girl came in from falling dark and snow
To bring into this house her glowing 'cello
As if some silent, magic animal.

She sat, head bent, her long hair all aspill
Over the breathing wood, and drew the bow.
There had been no such music here until
A girl came in from falling dark and snow.

And she drew out that sound so like a wail,
A rich dark suffering joy, as if to show
All that a wrist holds and that fingers know
When they caress a magic animal.
There had been no such music here until
A girl came in from falling dark and snow.

- May Sarton

[Larry Robinson]

Midway through the Journey
(From The Divine Comedy)

Midway through the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark forest
with the right path nowhere in sight.
Oh how hard to say what it was like,
that savage forest, so rugged and brutal
that the very thought brings back my fright!
Death can hardly have more horror,
but in order to relate the good I found there,
I will say what else I encountered.
I am still not sure how I got there,
so full of sleep was I at the moment
when I abandoned the true path.
But once I reached the foot of the hill
rising at the end of the valley
which had stricken my heart with such fear,
I looked up and saw the hill’s shoulders
cloaked with the rays of that planet
which leads people straight down every road.
This somewhat calmed the terror
the lake of my heart had endured
all night long with such misery,
And like someone who, panting for breath,
after escaping from sea to shore
turns to see the perilous waters left behind,
So did my soul, still in flight,
turn back to gaze again at the pass
through which no one else had ever come alive.

- Dante Alighieri
(1265-1321)

[Larry Robinson]

October Arriving

I only have a measly ant
To think with today.
Others have pictures of saints,
Others have clouds in the sky.

The winter might be at the door,
For he’s all alone
And in a hurry to hide.
Nevertheless, unable to decide

He retraces his steps
Several times and finds himself
On a huge blank wall
That has no window.

Dark masses of trees
Cast their mazes before him,
Only to erase them next
With a sly, sea-surging sound.

- Charles Simic

[Larry Robinson]

The Garnet Moon

The Garnet moon slices off pieces
of herself to send down to earth,
climbing through my bedroom
window, to play among the shelves
and toys of yesteryear;
to dig around into the dark rooms,
and turn those dusty old rhinestones into
diamonds for a night.

Page by page the black heart
of despair opens,
and when there are no more
pictures left on the page,

Light.

- Diane LaRae Bodach

[Larry Robinson]

Sunlight washes a dark face

Light again, and the one who brings light!
Change the way you live!

From the ocean vat, wine fire in each cup!
Two or three of the long dead wake up.
Two or three drunks become lion hunters.

Sunlight washes a dark face.
The flower of what's true opens in the face.
Meadowgrass and garden ground grow damp again.
A strong light like fingers massages our heads.
No dividing these fingers from those.

Draw back the lock bolt.
One level flows into another.
Heat seeps into everything.
The passionate pots boil.
Clothing tears into the air.
Poets fume shreds of steam,
never so happy as out in the light.

- Jelalludin Rumi

Ghazal (Ode) 3438
( Version by Coleman Barks
"The Essential Rumi"
Castle Books, 1997)

[Larry Robinson]

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change


Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train
is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Medmorial for Diane Bodach Sunday, October 21

Hello Friends and Family of Diane Bodach,
Just a few requests and items of information to help facilitate Diane's big bash:

We will open the doors at 1:30PM and invite you to come in early and enjoy some wonderful music by Lindalou and Michael. WE WILL START THE MEMORIAL ON TIME (2PM). We have lots of presenters and music and need to keep to our schedule to allow our very popular girl to be honored by all her devotees and talented friends and family. We are requesting that presenters for the memorial keep their time to about 5 minutes or we could go on far into the night.

We will have an altar and invite you to place things that remind you of Diane on it.

We are planning to start the potluck at 4PM. After that we will start the party. We have three bands: The Love Choir, The Tonewoods, and The Baby Seal Club plus performances by Gus and David & Trish.

Our thanks to all who have offered to help and contribute. I'm sure Diane can't wait for the party to start.

Playing by the Lake

All night long I play around
the edges of a huge lake,
like an animal that dodges and darts
among the trees --
a chipmunk perhaps,
or a raccoon, or a small
red fox. Sometimes
the lake comes into view
and then vanishes again.
Sometimes the moon shining
on the surface is so big
that the lake seems to disappear.

It is said there's a huge monster
that lives in the lake.
People have caught glimpses of it,
but no one has ever been able
to prove that it really exists.

What is this fascination
I have with the lake?
Is it the lake?
Or the monster?
Or is it the full moon
that consumes all?

- Diane LaRae Bodach

[Larry Robinson]

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
the stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill–
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

- Charles Simic

[Larry Robinson]

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
*
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

- Randall Jarrell

[Larry Robinson]

My Aunts

Always caught up in what they called

the practical side of life

(theory was for Plato),

up to their elbows in furniture, in bedding,

in cupboards and kitchen gardens,

they never neglected the lavender sachets

that turned a linen closet to a meadow.


The practical side of life,

like the Moon's unlighted face,

didn't lack for mysteries;

when Christmastime drew near,

life became pure praxis

and resided temporarily in hallways,

took refuge in suitcases and satchels.


And when somebody died--it happened

even in our family, alas--

my aunts, preoccupied

with death's practical side,

forgot at last about the lavender,

whose frantic scent bloomed selflessly

beneath a heavy snow of sheets.

Don't just do something, sit there.

And so I have, so I have,

the seasons curling around me like smoke,

Gone to the end of the earth and back without sound.

- Adam Zagajewski
(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

[Larry Robinson]

When I Am Asked


When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.

- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

Father

May 19, 1999

Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient, fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day--the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, the Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that at the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.

- Ted Kooser

[Larry Robinson]

Self Portrait

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter

half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.

I live in strange cities and sometimes talk

with strangers about matters strange to me.

I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.

I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.

The fourth has no name.

I read poets, living and dead, who teach me

tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand

the great philosophers--but usually catch just

scraps of their precious thoughts.

I like to take long walks on Paris streets

and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,

anger, desire; to trace a silver coin

passing from hand to hand as it slowly

loses its round shape (the emperor's profile is erased).

Beside me trees expressing nothing

but a green, indifferent perfection.

Black birds pace the fields,

waiting patiently like Spanish widows.

I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older.

I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,

and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses

dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.

Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me

and irony suddenly vanishes.

I love gazing at my wife's face.

Every Sunday I call my father.

Every other week I meet with friends,

thus proving my fidelity.

My country freed itself from one evil. I wish

another liberation would follow.

Could I help in this? I don't know.

I'm truly not a child of the ocean,

as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,

but a child of air, mint and cello

and not all the ways of the high world

cross paths with the life that--so far--

belongs to me.

- Adam Zagajewski


(From Mysticism for Beginners translated by Claire Cavanaugh)

[Larry Robinson]

All Hallow’s Eve, 2001

Above the deep-piled carpet of maple leaves
the madrones are slipping free
of summer’s brown paper wrapping,
eager to show off their new winter coats.

The afternoon rain still drips
from the canopy of oak, fir and pine.
Across the creek a turkey chuckles
as a woodpecker beats a drum.

The light is passing swiftly now,
passing from the face of this land.
Shadows are lengthening everywhere,
reaching out across our lives.

Should we not, then, dare to love boldly,
more boldly than ever before -
as if the fate of the Earth itself
depended upon our loving?

And still the stars will surely rise,
revealing the Soul’s deep secret:
that the eye can see farther in the dark of night
than ever it could by day.

- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

What Did the Children Know and
When Did They Know It?
What Did the Animals Know and When Did They Know It?
— Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2005


I kept the secret well.
A tsunami had struck Southeast Asia
and 43,000 people were killed. That's

what they said at first, somewhat
loudly, somewhat pointedly, somewhat unmistakably,
on the radio, on the day after Christmas.

But the girls were playing
Yahtzee, or watching that hilarious Fawlty Towers
video for the nth time, or

practicing their dance steps, or doing
each other's hair, or toasting smores through the
side door of the woodstove,

the Christmas tree winking
at us from the other room, not yet as dry
as tinder, and though

I didn't turn the radio off — and
it kept going on and on, the steady accretion of
horrific detail — it somehow

couldn't compete with their
industrious pursuit of the funny video, or the
violin, their absorption

in the smores, or whatever
it was that they were doing. I didn't
turn it off; I let it talk

alongside them, wondering
when they would notice, sort of incredulous
that they hadn't, but not wanting

to stop them, to say something.
Now, reading the Wall Street Journal
today, a week later,

I realize that they, like the antelope
stampeding the shoreline in the state
of Tamil Nadu — ten minutes

before the tsunami hit — or the elephants,
leopards, deer, and other wild animals
who escaped unharmed in Sri Lanka,

had already found high land,
a little island, that
would not break. You see,

I wasn't just keeping
the secret of the tsunami. There was something
else in the house. How often

I'd wished they'd overhear,
preferably my side of the story, so that I would not
have to know alone. But my girls had

already proceeded inland.
They were balancing on their new exercise
balls from Borders, watching John

Cleese, as Basil Fawlty — with the
woman in the video, "Polly," the maid, who in real
life was, for a long while, at least,

his wife — his helpless antics
in the face of events that he couldn't control,
events that became all the more

idiotic and perverse, as he
tried to twist them in service of his petty pride
and vanity, and we all died

with laughter watching him,
balancing on our balls, holding our secrets
in our mouths like big marbles.

- Dana Roeser

[Larry Robinson]

In the Arc of Your Mallet

Don't go anywhere without me.
Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,
or on the ground, in this world or that world,
without my being in its happening.
Vision, see nothing I don't see.
Language, say nothing.
The way the night knows itself with the moon,
be that with me. Be the rose
nearest to the thorn that I am.
I want to feel myself in you when you taste food, in the
arc of your mallet when you work.
When you visit friends, when you go
up on the roof by yourself at night.

There's nothing worse than to walk out along the street
without you. I don't know where I'm going.
You're the road and the knower of roads,
more than maps, more than love.
Rumi
-- Version by Coleman Barks
"Open Secret"
Threshold Books, 1984

[Larry Robinson]

Hot biscuits

Hot biscuits from the oven—
high and flaky,
moist and succulent,
crusty, steaming hot, cracked open,
crying out for more butter
and homemade strawberry preserves—
are not a solitary food.

They cry out, as well, for fellowship
and sharing in that circle
of grace that comes down to us,
down through the ages,
through my mother, Louise,
through her mother, Mary,
and her mother and her mother and her mother
all the way back, across the ocean,
across the land,
across the generations,
to that Eden, that fertile crescent,
where, now, destruction reigns
and sharing and fellowship
and hot bread from the oven
are scarce
to be
found.

Oh, the loss.
Let us not forget, then,
when next we break bread together,
held in our own personal circle of gifted grace,
our brothers and sisters
who cannot—
and love that moment
beyond all else.


- Bill Denham

[Larry Robinson]

The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

- Wislawa Szymborska


(View With a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

[Larry Robinson]

You Are My Silent Brethren

You are silent brethren,
the dead.
I wont forget you.

In old letters I find traces of your writing,
creeping to the page"s top
like a snail on the wall of a psychiaric ward.

Your addresses and phone numbers pitch camp
in my notebooks, waiting, dozing.

I was in Paris yesterday, I saw hundreds of tourists,
tired and cold. I thought, they look
like you, they caant get settled, they circle
restlessly.

You'd think it would be easy, living.
All you need is a fistful of earth, a boat, a nest,a
jail,
a little breath, some drops of blood and longing.

You are my masters,
the dead.
Dont forget me.

- Adam Zagajewski

[Larry Robinson]

The Ripening

This Living
has softened the hard fruit
of my being

Everyday, tenderness
claims more of me
taking me holy
into ripeness

Let me not
fall from the branch
ripe but untasted

Rather, let the Beloved
pluck me in ripeness
and pierce me with His bite

Releasing the juicy
fullness of my life
to run down His arm
like tears of gratitude,
like tears of devotion

But,
if fall I must
untasted
melting into the earth

Let that nourishing decay
be my devotion
spreading out in a pool
of returning

the essential elements
of my being

- Kay Crista

[Larry Robinson]

AMERICAN FUNERAL


He sits in a raft in a river with no water
that winds through sandstone canyons and green valleys

before passing through the gates of heaven.
The old raft, a sunken coat of flesh that
once ripped up huge chunks of Stanford Stadium
turf at left tackle, class of 1949,
that once built tuna fish sandwiches
for church youth groups,
that made sloppy wet love to an appreciative wife,
now lays boxed in the ground,
but he sits alone in the raft waiting.

Waters that could've carried him
down the river
lie locked inside
Protestant bodies maintaining
an unfortunate sense of dignity, decorum,
and strength.
Oceans of roiling grief
sit in the pews
requiring release,
but we have forgotten how to do this.
In the old days,
we knew how to prepare and anoint the old raft
for its journey.
Knew how to create the ritual
that released the sacred storms
that sent him on his way.
And as much as he needed our tears
we needed to weep.
But today our grief lies entombed in our bodies
and we carry them out into the world
where they come out later in ways
not so elegant
or beautiful or as necessary
as tears,
and he sits in raft in a river with no water.

- Greg Kimura

[Larry Robinson]

Autumn


The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Robert Bly

[Larry Robinson]

Sitting Down to Dinner

Suppose a man can't find what is his.
Suppose as a boy he imagined that some demon
forced him to live in "his room,"
And sit on "his chair" and be the child of "his parents."

That would happen each time he sat down to dinner.
His own birthday party belonged to someone else.
And - was it sweet potatoes that he liked? -
He should resist them. Whose plate is this?

That man would be like a lean-to-attached
To a house. It dosn't have a foundation.
He would be helpful and hostile at the same time.
Such a person leans toward you and leans away.

Do you feel me leaning?

- Robert Bly

[Larry Robinson]

Cats Purring

The internet says science is not sure how cats purr,
probably a vibration of the whole
larynx, unlike what we do when we talk. Less

likely, a blood vessel moving across the chest wall.
As a child I tried to make every
cat I met purr. That was one of the early

miracles, the stroking to perfection. Here's something
I've never heard: a feline purrs in
two conditions, when deeply content and when

mortally wounded, to calm themselves, readying for the
death-opening. The low frequency
evidently helps to strengthen bones and

heal damaged organs. Say poetry is a human purr, vessel
mooring in the chest, a closed-mouth
refuge, the feel of a glide through dying: one

winter morning on sunny chair inside this only body,
a faroff inboard moterboat sings
the empty room, urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhh

cats purr when happy, and when dying.....

- Coleman Barks

[Larry Robinson]

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

- Adam Zagajewski
(Translation by Clare Cavanaugh)

[Larry Robinson]

Family Reunion

The week in August you come home,
adult, professional, aloof,
we roast and carve the fatted calf
—in our case homegrown pig, the chine
garlicked and crisped, the applesauce
hand-pressed. Handpressed with greengage wine.

Nothing is cost effective here.
The peas, the beets, the lettuces
handsown, are raised to stand apart.
The electric fence ticks like the slow heart
of something we fed and bedded for a year,
then killed with kindness’s one bullet
and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering.

In winter we lure the birds with suet,
thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat.
Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring
of wire that keeps raccoons from the corn
to the gouged pine table that we lounge around,
distressed before any of you was born.

Benign and dozy from our gluttonies,
the candles down to stubs, defenses down,
love leaking out unguarded the way
juice dribbles from the fence when grounded
by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe,
how eloquent, how beautiful you seem!

Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow,
ballooning to overfill our space,
the almost-parents of your parents now.
So briefly having you back to measure us
is harder than having let you go.

- Maxine Kumin

[Larry Robinson]

Final Fruit

An apple tree went down

last night.

It lies fallen into gophered

ground, where dark rains

gently removed

its last hold

on earth.


Its final fruit,

just now ready,

hangs barely lifted above the soil,


still offered

by perfectly

yielding

limbs.

- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

Life As It May Be

You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy

- Ikkyu
(1394-1481)

[Larry Robinson]

Thanksgiving

I take my friends into the garden
where they remark on the weedless
ranks of ripening vegetables and fruit
of the swelling melon,
the abundant squash
cucumber, onion, pepper,
lettuce, basal, tomato,
each row a row of pride
and I am gratified, satisfied,
smugly thankful, ever vigilant,
and thankful for the taking.

I am thankful for the gopher
whose digging skill forms
catacombs beneath my cantaloupe
and who on a hungry morning
takes its share of melon meat.
Without that satiate need
to eat what I have nurtured
my garden would be a quiet place
for sweet but modest satisfactions.

I am thankful for the jay
whose precipitous assault
upon my Asian pears produces
peckhole patterns on the
still unripened flesh
without which messages
my orchard, a garden of serenity,
would seasonally bear its fruit
undramatized and sanitary.

I am thankful for the wasp
perceiving
the necessity of survival
finds on cooked or uncooked flesh
--sometimes my own-- a succulant summer menu
arouses me to know again
that pain may be to one
what is pleasure for another
and the price I pay
for so much abundance.

I am thankful for the moth
who lays its fertile eggs
on my still green apples
arousing in me strategies
to keep alive
my fruitful perfect garden dreams.

I am thankful by the yardful
for those hostile to my lustful
wish to claim it all
without pain or challenge,
now arousing the sentinal in me,
the garden guardian by proclamation,
where upon this territory
I plant the flag
ever ready to take up arms,
engage in chemical and biological warfare
and rid my chosen space of woe.

Ah, but will it not be easy to find enemies
who support my righteousness,
against whom I take up a holy book,
a loyal flag and heroic arms,
knowing invaders by their different speech,
by contrary tints of flesh or gender,
by some other foreign fixation,
style, habit, history
and claim of territory,
against whom I now employ
my own militant social wasps,
military cutworms and coddling moths
for the sake of my grasshopper greed
and exercise of gophermind?
Will my garden not then be a battleground
rather than a soil from which I harvest
present and future feasts?

I am thankful
that I have warned myself
how much I am a danger to myself
when I find my Eden enemies
emerging from the bushes, overhead,
underground, lurking spies and traitors
in all their civilized disguises,
tricked into existence by a
fertile but paranoic mind.

I am thankful for all that I have
and for all that I have not.
Now, if you will pardon me,
my garden is calling.

- Doug Stout

[Larry Robinson]

After Death, Like Flows to Like

(for Denise Levertov)

I often think of them
streaming together
to form one being,
those who kept stroking
reality alive with language,
who did not separate
word from thing.

Carolan with his harp,
stricken Dante, flaming rose,
Li-Po and his jug,
unsteady moon lifting
through shadow,
everywhere a constant singing,
a music beyond our hearing.

Once we called them muses.
Sometimes we catch glimpses of them
in blossoming summer skies,
or say their names
when we begin.

- Dorothy Walter

[Larry Robinson]

The Well at the Broch of Gurness

Imagine the sails flying like swans,
women hauling infants
as ox-horns bawled,
and door-bars thudding
home in this socket, where a thrush nests.

And slipping away from the rest
—a girl, crossing flagstones
to the sunken well, where, left hand
on the roof's cool rock,
she steps down out of the world.

Perhaps she's there yet, waiting
till they've done their worst
before she drinks, then barefoot
begins her return toward daylight,
where she'll vanish.

The broch's rubble.
Her homestead's lintels tilt
through mown turf.
But we can follow her, descend
below the bright grasses, the beat of surf

step by hewn step, crouching
till our eyes adjust—before we seek
the same replenishing water,
invisible till reached for,
when reached for, touched.

- Kathleen Jamie

[Larry Robinson]

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

- Jane Kenyon

[Larry Robinson]

Absence and Presence

If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don't want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don't want my heritage of joy to die.
Don't call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air.
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.

- Pablo Neruda

[Larry Robinson]

Sabbaths 1999, VII

Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.

With the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight.

The sky
is gray. It begins in mist
almost at the ground
and rises forever. The trees
rise in silence almost
natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but
not quite.

What more did I
think I wanted? Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
be. Even in me,
the Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Love Calls Us to the Things of the World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,

"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance."

- Richard Wilbur

[Larry Robinson]

Here

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

- Grace Paley

[Larry Robinson]

The Holy Longing

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

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

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

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

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


-Goethe/1814
translated by Robert Bly

[Larry Robinson]

Out Of The Stars

Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity, here
have we come,
Stardust and sunlight, mingling through time and through space.
Out of the stars have we come, up from time;

Out of the stars have we come.

Time out of time before time in the vastness of space, earth spun to
orbit the sun,
Earth with the thunder of mountains newborn, the boiling of seas,
Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight: this is our home;

Out of the stars have we come.

Mystery hidden in mystery, back through all time;
Mystery rising from rocks in the storm and sea,
Out of stars, rising from rocks and the sea,

Kindled by sunlight on earth, arose life.

Ponder this thing in your heart; ponder with awe:
Out of the sea to the land, out of the shallows came ferns.
Out of the sea to the land, up from darkness to light,

Rising to walk and to fly, out of the sea trembled life.

Ponder this thing in your heart, life up from sea:
Eyes to behold, throats to sing, mates to love.
Life from the sea, warmed by sun, washed by rain.

Life from within, giving birth rose to love.

This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space;

Out of the stars swung the earth; life upon earth rose to love.
This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know;
Out of your heart, cry wonder: sing that we live.

- Robert Weston

[Larry Robinson]

Not This, Not That

Nor anything,
not the eastern wind whose other name
is rain
nor the burning heats of the dunes
at the crown of summer,
nor the ticks, that new, ferocious populace,
not the President who loves blood,
nor the govermental agencies that love money,
will alter
my love for you, my friends and my beloved,
or for you, oh ghosts of Emerson and Whitman,

or for you, oh blue sky of the summer morning,
that makes me roll in a barrel of gratitude
down hills,
or for you, oldest of friends: hope;
or for you, newest of friends: faith;
or for you, silliest and dearest of surprises, my
own life.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

The Treasure


Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars—
Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral
Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s
Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf
After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome,
Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity.
Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely
To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called life? I fancy
That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;
Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure says “Ah!” but the treasure’s the essence:
Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.

- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

When We Stumble and Find It

We all have our favorite themes
the ones we say over and over
in a thousand different tongues.

Mine is the moment which
changed my life
forever.
Not the one I planned for
or expected, but the one which simply
happened.
It could have been a
revelation
speaking from a cloud of fire.
It could have been a rare accomplishment, election
descending like a dove after
so many years.

It was none of these.
Merely a moment,
the one I keep returning to,
feeling along the wall for the
hidden latch
which will spring open
and reveal the undefined.

- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

When I Die

People talk about how
when their time comes
they want to go quietly, in their sleep,
watching the news and weather before
pulling back the sheets
and slipping into bed
one last time.

But I think that when I die,
when my “I am” becomes
“I am not,”
when the pendulum of my clock
stops,
I want my pockets
turned inside out
and my glass
turned upside down.
I want to be a raindrop
breaking the surface of a pond somewhere,
maybe a pine-thicket pond,
with my concentric circles
wrapping themselves around the legs
of a great blue heron.
I want to be the white tail
of a deer, a metronome,
fading into the forest,
the thud of a fallen hickory nut,
a baby’s last breath before
falling asleep on his mother’s breast.

When I die,
when I finish living this life
that never really was mine,
when all my stakes and claims
in this world
are rendered null and void,
I want to leave like
the final swirl of smoke
from a smoldering ember,
rising as a smile
into nothing.

- Doug Wilson

[Larry Robinson]

Etude

I have been watching a Great Blue Heron
fish in the cattails, easing ahead
with the stealth of a lover composing at letter,
the hungry words looping and blue
as they coil and uncoil, as they kiss and sting.

Let’s say that he holds down an everyday job
in an office. His blue suit blends in.
Long days swim beneath the glass top
of his desk, each one alike. On the lip
of each morning, a bubble trembles.

No one has seen him there, writing a letter
to a woman he loves. His pencil is poised
in the air like the beak of a bird.
He would spear the whole world if he could,
toss it and swallow it whole.

- Ted Kooser

[Larry Robinson]

Shine, Perishing Republic


While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass
hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make
earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and
home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing
republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening
center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left
the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he
walked on earth.


- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

may my heart always be open

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

- e.e. cummings

[Larry Robinson]

THE GREAT WORK

Love
Is the great work
Though every heart is first an
Apprentice

That slaves beneath the city of Light.

This wondrous trade,
This magnificent throne your soul
Is destined for-

You should not have to think
Much about it,

Is it not clear
An apprentice needs a teacher
Who himself

Has charmed the universe
To reveal its wonders inside his cup.

Happiness is the great work,
Though every heart must first become
A student

To one
Who really knows
About Love.

- Hafiz

(Translated by by Daniel Ladinsky)

[Larry Robinson]

Old Man Leaves Party

It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection. The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking. I was like you once. But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?

- Mark Strand

[Larry Robinson]

Earth Dweller

It was all the clods at once become
precious; it was the barn, and the shed,
and the windmill, my hands, the crack
Arlie made in the ax handle: oh, let me stay
here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;
let the sun casually rise and set.
If I have not found the right place,
teach me; for, somewhere inside, the clods are
vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing
for the saints forever, the shed and windmill
rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.

Now I know why people worship, carry around
magic emblems, wake up talking dreams
they teach to their children: the world speaks.
The world speaks everything to us.
It is our only friend.

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Perhaps The Signs Point To...


When a chill sea wind swirls in and starts to flirt
with reddening leaves, gusting streams of dusty earth,
and berries droop and sour,
apronfuls of scattered apple sunset skirts

soften and brown, and insect friends abound,
buzzing busily one final fling around the sugared vine,
while hosts of unacknowledged spirits weave
greens into kindred rainbow colors

and, as if from nowhere, speeding clouds spring
and sweep across the sun's face, now wanly lit,
small birds magnetically bestir, circling tightly,
loudly summoning for lengthy flight

the poplar and eucalyptus bow and bend
their frizzled clumps, and bunched brown heads
of Queen Anne’s lace fill to the brim with seed,
and we,like early September pumpkins, are rushed

and boxed in the stores, then perhaps, the signs
point to a time of seeded contemplation.
One fresh-fallen leaf held up to the light
casts a spell breaking my day's petty betrayals

and reflects a tree whose branches and branchlets
spread a filigree beyond all golden wealth.

- Raphael Block

[Larry Robinson]

I have been one acquainted with the night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

- Robert Frost

[Larry Robinson]

I’m leaving!


Every day I try to paint your portrait,
but in your presence my paint runs off the canvas.

I try to sculpt your image in clay, but the sight of you turns my efforts to mud pies.

You are the wine that undoes my sobriety and sabotages all my best laid plans.

The merest hint of your divine fragrance drives me mad with longing.

Every drop of blood that flows in my veins bears the color of your love.

Without you even the greatest palace is a miserable shack; if you won’t come into this house, there’s nothing here for me; I’m leaving!

- Jelalludin Rumi
(translated by Sima Vaghti and Larry Robinson)

[Larry Robinson]

I Think That When I Die

I think that when I die,
I can breathe back the breath that made me live.
I can give back to the world all that I didn't do.
All that I might have been and couldn't be.
All the choices I didn't make.
All the things I lost and spent and wasted.
I can give them back to the world.
To the lives that haven't been lived yet.
That will be my gift to the world
that gave me the life I did live,
the love that I loved,
the breath that I breathed.

- Ursula LeGuin

[Larry Robinson]

Slow



Too fast

these emails fly,

too soon

the day closes,


no poem truly admitted

to make us

catch our

heart’s beat

mid-stride,

and gasp

at how

unfathomable

it is:


My God,

we

are

alive!



- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

Lines For Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

- Mark Strand

[Larry Robinson]

Cold moonlight shines
on the end and beginning

of everything


- Andrew Zarrillo

[Larry Robinson]

Strange Nativity


Into my memory, I pour the words of poets.

It is the Troubadour tradition to know many poems by heart.

There’s an entire herd of them that graze on the pastures

Around my house.

The words of poets, carrying images and stories

Hang around close to my home like large dogs on porches

Or cats curled up on cushioned wicker chairs.



There are the bovine poems to be milked

For everyday sustenance then,

There is the range poetry, the horses,

I will never tame.

These poems never float off my tongue or

meander through my head while I wander

Up and down the grocery store aisle

Or mindlessly pump gas into my car.

There is no daydreaming while riding bareback

On these poems.

I am barely hanging on, fistfuls of mane held

In clenched fingers.



Sometimes, I think, there are too many poems and

I consider closing my gate to them, but

They keep coming, needing homes,

Teaching me about life and language.

These poems of others that are mine,

But not mine, mill around,

Come and go across my land,

Muses who teach me the nuances

Of rhythm and pace.

As they roam around in my head and heart,

They do, at times, come home to rest.

Sometimes, it’s only the flick of a tail feather

Glimpsed as one of them disappears into the trees then,

I give my special whistle and

The poem reveals itself.



As I tend these poems, I wait for the creation

Of my own poetry from the Aroused Beast of Imagination.

At this strange Nativity,

The birthing of my creative voice,

All the dogs, cats, milk cows and even

The range horses venture near the barn,

Sensing something new, coming into the world.



- Beverly Green

[Larry Robinson]

Quiet Time

It is our quiet time.
We do not speak, because the voices are within us.
It is our quiet time.
We do not walk, because the Earth is all within us.
It is our quiet time.
We do not dance, because the music has lifted us to a place
where the spirit is.
It is our quiet time.
We rest with all of nature.
We wake when the Seven Sisters wake.
We greet them in the sky over the opening of the kiva.

- Nancy Wood

[Larry Robinson]

This Too Shall Pass

This day the fog’s so thick the ground is wet
The air smells like rust
With a mood so dense it feels like
Unyielding steel and dampens faith
This too shall pass

This day with the musky scent of
Sun baked pine needles
Spring water so fresh that it takes
The breath away like a first kiss
This too shall pass

A heart trampled, torn open,
Exposed to the elemental
Fear that this will never end
But…..
This too shall pass

Music so inspired that it opens every pore
Until you sweat out a longing you didn’t
Know you had and you
Want to stay up all night and dance
This too shall pass

A life well lived, well loved
A life of generosity and receptivity
Of strength, courage, humor
An extraordinary and ordinary life
This too shall pass

This too


- Sally Churgel

[Larry Robinson]

MUSHROOM

What amazes me
as usual
is the perfection
of all beings.

With no intervention
or interruption
or invention
on our part
She creates
this
on astonishingly intricate
incredibly beautiful
creature
rising out
of the cool, damp earth
at my feet.


- Lilith Rogers

[Larry Robinson]

Footsteps

Across this wounded land, where the tears
of our ancestors made
stillborn forests grow,
we are walking. Over this fragile earth,
where shattered dreams
reemerged as secrecy,
we are walking. Up to the mesa tops,
where people became bluebirds, we are walking.
Along the Great River,
where ancestors listened to water songs,
we are walking. To the villages
where our people watched momentum die, we are
walking. Out of the dust of misery, we are making do
with scraps. Out of our minds comes respect
for ourselves. We are walking,
day after day, year after year, even when
we would rather lie down.

- Nancy Wood

[Larry Robinson]

The Catholic Bells

Tho' I'm no Catholic
I listen hard when the bells
in the yellow-brick tower
of their new church

ring down the leaves
ring in the frost upon them
and the death of the flowers
ring out the grackle

toward the south, the sky
darkened by them, ring in
the new baby of Mr. and Mrs.
Krantz which cannot

for the fat of its cheeks
open well its eyes, ring out
the parrot under its hood
jealous of the child

ring in Sunday morning
and old age which adds as it
takes away. Let them ring
only ring! over the oil

painting of a young priest
on the church wall advertisng
last week's Novena to St.
Anthony, ring for the lame

young man in black with
gaunt cheeks and wearing a
Derby hat, who is hurrying
to 11 o'clock Mass (the
grapes still hanging to
the vines along the nearby
Concordia Halle like broken
teeth in the head of an

old man) Let them ring
for the eyes and ring for
the hands and ring for
the children of my friend

who no longer hears
them ring but with a smile
and in a low voice speaks
of the decisions of her

daughter and the proposals
and betrayals of her
husband's friends. O bells
ring for the ringing!

the beginnng and the end
of the ringing! Ring ring
ring ring ring ring ring!
Catholic bells!

- William Carlos Williams

[Larry Robinson]

A New Year’s Blessing

Unhurried mornings, greeted with gratitude;
good work for the hand, the heart and the mind;
the smile of a friend, the laughter of children;
kind words from a neighbor, a home dry and warm.

Food on the table, with a place for the stranger;
a glimpse of the mystery behind every breath;
some time of ease in the arms of your lover;
then sleep with a prayer of thanks on your lips;

May all this and more be yours this year
and every year after to the end of your days.

- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Could this be the year?


Could this be the year the troops come home
from every battle every land everywhere -
home to love healing peace?

Could this be the year we build more homes than bombs
make more cookies than bullets
write more poems than balance sheets?

Could this be the year that no child goes hungry
no woman abused no man homeless
nobody unloved?

Could this be the year that the salmon swim
the songbirds sing the coyotes dance
in greater numbers than we have ever known?

Could this be the year we stop serving the machine
the machine begin serving us
we begin serving life?

Could this be the year the ancient promise comes true
you know the one I mean of peace on earth
good will to all?

- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

I Love the Way Men Crack

I love the way men crack
open when their wives leave them,
their sheaths curling back like the split
shells of roasted chestnuts, exposing
the sweet creamy meat. They call you
and unburden their hearts the way a woman
takes off her jewels, the heavy
pendant earrings, the stiff lace gown and corset,
and slips into a loose kimono.
It's like you've both had a couple shots
of really good scotch and snow is falling
in the cone of light under the street lamp—
large slow flakes that float down in the amber glow.

They tell you all the pain pressed into their flat chests,
their disappointed penises, their empty hands.
As they sift through the betrayals and regrets,
their shocked realization of how hard they tried,
they way they shouldered the yoke
with such stupid good faith—
they grow younger and younger. They cry
with the unselfconciousness of children.
When they hug you, they cling.
Like someone who's needed glasses for a long time—
and finally got them-they look around
just for the pleasure of it: the detail,
the sharp edges of what the world has to offer.

And when they fall in love again, it only gets better.
Their hearts are stuffed full as éclairs
and the custard oozes out at a touch.
They love her, they love you, they love everyone.
They drag out all the musty sorrows and joys
from the basement where they've been shoved
with mitts and coin collections. They tell you
things they've never told anyone.
Fresh from loving her, they come glowing
like souls slipping into the bodies
of babies about to be born.

Then a year goes by. Or two.
Like broken bones, they knit back together.
They grow like grass and bushes and trees
after a forest fire, covering the seared earth.
They landscape the whole thing, plant like mad
and spend every weekend watering and weeding.

- Ellen Bass

[Larry Robinson]

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to us.

- Sheenagh Pugh

[Larry Robinson]

The Storm

1

Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.

2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.

A time to go home!--
And a child's dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
A cat runs from the wind as we do,
Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
Where the heavy door unlocks,
And our breath comes more easy--
Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.

3

We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
We wait; we listen.
The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
Flattening the limber carnations.

A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
Water roars into the cistern.

We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
Breathing heavily, hoping--
For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.

- Theodore Roethke

[Larry Robinson]

A Blessing For Equilibrium


Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the music of laughter break through your soul.

As the wind wants to make everything dance,
May your gravity be lightened by grace.

Like the freedom of the monastery bell,
May clarity of mind make your eyes smile.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what’s said,
May a sense of irony give you perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,
May fear or worry never put you in chains.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough
To hear in the distance the laughter of God.



- John O'Donohue

(1954- 2008)






John O'Donohue died peacefully in his sleep January 3, 2008.

[Larry Robinson]

Looking Out From Clare

For John Donohue

There's a great spring in you
all bud and blossom
and March laughter
I've always loved.

Your face framed
against the bay
and the whisper
of some arriving joke
playing at the mouth,
your lightening raid
on the eternal
melting the serious line
to absurdity.

I look around and see
the last days of winter
broken away
for all those
listening or watching,
all come to life now
with the first pale sun on their face
for many a month,
remembering how to laugh.

But most of all I love
the heft and weight
and swing of that sea
behind it all, some other tide
racing toward the shore,
or receding to the calmness
where no light or laughter
lives for long.

The way you surface
from those atmospheres
again and again,
your emergence seems to make
you a lover of horizons
but your visitation
of darkness shows.

Then away from you
I can see you only alone
on the strand
walking to the sea
on the north coast of Clare
toward the end
of an unendurable winter
taking your first swim
of the year.

The March scald
of cold ocean
even in may about to tighten
and bud you into spring.

You look across
to the mountains in Connemara
framing, only for now,
your horizon.

You look and look, and look,
beyond all looking.

- David Whyte


In Memoriam
John O'Donohue

David Whyte

A drive into the setting sun of a summer evening, west of Ballyvaughan would take you along the limestone coast of North Clare, with the salt ocean on the right and a rising, almost over bearing, mountain of white stone on your left. The road grips the cliff edge for a good while and then opens into dunes. From there you would see a long curve of beach and a far, inviting prospect of the Aran Islands silhouetted in the low sunlight. As you drive, your gaze is so naturally pulled forward into this horizon of fire and shadow that you would most likely, and thankfully, miss the narrow lane to the left that disappears very quickly into the recesses of the mountain. You would have passed the entrance to the valley without knowing, much to the relief of the people who live beyond its entrance and who have enjoyed its solitude for centuries.

That quiet lane disappears into a sanctuary, one of the most hidden and silent enclosures in the whole north Burren. The geological architecture of the valley speaks of shelter, the human history of fortitude and the view out to sea from the surrounding hills, of all the possible and imminent futures about to blow in from the west.

Out of that private, beautiful enclosed valley there came into the world a very private but very unenclosed man, one who knew the need in every human heart for that sense of sanctuary, and for that silence but equally for the high and necessary walk which brings the horizon and the future alive again and again in the home-bound human imagination. John O'Donohue grew up in that valley and eventually entered our world through that narrow pass down to the sea. He took us with him as he journeyed to those beckoning horizons and generously brought us, as we listened to him or read him, to marvel, to wonder, and to return home transformed. He was a rare form of human possibility, a razor sharp intellect married to a far-travelling, Irish articulation and a bird-of-paradise vocabulary that made the listener realize that until then they had never listened at all. Like the valley from which he emerged, all the geological and imaginative layers of human experience were present in his speech at once; he could bring recesses and contours in the listener alive that quickened their senses, broke their enclosed imprisoning notions of self and lead them on, up high into that clear western air, listening to the lark calls, letting the wind blow them clean of worry, and returning them to their shadowed, home valley with a strange sense of intention, of courage, and a brave, laughing almost flamboyant, sense of celebration.


I was privileged to have a close friendship with John, to witness him work and play, to eat and drink with him and to participate in that moveable, laughing, bull-fighting, swish-of-the-cloak drama that accompanied and enlivened everything and everyone around him. I also knew, behind the mesmerizing cloak, the serious philosopher, the critical take-no-prisoners thinker, the responsible head of a close, extended family, and the courageous, almost sacrificial activist, who with a group of North Burren allies, took on the might of the Irish establishment and won a victory that changed Irish law at a foundational level. This is a man who could hold the broad spectrum of human experience together in a fierce, intimate and compassionate way, leavened with a humour that defies easy description and that enlivened everyone around him.

John leaves behind an enormous circle of bereft readers and listeners, a great crowd of mourning friends, and most especially, a shocked and grieving family in his loving mother Josie, his loyal brothers PJ and Pat, his good sister Mary; his extended family, Dympna, Eilish, Shane, Kate, Triona and Peter and more recently, but equally poignant, the woman to whom he had just committed his future and who had brought him a happiness he had sought all his life: Kristine Fleck.

John was a love-letter to humanity from some address in the firmament we have yet to find and locate, though we may wander many a year looking or listening for it. He has gone home to that original address and cannot be spoken with except in the quiet cradle of the imagination that he dared to visit so often himself. As a way of sending a love letter in return, I wrote this poem for him a good few years ago. I hope it can still reach him now, wherever he is to be found and that he finds it as good a representation as he did when he lived and breathed. I remember the bright, surprised and amused intelligence in his eyes when I first read it to him, sitting by his fire in Connemara. It brings him back to me even as I read it now, as I hope it does for you.

[Larry Robinson]

Why Then Do We Not Despair?

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

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

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


- Anna Akhmatova


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

[Larry Robinson]

Trapeze

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

- Deborah Digges

[Larry Robinson]

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

- Margaret Atwood

[Larry Robinson]

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of Silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

- William Butler Yeats

[Larry Robinson]

A Tree Telling of Orpheus

White dawn. Stillness.When the rippling began
I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors
of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog
didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving.
Yet the rippling drew nearer – and then
my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips
were drying and curling.
Yet I was not afraid, only
deeply alert.
I was the first to see him, for I grew
out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless
twigs at their ends,
and the head that's crowned by brown or golden grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
more like a flower's.
He carried a burden made of
some cut branch bent while it was green,
strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this,
when he touched it, and from his voice
which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our
leaves and branches to complete its sound,
came the ripple.
But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me
as if rain
rose from below and around me
instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:
I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know
what the lark knows; all my sap
was mounting towards the sun that by now
had risen, the mist was rising, the grass
was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them
deep under earth.

He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:
the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded.
Music! There was no twig of me not
trembling with joy and fear.

Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
He told me of journeys,
of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots ...
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
and I, a tree, understood words – ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost wounds it.

Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
were both frost and fire, its chords flamed
up to the crown of me.
I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.

- Denise Levertov

[Larry Robinson]

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.

This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them — I swear it! —

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.


- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Poem To Be Read At 3 A.M.

Excepting the diner

On the outskirts

The town of Ladora

At 3 A.M.

Was dark but

For my headlights

And up in

One second-story room

A single light


Where someone

Was sick or

Perhaps reading

As I drove past

At seventy

Not thinking

This poem

Is for whoever

Had the light on

- Donald Justice

[Larry Robinson]

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

- Langston Hughes

[Larry Robinson]

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

- Robert Hayden

[Larry Robinson]

Alone And Drinking Under The Moon

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.

- Li Po

[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]

World Was In The Face Of The Beloved

World was in the face of the beloved--,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.

Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink
world, so near that I couldn't almost taste it?

Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

[Larry Robinson]

Good People

From the kindness of my parents

I suppose it was that I held

that belief about suffering

imagining that if only

it could come to the attention

of any person with normal

feelings certainly anyone

literate who might have gone

to college they would comprehend

pain when it went on before them

and would do something about it

whenever they saw it happen

in the time of pain the present

they would try to stop the bleeding

for example with their own hands

but it escapes their attention

or there may be reasons for it

the victims under the blankets

the meat counters the maimed children

the animals the animals

staring from the end of the world

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Three Dreams

I dreamt of walking dark streets,
towering structures to either side,
narrow passages branching.
Seized from above,
I was lifted and saw below
my own sole.

I dreamt of a grain of sand
inflaming an oyster,
becoming a pearl
and the pearl was called Jerusalem.

I dreamt of snow falling
silently in a vast bowl.

- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment
comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter after more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, “The world is vast and intricate.
There are wheat fields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer:
“There is no ‘other world’.
I only know what I’ve experienced.
You must be hallucinating.”
that slowly begins to say Thank you, thank you.


When you feel gloomed over,
it’s your failure to praise. Irreverence
and no discipline rob your soul of light.


Awe is the salve
that will heal our eyes.

- Rumi

[Larry Robinson]

The Zen of Housework

I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.

My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.

Full of the grey wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches,
is setting in Western America.

I can see thousands of droplets
of steam -- each a tiny spectrum -- rising
from my goblet of grey wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly -- like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.

Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!

- Al Zolynas

[Larry Robinson]

We Have A Beautiful Mother

We have a beautiful
mother
Her hills
are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
hills.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her oceans
are wombs
Her wombs
oceans.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her teeth
the white stones
at the edge
of the water
the summer
grasses
her plentiful
hair.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her green lap
immense
Her brown embrace
eternal
Her blue body
everything we know.



- Alice Walker

[Larry Robinson]

The Charge of the Goddess

Now listen to the words of the Great Mother,
who was of old also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Athene, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Dana, Arianrhod, Isis, Bride, and by many other names. At her altars, the youth of Lacedaemon in Sparta made due sacrifice.


Whenever ye have need of any thing,
once in the month,
and better it be when the moon is full,
then shall ye assemble in some secret place, and adore the spirit of me,
who am Queen of all witches.


There shall ye assemble, ye who are fain to learn all sorcery,
yet have not won its deepest secrets;
to these will I teach things that are as yet unknown.


And ye shall be free from slavery;
and as a sign that ye be really free,
ye shall be naked in your rites;
and ye shall dance, sing, feast, make music and love, all in my praise.
For mine is the ecstasy of the spirit,
and mine also is joy on earth;
for my law is love unto all beings.


Keep pure your highest ideal;
strive ever towards it, let naught stop you or turn you aside;
for mine is the secret door which opens upon the land of youth,
and mine is the cup of wine of life,
and the cauldron of Cerridwen,
which is the Holy Grail of immortality.


I am the gracious Goddess,
who gives the gift of joy unto the heart of man.
Upon earth, I give the knowledge of the spirit eternal;
and beyond death, I give peace, and freedom,
and reunion with those who have gone before.


Nor do I demand sacrifice;
for behold, I am the Mother of all living,
and my love is poured out upon the earth.


Hear ye the words of the Star Goddess;
she in the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven,
whose body encircles the universe.


I who am the beauty
of the green earth and the white moon upon
the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me.


For I am the soul of nature
that gives life to the universe.
From me all things proceed and unto me
they must return.
Let My worship be in the
heart that rejoices, for behold,
all acts of love and pleasure
are My rituals.


Let there be beauty and strength,
power and compassion,
honor and humility,
mirth and reverence within you.
And you who seek to know me,
know that the seeking and yearning
will avail you not,
unless you know the Mystery:
for if that which you seek,
you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.


For behold,
I have been with you from the beginning,
and I am that which is attained
at the end of desire

- Traditional by Doreen Valiente, as adapted by Starhawk

[Larry Robinson]

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT

Make love your business.
Rumi

I have made love
my business
and where has it
gotten me?

Nothing I would
care to share
with listeners.

Only this being
alone
night after night
with the Beloved,
faint with kisses.
It never ends.

- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

In the Basement of the Goodwill Store

In musty light, in the thin brown air
of damp carpet, doll heads and rust,
beneath long rows of sharp footfalls
like nails in a lid,
an old man stands
trying on glasses, lifting each pair
from the box like a glittering fish
and holding it up to the light
of a dirty bulb.

Near him, a heap
of enameled pans as white as skulls
looms in the catacomb shadows,
and old toilets with dry red throats
cough up bouquets of curtain rods.

You've seen him somewhere before.
He's wearing the green leisure suit
you threw out with the garbage,
and the Christmas tie you hated,
and the ventilated wingtip shoes
you found in your father's closet
and wore as a joke. And the glasses
which finally fit him, through which
he looks to see you looking back
two mirrors which flash and glance
are those through which one day
you too will look down over the years,
when you have grown old and thin
and no longer particular,
and the things you once thought
you were rid of forever
have taken you back in their arms.

- Ted Kooser

[Larry Robinson]

Turkish Pears

Sometimes a poem has her own husband
And children, her nooks and gardens and kitchens,
Her stairs, and those sweet-armed serving boys
Who carry veal in shiny copper pans.
Some poems do give plebeian sweets
Tastier than the chocolates French diners
Eat at evening, and old pleasures abundant
As Turkish pears in the garden in August.

- Robert Bly

[Larry Robinson]

Working Together

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air

passed at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self
by forming it well

to the great
intangibles about us.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

The Starry Night


That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.
Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother



The town does not exist

except where one black-haired tree slips

up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.

Oh starry starry night! This is how

I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.

Even the moon bulges in its orange irons

to push children, like a god, from its eye.

The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.

Oh starry starry night! This is how

I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,

sucked up by that great dragon, to split

from my life with no flag,

no belly,

no cry.

- Anne Sexton

[Larry Robinson]

The Country of Marriage

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Happiness

In the afternoon I watched
the she-bear; she was looking
for the secret bin of sweetness -
honey, that the bees store
in the trees’ soft caves.
Black block of gloom, she climbed down
tree after tree and shuffled on
through the woods. And then
she found it! The honey-house deep
as heartwood, and dipped into it
among the swarming bees - honey and comb
she lipped and tongued and scooped out
in her black nails, until

maybe she grew full, or sleepy, or maybe
a little drunk, and sticky
down the rugs of her arms,
and began to hum and sway.
I saw her let go of the branches,
I saw her lift her honeyed muzzle
into the leaves, and her thick arms,
as though she would fly -
an enormous bee
all sweetness and wings -
down into the meadows, the perfections
of honeysuckle and roses and clover -
to float and sleep in the sheer nets
swaying from flower to flower
day after shining day.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance--

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave. . .
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
( translated by Robert Bly)