Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Terza Rima

In this great form, as Dante proved in Hell,
There is no dreadful thing that can't be said
In passing. Here, for instance, one could tell

How our jeep skidded sideways toward the dead
Enemy soldier with the staring eyes,
Bumping a little as it struck his head,

And then flew on, as if towards Paradise.

- Richard Wilbur

[Larry Robinson]

Autumn Passage

On suffering, which is real.
On the mouth that never closes,
the air that dries the mouth.

On the miraculous dying body,
its greens and purples.
On the beauty of hair itself.

On the dazzling toddler:
“Like eggplant,” he says,
when you say “Vegetable,”

“Chrysanthemum” to “Flower.”
On his grandmother’s suffering, larger
than vanished skyscrapers,

September zucchini,
other things too big. For her glory
that goes along with it,

glory of grown children’s vigil.
communal fealty, glory
of the body that operates

even as it falls apart, the body
that can no longer even make fever
but nonetheless burns

florid and bright and magnificent
as it dims, as it shrinks,
as it turns to something else.

- Elizabeth Alexander

[Larry Robinson]

*Monet Refuses the Operation
*
Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.* The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.* Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
*
- Lisel Mueller

[Larry Robinson]

Praise What Comes

surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven't deserved
of days and solitude, your body's immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books
that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

- Jeanne Lohmann

[Larry Robinson]

Gautama Christ

The names of God and especially those of His representative
Who is called Jesus or Christ according to holy books and
someone's mouth
These names have been used, worn out and left
On the shores of rivers of of human lives
Like the empty shells of a mollusk.
However when we touch these sacred but exhausted
Names, these wounded scattered petals
Which have come out of the oceans of love and fear
Something still remains, a sip of water,
A rainbow footprint that still shimmers in the light.

While the names of God were used
By the best and the worst, by the clean and the dirty
By the white and the black, by bloody murderers
And by victims flaming gold with napalm
While Nixon with his hands
Of Cain blessed those whom he condemned to death,
While fewer and fewer divine footprints were found
on the beach
People began to study colors,
The future of honey, the sign of uranium
They looked with anxiety and hope for the possibilities
Of killing themselves or not killing themselves, of organizing
themselves into a fabric
Of going further on, of breaking through limits without stopping

What we came across in these blood thirsty times
With their smoke of burning trash, their dead ashes
As we weren't able to stop looking
We often stopped to look at the names of God
We lifted them with tenderness because they reminded us
Of our ancestors, of the first people, those who said the prayers
Those who discovered the hymn that united them in misfortune
And now seeing the empty fragments which sheltered those
ancient people
We feel those smooth substances,
Worn out and used up by good and by evil.

- Pablo Neruda

[Larry Robinson]

A Penitent Considers Another Coming of Mary

For Reverend Theodore Richardson

If Mary came would Mary
Forgive, as Mothers may,
And sad and second Saviour
Furnish us today?

She would not shake her head and leave
This military air,
But ratify a modern hay,
And put her Baby there.

Mary would not punish men—
If Mary came again.

- Gwendolyn Brooks

[Larry Robinson]

What, Friends, Is A Life?

for Gabe Gudding

Killing a chicken for dinner always prompted
A quarrel about who had to do it. Today

You can take tours of virtual slave ships.
Many people are drawn to the dead

On their holidays. Because of its abundance
A large section of Birkenau was named Canada.

You could get good boots there & sometimes
A silk shawl or a jar of pickled herring. But it was

In America that fake birds were first made
To attract native fowl. The most familiar kinds

Of camouflage make one thing appear to be two,
Two things one & so on. Camouflage artists

Make it an arduous challenge to see a figure
On a ground (blending) or to distinguish one

Category of object from another (mimicry).
Less familiar but far more effective is dazzle

Camouflage in which a single thing appears
To be a hodgepodge of disparate components.

At Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the actors say
The audience always pays better attention

When it’s raining. Mother loved the sun,
She said, because its rays felt like ink to her

Fingers. Honestly I don’t understand many
People. But, Friends, if you plan on dying

By your own hand, don’t use pills. Swallowing
Is simply another way of marking time.

- Mark Yakich

[Larry Robinson]

I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

- Langston Hughes

[Larry Robinson]

Reverse Living

Life is tough.
It takes up a lot of your time. All your weekends.
And what do you get at the end of it -
Death - A great reward.
I think that the life cycle is all backwards.
You should die first. Get it out of the way.
Then you live 20 years in an old folks home.
You get kicked out when you're too young.
You get a good watch. You go to work.
You work for 40 years until you are young enough to enter college.
You learn to party until you are ready for High School.
You go to High School, Grade School,
You become a little kid.
You play, you have no responsibilities.
You become a little baby.
You go back into the womb.
You spend the last nine months floating
Only to finish off as a gleam in somebodies eye.

- Lynne Vance

[Larry Robinson]

The Hour Glass

It was but twelve months ago that the hour glass that is 2008 was turned. And now we watch in anticipation as the final grains of sand follow one another to end the year.

A man with a long white beard who needs a cane to help him remain on his feet takes the hand of the child in diapers standing on his plump little legs.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” warns the old man, “it passes quickly.”

And a nation down on its luck looks back, shamed by the misdeeds of its president. “We can do what is right!” It screams out to its neighbors around the earth, “we have chosen a leader so different from all of the rest, you will see. You will see!”

And even though it is the dead of winter and the longest and coldest nights of the year are upon us, we nonetheless continue a measured and steady trek toward spring and day by day hope slowly approaches.

Ah yes, the hour glass of 2009 will be turned in a few short hours its top globe filled not so much by the sands of time as the hopes of a people.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila

[RexCasteel]

Quoting ChoQosh Auh'Ho'Oh:

> Where do you live (not just geographically)?
> What is it that you do?
> How are your relationships?
> Are you in right relation with the Earth?
> Where is your water?
> Know your garden (and nature around you).
> Speak your truth; it is time now.
> Be good to each other.
> Don't look outside yourself for the leader.
> This could be a good time.

That last one gets me every day...

Happy New Year,

- Rex


The Hour Glass

It was but twelve months ago...

“Don’t get too comfortable,” warns the old man, “it passes quickly.”

And the hour glass of 2009 will be turned in a few short hours - its top globe filled not so much by the sands of time as the hopes of a people.

- Armando Garcia-Dávila

[Larry Robinson]

A Day is Coming

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

- Lalo Delgado

[Larry Robinson]

The Mystery

Some come at it
with weights and measures,
some waving a sieve.
Some sing to it,
ballads and carols,
hoping to coax forth
its hidden center,
unwind the sheath
of who it is.
Some tap on it,
or deal heavy blows
with hammers,
trying to smash
its thick shield
force it to bow down.
Some seek ways to clamber in,
explore its hidden vaults
and chambers.

Some lie down beside it,
breathe its cool scent,
become its own self.

- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

Testament

1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don't call it death --
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don't know.

2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit's whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say

Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all's despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought's unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!

3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don't muck up my face

With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day's round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.

4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.

He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After

Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Well Being/Being Well

Wishing all the world well being,
Starving dark thoughts while
Feasting on joy and humor so they thrive
Even when the body complains.

This is the goodness we can claim;
This is the healing we crave;
In the face of every ugly thing,
To choose to merge with
Mu- the Zen nothing,
The Christian love,
The Congolese ntu (everything)

Why give mistrust a foothold when
Pain can be washed away
With more care to
Mind, heart and hearth?

Why choose independence as a mask,
A too easy refuge for ego,
Negating the deeper peace of
Vulnerability and loving surrender?

In these short, grey winter days, then,
Let there be more tenderness, more light,
So, like angels our spirits may fly.

- Connie Madden

[Larry Robinson]

A Taoist Visits

I. "A foolish man is always doing, yet much remains to be done."
- Lao Tsu Tao Te Ching

How can I wash the dishes
when on the front porch
he contemplates tree roots
and watches ants disappear
Into sidewalk cracks?

I know which one
Of us
Is foolish.

II. "The great Tao flows everywhere….It nourishes the ten thousand things, and yet is not their lord. It is very small…. It is very great…."
- Lao Tsu Tao Te Ching


He holds the Tao
as a peach, peeling
the skin with his teeth.

The Tao expands
spanning the late summer sky.

It brushes his arm
as a fallen feather.

III. "Do you think you could take over the universe and improve it? I do not believe it can be done…. The universe is sacred…. So sometimes things are ahead, and sometimes they are behind…sometimes one is up and sometimes down…."
- Lao Tsu Tao Te Ching

I follow him now
through a drought-yellowed
cornfield where dry stalks
confess the sins that prevent
the summer rain. They would whisper
anything that might end the white kernels
withering.

Uncorking rice wine, the Taoist and I
celebrate the sacred universe now
both behind and down.
In all this field
only he and I know
no sin keeps the rain
from coming.

- Cheryl Todd

[Larry Robinson]

Persephone Again

Everyone wants to talk
about Persephone.
Especially the poets.
How she was grabbed
and carried off,
how she was kept in darkness
so many months,
while her mother searched everywhere,
waited for her darling
to come home.

Some say
the daughter
liked what had happened
(you know the story,
how women really want it
even when they say no),
others claim it is in fact
the mother who is at fault,
that it is she
who drove her daughter
away, forced her to
leave home and
flee into that hidden world,
because of her own impossible
demands.

And then of course
there are those
who read it as a simple
nature myth--nine months
of fertility and sun,
three of winter and death
over the land.

What do I think?
I think she is the soul
of each of us,
going down to obscurity,
resurrecting like a flower
over and over
as the seasons return.

- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Year’s End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

- Richard Wilbur

[Larry Robinson]

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

- Tony Hoagland

[RexCasteel]

My goodness. Adbusters meets "Iron John" meets ___.

I bought a copy of Adbusters the other day. It was the first time in a long time...

As always, thanks Larry.

- Rex


America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison...

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

- Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

- W. S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

The Pieces That Fall To Earth

One could
almost wish
they wouldn't;
they are so
far apart,
so random.
One cannot
wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding
way they matter.

- Kay Ryan

[Larry Robinson]

For Presence

Awaken to the mystery of being here
and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.

Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon.

Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to
follow its path.

Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity.

May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.

May anxiety never linger about you.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of
soul.

Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek
no attention.

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]

White-Eyes

In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees
where the wind-bird

with its white eyes
shoves and pushes
among the branches.
Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,
but he's restless—
he has an idea,
and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings
as long as he stays awake.
But his big, round music, after all,
is too breathy to last.

So, it's over.
In the pine-crown
he makes his nest,
he's done all he can.

I don't know the name of this bird,
I only imagine his glittering beak
tucked in a white wing
while the clouds—

which he has summoned
from the north—
which he has taught
to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall
into the world below
like stars, or the feathers
of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
that is asleep now, and silent—
that has turned itself
into snow.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Holy Thursday: Is this a holy thing to see

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc'd to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are fill'd with thorns:
It is eternal winter there.

For where-e'er the sun does shine,
And where-e'er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.

- William Blake

[Larry Robinson]

God brings you into a new land


God brings you into a new land
Look, it’s just over this hill
Not the one with ten miles of gridlock before your exit
Not even the hill covered with auburn grape vines

The hill between you and this new land
Is of your own creation
It’s the hill made of spent dreams and regrets
Comparisons and despair

This hill is not as steep as it seems
It is covered with the sweet lilac scent of longing
You cannot walk this hill alone
The soft, yielding hand of the Divine is always present

You shall not lack for anything in this land
This is a land of olive oil and honey
Where bread of every description abounds

Here, truth is like a fig, chewy and sweet
It’s no longer like a pomegranate
With only small bursts of fleeting flavor
Here, your heart is as resilient as iron but as yielding
As a field of barley in a summer breeze

Your body and soul are entwined like
A dazzling vine of bronze stems and copper leaves
Even in this land you must be still in order to hear the
Sound of water flowing from deep springs

God brings you into a new land
But you still must walk
The wind will still blow in your face
Your heart can close again

If in the morning you wake and the hill is here again
Just put on your walking shoes
And climb again
And again, if need be

Remember you cannot climb this hill alone

- Sally Churgel

[Larry Robinson]

And then, it happened to us.
We, who had always been young,
grew old.
Hair thinned,
kidneys shrunk,
teeth fell.
Strength was within.

- Tina Rosa

[Larry Robinson]

NEW YEAR, 2009


Venus in the arc of the young moon

is a boat in the arms of a bay,

the sky clear to infinity

but for the trailing gossamer

of a transatlantic plane.

The old year and the old era dead,

pushed burning out to sea

bearing the bones of heroes, tyrants,

ideologues, thieves and deceivers

in a smoke of burning money.


The dream is over. Glaciers will melt.

Seas will rise to swallow golden islands.

Somewhere a volcano may whelm a city,

earth shake its skin like an old horse,

a hurricane topple a town to rubble.

Yet tonight, under the cold beauty

of the moon and Venus, something like hope begins,

as if times can turn, the world change course,

as if truth can speak, good men come to power,

and words have meaning again.

Maybe black-hearted boys in love with death

won't blow themselves and us to smithereens.

Maybe guns will fall silent, the powerful

cease slaughtering the weak, the rich

will not gorge as the poor starve.


Hope spoke the word 'Yes', the word 'we', the word 'can',

and a thousand British teenagers at Poetry Live

rose to their feet in a single yell of joy -

black, white, Christian, Muslim, Jew,

faithful and faithless. We are all in this together.

- Gillian Clarke

I will be on retreat until January 26. This will be my last post until then.
Larry

[Larry Robinson]

The Road Taken

(with apologies to Robert Frost)

The wood was green,
though it could just as well
have been yellow.
The roads did indeed diverge, though.

Those who know me would not be surprised
to hear that I took the one
marked "No Trespassing".
On the other side
I found myself already there.

I won't say what else I found there.
I will say that I will be back.
I'll leave it to you
to decide which side
was in and which was out.

Two roads converged
and that erased
all the difference.

- Larry Robinson

[Larry Robinson]

Beginning

Long before spring
king of the black cranes
rises one day
from the black
needle's eye
on the white plain
under the white sky

the crown turns
and the eye
drilled clear through his head
turns
it is north everywhere
come out he says

come out then
the light is not yet
divided
it is a long way
to the first
anything
come even so
we will start
bring your nights with you

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Learning to Read

If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.

My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, every time I spoke.

My favorite was called the Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names,
but when was I going to pronounce them, and

to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English;

two, he had sufficient intent
to smirk or knock me down
without any prompting from me.

Loneliness, boredom and terror
my motivation
fiercely fuelled.

I get down on my knees and thank God for them.

Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.

- Franz Wright

[Larry Robinson]

Praise Song For The Day

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

- Elizabeth Alexander

[Larry Robinson]

And The Trees Danced

A bitter wind blew through the land
And screams of rage could be heard
From every corner of the sky,
Echoing throughout all of the Earth.

The ground was red from the battle, the long and endless battle,
Where neither one side, nor the other
Was heard to profess an element of understanding,
And pleas screamed would only break on ears of stone,
As each claimed that their god would reign victorious.

And there were those who loved and simply watched,
Who could see beyond the shades of skin,
And the acclamations of divine intent,
And would weep helplessly,
As they watched the ebb and flow of the bleeding tides,
Cursing the shades and pointing to the color that all beings shared,
Spilled relentlessly on fields of intolerance and greed.

And the reddened brown mud dried and cracked over the earth,
And the land was parched with flame and ash,
And the waters became putrid so no one could drink,
And the air thickened, and was brown with smoke and dust,
And the food would not grow because the rains would not fall,
And all of the Earth settled into a deep despair.

Then, just when all of the world agreed that the end was near,
And that nothing could be done to reverse the turn,
A man with skin the color of coffee and milk
Stepped out onto the battlefield,
And with his eyes, ears and heart open wide,

He listened.

And he heard the cries of the people,
And he spoke to them of Hope,
And the hearts of the many who heard his words
Chose him above all others to be their voice,
And to speak the truth for them.

A fuse was ignited and all around the world,
Tall columns built on worm ridden pedestals
Began to crumble and collapse,
As the age of plenty built on shards of illusion
And the backs of slaves
Could not stand tall,
And cowered in the brilliant light of Hope
And words of Truth.

And all of the people fighting
In all of the lands,
Increased their battles,
Reaching farther into the darkness,
Looting whatever remained of anything precious.
They waged on in their wars, in the names of their gods,
Utilizing women and children, in the crimes of their greed,
And causing a great wave of grief throughout the world.

Then on the eve of the day before the man was to become
The voice of the people,
A great cloud filled the heavens and settled over the land,
And a long and quiet snow fell throughout the night,
And covered the fields stained red in the blood of slaves and soldiers
With a soft blanket of redemption.

And in the morning light,
As the sun shown on the fields of ice and snow,
The man the color of coffee and milk
Stood in front of all the world,
And spoke of Peace and the Promise of Humanity.
And all of the people from all four corners of the earth,
Heard the words,
And wept,
For the broken hearts of the many,
That had finally been redeemed.

And the trees, that had stood guard in watch of their fields,
Who witnessed the toils of the pickers and planters,
Those unlucky, who as children
Had been stolen from the arms of their mothers
And sent in the bottoms of ships, in sickness and shackles
To toil in the fields,

The trees who watched helplessly,
Baring silent witness to the rape of young girls,
Who thought the dream was a fool’s folly
As the weight of somebody’s child
Swung heavily from their branches,
Though try as they might,
They could not release them,

The very trees whose limbs hung heavy in frozen tears,
Suddenly stood tall and reaching their naked branches to the sky,
They danced with their shadows in the fields of snowy white.
Filled with the blood of the ages they sounded in words heard clearly
In the hearts of the crying spirits of mothers and children of Africa,

"Hallelujah!" They sang.
"Behold, a brand new day!"

- Catherine Vibert

Witnessing a World of People and Places (https://www.catvibe.blogspot.com)

[Larry Robinson]

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

- John Updike

[Larry Robinson]

Infirmity

In purest song one plays the constant fool
As changes shimmer in the inner eye.
I stare and stare into a deepening pool
And tell myself my image cannot die.
I love myself: that’s my one constancy.
Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!

Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity;
There’s little left I care to call my own.
Today they drained the fluid from a knee
And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone;
Thus I conform to my divinity
By dying inward, like an aging tree.

The instant ages on the living eye;
Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light
Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down—
The soul delights in that extremity.
Blessed the meek; they shall inherit wrath;
I’m son and father of my only death.

A mind too active is no mind at all;
The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone;
The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal,
The change from dark to light of the slow moon,
Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear,
I move beyond the reach of wind and fire.

Deep in the greens of summer sing the lives
I’ve come to love. A vireo whets its bill.
The great day balances upon the leaves;
My ears still hear the bird when all is still;
My soul is still my soul, and still the Son,
And knowing this, I am not yet undone.

Things without hands take hands: there is no choice,—
Eternity’s not easily come by.
When opposites come suddenly in place,
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see
How body from spirit slowly does unwind
Until we are pure spirit at the end.

- Theodore Roethke

[Larry Robinson]

February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

- Margaret Atwood

[Larry Robinson]

Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade pulled
not quite down. Otherwise,
clouds. Sea rippled here and
there. Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
wants more than it has --
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses -- as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren't enough,
as if joy weren't strewn all around.

- Holly Hughes

[Larry Robinson]

Old News

I walk past the Hardin-Bergia:
it hasn’t got the news.
Sending forth tender purple micro
blossoms crafted
to celebrate the coming spring,
it’s oblivious to
this global meltdown.

The nectarine tree readies
its small bursts of
snowy hope
on stems’ ends,
unclear
or unconcerned,
that the collapse is coming.

What to make of this ignorant
spring grass engorging the orchard?
Birds who flit from tree to tree
and sing alive
these futile mornings?
Who store their seeds,
depart on their migrations?

Something still is
working:
the only true ground, spreading the word:
our next deposit,
our next withdrawal, as near as
our next spent
breath.

- Scott O'Brien

[Larry Robinson]

For Presence

Awaken to the mystery of being here
and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.

Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon.

Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to
follow its path.

Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity.

May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.

May anxiety never linger about you.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of
soul.

Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek
no attention.

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]

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you've broken your vow
a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come.

- Jelalludin Rumi

[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.
*
-*Jelalludin Rumi*
*

[Larry Robinson]

The Creek

I want to live my life the way a creek
runs faithful to the land and the seasons.

I want to rest in deep pools
rich with algae and fish,
tranquil under the sun and moon.

I want to rush wide awake in rapids
tumbling over rocks and branches
In the hidden depths,
fearless in my gravitational pull to the sea.

I want to feel that utter surrender
when the creek runs dry
giving myself to cloud
waiting in stillness and silence
to flow again

I want to race wildly reborn
swelling the banks
with my endless devotion to returning

And in all these expressions of the One,
I want to – BE
in the most ordinary of ways.
Grateful to be water,
rock, cloud, sun, moon – reflecting
all this beauty back to itself.

- Kay Crista

[RexCasteel]

Thank you for sharing this one, today, Larry.

I was stunned by this poem last night (at the Rumi night). And now I'm stunned again to find that Kay was reciting her own poem.

Thank you, Kay, where ever you are.

And thank you, Larry (and all the rest), for another unforgettable night.

- Rex


The Creek

I want to live my life the way a creek
runs faithful to the land and the seasons...

- Kay Crista

[Larry Robinson]

Exercise

First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them around
after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backward
starting with even numbers
starting with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
starting with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Beloved

I used to love certain things ….
Like the way sun's light slants bright in the
Dark of redwood grove;
Like the sound of river water growling
Over submerged stone;
Like the dark blue of sky - so much darker
And so much bluer after
The season's first true snow ….
I used to love
The sharp smelly tang of wet ocean beach
As the tide turned low ….
I once loved the soundless sound of water
Dripping from lifted paddle on a stretch of
Quiet water ….
I once loved the sensation of a deep
Belly laugh, rising uncontrollably and
Ending in tears of joy ….
I used to love the velvet black of
Sky, suddenly and unexpectedly split
By the explosion of an ancient falling star;
I used to love the smell of puppy breath,
The bright round eyes of a curious kitten,
Or the contented sounds of a well-kept
Horse munching on breakfast hay ….
I once loved the way dawn would sometimes
Sweep in with vivid crimson and iridescent
Gold….
Or in the far North how dusk would linger
On and on and on and on until night seemed like
An afterthought ….
But now, I realize, what could I possibly
Have known about loving?
Because of you, I am so opened and
So full, that every note of every song
Only now has meaning.
- Michele Cruz

[Larry Robinson]

How to See Deer

Forget roadside crossings.
Go nowhere with guns.
Go elsewhere your own way,

lonely and wanting. Or
stay and be early:
next to deep woods

inhabit old orchards.
All clearings promise.
Sunrise is good,

and fog before sun.
Expect nothing always;
find your luck slowly.

Wait out the windfall.
Take your good time
to learn to read ferns;

make like a turtle:
downhill toward slow water.
Instructed by heron,

drink the pure silence.
Be compassed by wind.
If you quiver like aspen

trust your quick nature:
let your ear teach you
which way to listen.

You've come to assume
protective color; now
colors reform to

new shapes in your eye.
You've learned by now
to wait without waiting;

as if it were dusk
look into light falling;
in deep relief

things even out. Be
careless of nothing. See
what you see.

- Philip Booth

[Larry Robinson]

The deer lay down their bones

I followed the narrow cliff side trail half way up the mountain
Above the deep river-canyon. There was a little cataract crossed the path, flinging itself
Over tree roots and rocks, shaking the jeweled fern-fronds, bright bubbling water
Pure from the mountain, but a bad smell came up. Wondering at it I clambered down the steep stream
Some forty feet, and found in the midst of bush-oak and laurel,
Hung like a bird's nest on the precipice brink a small hidden clearing,
Grass and a shallow pool. But all about there were bones lying in the grass,clean bones and stinking bones,
Antlers and bones: I understood that the place was a refuge for wounded deer; there are so many
Hurt ones escape the hunters and limp away to lie hidden; here they have water for the awful thirst
And peace to die in; dense green laurel and grim cliff
Make sanctuary, and a sweet wind blows upward from the deep gorge.--I wish my bones were with theirs.
But that's a foolish thing to confess, and a little cowardly. We know that life
Is on the whole quite equally good and bad, mostly gray neutral, and can be endured
To the dim end, no matter what magic of grass, water and precipice, and pain of wounds,
Makes death look dear. We have been given life and have used it--not a great gift perhaps--but in honesty
Should use it all. Mine's empty since my love died--Empty? The flame-haired grandchild with great blue eyes
That look like hers?--What can I do for the child? I gaze at her and wonder what sort of man
In the fall of the world . . . I am growing old, that is the trouble. My children and little grandchildren
Will find their way, and why should I wait ten years yet, having lived sixty-seven, ten years more or less,
Before I crawl out on a ledge of rock and die snapping, like a wolf
Who has lost his mate?--I am bound by my own thirty-year-old decision: who drinks the wine
Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment
New discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down their
bones: I must wear mine.

- Robinson Jeffers

[RexCasteel]

I know that smell exactly. I came across it night after night, on a forest trail, a couple of months ago.

On occasion, a vulture would make a spectacular liftoff as it sensed me.

Finally, I went wading into the ferns and thickets and natural cacophony that keeps us mostly on the trails. I went looking for the bones.

I couldn't find them, but it was near a stream. And now I know that is not coincidence...


The deer lay down their bones

I followed the narrow cliff side trail half way up the mountain
Above the deep river-canyon...

The deer in that beautiful place lay down their
bones: I must wear mine.

- Robinson Jeffers

[Larry Robinson]

Notice

This evening, the sturdy Levi's
I wore every day for over a year
& which seemed to the end
in perfect condition,
suddenly tore.
How or why I don't know,
but there it was: a big rip at the crotch.
A month ago my friend Nick
walked off a racquetball court,
showered,
got into his street clothes,
& halfway home collapsed & died.
Take heed, you who read this,
& drop to your knees now & again
like the poet Christopher Smart,
& kiss the earth & be joyful,
& make much of your time,
& be kindly to everyone,
even to those who do not deserve it.
For although you may not believe
it will happen,
you too will one day be gone,
I, whose Levi's ripped at the crotch
for no reason,
assure you that such is the case.
Pass it on.

- Steve Kowit

[Larry Robinson]

Marsh Languages

The dark soft languages are being silenced:
Mothertongue Mothertongue Mothertongue
falling one by one back into the moon.

Language of marshes,
languages of the roots of rushes tangled
together in the ooze,
marrow cells twinning themselves
inside the warm core of the bone:
pathways of hidden light in the body fade and wink out.

The sibilants and gutturals,
the cave language, the half-light
forming at the back of the throat,
the mouth's damp velvet moulding
the lost syllable for "I" that did not mean separate,
all are becoming sounds no longer
heard because no longer spoken,
and everthing that could once be said in them has
ceased to exist.

The languages of the dying suns
are themselves dying,
but even the word for this has been forgotten.
The mouth against skin, vivid and fading,
can no longer speak both cherishing and farewell.
It is now only a mouth, only skin.
There is no more longing.

Translation was never possible.
Instead there was always only
conquest, the influx
of the language of hard nouns,
the language of metal,
the language of either/or,
the one language that has eaten all the others.

- Margaret Atwood

[Larry Robinson]

WHILE ATTENDING THE ANNUALCONVOCATION
OF CAUSE THEORIST AND BIGBANGISTS AT THE
LOCAL PROVINCIAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY, THE
MAD FARMER INTERCEDES FROM THE BACK ROW

“Chance” is a poor word among
the mazes and causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, “By chance, of course!” As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Almond Blossom

Even iron can put forth,
Even iron.

This is the iron age,
But let us take heart
Seeing iron break and bud,
Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.

The almond-tree,
December's bare iron hooks sticking out of earth.

The almond-tree,
That knows the deadliest poison, like a snake
In supreme bitterness.

Upon the iron, and upon the steel,
Odd flakes as if of snow, odd bits of snow,
Odd crumbs of melting snow.

But you mistake, it is not from the sky;
From out the iron, and from out the steel,
Flying not down from heaven, but storming up,
Strange storming up from the dense under-earth
Along the iron, to the living steel
In rose-hot tips, and flakes of rose-pale snow
Setting supreme annunciation to the world.

Nay, what a heart of delicate super-faith,
Iron-breaking,
The rusty swords of almond-trees.

Trees suffer, like races, clown the long ages.
They wander and are exiled, they live in exile through long ages
Like drawn blades never sheathed, hacked and gone black,
The alien trees in alien lands: and yet
The heart of blossom,
The unquenchable heart of blossom!

Look at the many-cicatrised frail vine, none more scarred and frail,
Yet see him fling himself abroad in fresh abandon
From the small wound-stump.

Even the wilful, obstinate, gummy fig-tree
Can be kept down, but he'll burst like a polyp into prolixity.

And the almond-tree, in exile, in the iron age!

This is the ancient southern earth whence the vases were baked, amphoras, craters, cantharus, oenochoe, and open-hearted cylix,
Bristling now with the iron of almond-trees

Iron, but unforgotten,
Iron, dawn-hearted,
Ever-beating dawn-heart, enveloped in iron against the exile, against the ages.

See it come forth in blossom
From the snow-remembering heart
In long-nighted January,
In the long dark nights of the evening star, and Sirius, and the Etna snow-wind through the long night.

Sweating his drops of blood through the long-nighted Gethsemane
Into blossom, into pride, into honey-triumph, into most exquisite splendour.
Oh, give me the tree of life in blossom
And the Cross sprouting its superb and fearless flowers!

Something must be reassuring to the almond, in the evening star, and the snow-wind, and the long, long, nights,
Some memory of far, sun-gentler lands,
So that the faith in his heart smiles again
And his blood ripples with that untenable delight of once-more-vindicated faith,
And the Gethsemane blood at the iron pores unfolds, unfolds,
Pearls itself into tenderness of bud
And in a great and sacred forthcoming steps forth, steps out in one stride
A naked tree of blossom, like a bridegroom bathing in dew, divested of cover,
Frail-naked, utterly uncovered
To the green night-baying of the dog-star, Etna's snow-edged wind
And January's loud-seeming sun.

Think of it, from the iron fastness
Suddenly to dare to come out naked, in perfection of blossom, beyond the sword-rust.
Think, to stand there in full-unfolded nudity, smiling,
With all the snow-wind, and the sun-glare, and the dog-star baying epithalamion.

Oh, honey-bodied beautiful one,
Come forth from iron,
Red your heart is.
Fragile-tender, fragile-tender life-body,
More fearless than iron all the time,
And so much prouder, so disdainful of reluctances.

In the distance like hoar-frost, like silvery ghosts communing on a green hill,
Hoar-frost-like and mysterious.

In the garden raying out
With a body like spray, dawn-tender, and looking about
With such insuperable, subtly-smiling assurance,
Sword-blade-born.

Unpromised,
No bounds being set.
Flaked out and come unpromised,
The tree being life-divine,
Fearing nothing, life-blissful at the core
Within iron and earth.

Knots of pink, fish-silvery
In heaven, in blue, blue heaven,
Soundless, bliss-full, wide-rayed, honey-bodied,
Red at the core,
Red at the core,
Knotted in heaven upon the fine light.

Open,
Open,
Five times wide open,
Six times wide open,
And given, and perfect;
And red at the core with the last sore-heartedness,
Sore-hearted-looking.

- D.H. Lawrence

[Larry Robinson]

One
*
The mosquito is so small
it takes almost nothing to ruin it.
Each leaf, the same.
And the black ant, hurrying.
So many lives, so many fortunes!
Every morning, I walk softly and with forward glances
down to the ponds and through the pinewoods.
Mushrooms, even, have but a brief hour
before the slug creeps to the feast,
before the pine needles hustle down
under the bundles of harsh, beneficent rain.
*
How many, how many, how many
make up a world!
And then I think of that old idea: the singular
and the eternal.
One cup, in which everything is swirled
back to the color of the sea and sky.
Imagine it!
*
A shining cup, surely!
In the moment in which there is no wind
over your shoulder,
you stare down into it,
and there you are,
your own darling face, your own eyes.
And then the wind, not thinking of you, just passes by,
touching the ant, the mosquito, the leaf,
and you know what else!
How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky,
how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you,
even your eyes, even your imagination.
*
- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Preludes

I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

- T.S.Eliot

[Larry Robinson]

Ask Much, The Voice Suggested

Ask much, the voice suggested, and I startled.
Feeling my body like the trembling body of a horse
tied to its tree while the strange noise
passes over its ears.
I who in extremity had always wanted less,
even of eating, of sleeping.
Agile, the voice did not speak again, but waited.
"Want more" --
a cure for longing I had not thought of.
But that is how it is with wells.
Whatever is taken refills to the steady level.
The voice agreed, though softly, to quiet the feet of the horse:
a cup taken out, a cup reappears; a bucketful taken, a bucket.

- Jane Hirshfield

[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.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(translated by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

As we head over this precipice together,
please remember your original face.
I know they say
to talk about it with words
is to move farther from it,

But how far away could you ever be
from that gentleness you were
before your birth, or from that warm dark Mother
Who fashioned you of mud and blood,
Who kissed and pinched your apple cheeks,
and sent you wide awake
into this world of ten thousand things?

Today your original face
is a soft cricket on the hardwood floor,
rain coming from the west,
the green fuse force of leaves and sun,
and yes, that fear of falling, falling.

In other words, nothing.
More or less than
all of it, exactly as it is,
alive and with you all the way
down.

- Barton Stone

[Larry Robinson]

Last Breath

… just walking
in the wet light of morning,
all your joys and heartaches
shattered by a wind-felled oak

-- your upturned umbrella
filling with rain

- Andrew Zarrillo

[Larry Robinson]

Ten Years Later

When the mind is clear
and the surface of the now still,
now swaying water
slaps against
the rolling kayak,
I find myself near darkness,
paddling again to Yellow Island.
Every spring wildflowers
cover the grey rocks.
Every year the sea breeze
ruffles the cold and lovely pearls
hidden in the center of the flowers
as if remembering them
by touch alone.
A calm and lonely, trembling beauty
that frightened me in youth.
Now their loneliness
feels familiar, one small thing
I've learned these years,
how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness
how to be found by the world.

- David Whyte

[Larry Robinson]

For the Unknown Self

So much of what delights and troubles you
Happens on a surface
You take for ground.
Your mind thinks your life alone,
Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,
Yet it seems that a little below your heart
There houses in you an unknown self
Who prefers the patterns of the dark
And is not persuaded by the eye's affection
Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience
With all your unfolding expression,
Is never drawn to break into light
Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness
And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom
That will often see you enchanted by twilight
Without ever recognizing the falling night,
It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:
All you do and say and think is fostered
Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease
That is not ruffled by disappointment;
It presides in a deeper current of time
Free from the force of cause and sequence
That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,
Its dark light might quench your mind,
For it knows how your primeval heart
Sisters every cell of your life
To all your known mind would avoid,

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,
Offering you only discrete glimpses
Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,
Magnetized by some resonance
That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night
As the poet who draws your dreams,
Creating for you many secret doors,
Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

It has the dignity of the angelic
That knows you to your roots,
Always awaiting your deeper befriending
To take you beyond the threshold of want,
Where all your diverse strainings
Can come to wholesome ease.

- John O'Donohue

[Larry Robinson]

A Dialogue Of Self And Soul

{My Soul} I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
"Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul

{My Self}. The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
>From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn

{My Soul.} Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And interllect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

{My self.} Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery --
Heart's purple -- and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.

{My Soul.} Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known --
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

{My Self.} A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? --
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

- William Butler Yeats

[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]

Prescription for the Disillusioned

Come new to this
day. Remove the rigid
overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud
your vision.

Leave behind the stories
of your life. Spit out the
sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs
waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.

Arrive curious, without the armor
of certainty, the plans and planned
results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you, new
every breath, every blink of
your astonished eyes.

- Rebecca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

How He Left

(for John O’Donohue, Who Departed Early)

He already knew all he needed to know.
He had plumbed the depths,
met the strange forms below,
captured their wisdom.

When dawn broke,
the birds caroled
their knowings
into his ear.
He listened,
and understood,
meaning behind the sounds.

The winds carried him
to unmarked places,
revelation swept
over him
until he was filled
like a holy vessel
with radiance
from the ancient source.

These gifts found meaning
in what he gave to others:
the world was his parish,
humanity his flock.
His words fed many.

When his time came,
he acquiesced gracefully
and departed like a bright lantern
carried upward on the currents
into the final light
above.

- Dorothy Walters

[Larry Robinson]

The War-Widows Are Heard, Nepal 2006

The country where your husband is accused by a debt-ridden neighbor,
seized in the sun-dried cornfield, is the country no one can escape,
the country we all live in, encased in smooth walls, clean laundry,
paper cut-out newsmen and bold-faced fashion fronts.

Your homespun shawl and burning eyes hold the still point
for a room of squirming children, a youth old before his time,
a woman who will never weep again. You travel far to tell
your story in a place where nobody knows who you are.

You stand watch behind the woven walls of a house
while men throw other men into a river like sacks of evidence,
while men who have nothing to lose push faces underwater
until they thin out, pale as words coming through two languages

transparent as tadpoles, though words swim better than men,
better than we do through two languages, better than your husband,
who wishes to be a fish, who wishes to slip away
but gets caught, buckles, floats to a place of blind eyes.

The men in khaki shorts haul their catch onto tractors,
water dripping off the bruised and splayed limbs.
The relevant authorities cannot offer words at all
in any language, but you speak, you go on speaking.

- Ann Hunkins

[Larry Robinson]

Garden of Love

I went to my garden of love
And saw what I never had seen,
A chapel was built in the midst
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of the chapel were shut,
And “Thou Shalt Not” writ over the door,
So I turned from my garden of love,
Which had so many sweet flowers bore,

And saw it was filled with weeds
And thorns where roses should be,
And priests in black gowns
Were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars
My joys and desires.

- William Blake

[Larry Robinson]

Jailbreak


It’s time to break out -
Jailbreak time.
Time to punch our way out of
the dark winter prison.
Lilacs are doing it
in sudden explosions of soft purple,
And the jasmine vines, and ranunculus, too.
There is no jailer powerful enough
to hold Spring contained.
Let that be a lesson.
Stop holding back the blossoming!
Quit shutting eyes and gritting teeth,
curling fingers into fists, hunching shoulders.
Lose your determination to remain unchanged.
All the forces of nature
want you to open,
Their gentle nudge carries behind it
the force of a flash flood.
Why make a cell your home
when the door is unlocked
and the garden is waiting for you?

- Maya Spector

[Larry Robinson]

Ode To Walking And Singing

Someday I'll set off
walking and singing a Holy Name
and never come back
because there's nothing like it,
small body under a great sky,
walking stick and hat
and the path-ribbon stretching out
as far as you want to go,
there's no good reason,
really, to stop

especially when you sing,
because the human voice
is a bird in a cage
and song allows it to soar,
and when at the top of its arc the bird
finds the sky is only another cage
a plaintive wail enters its voice,
the longing to go still farther,
knocking itself
against the door Beyond.

Amazing what the human voice can do,
this bellows of air transmuting longing
into a golden bird of song!

You have to walk and sing
to know what I'm saying.
Melody is a choice every second,
and if not a choice, a wild heart-stab;
timbre and rhythm, all improv, too,
every step's unique
signature in the air.

Sometimes for awhile the eye takes over,
soothed by green, gathering in spring's sprigs,
passing them deep to keep
against future drought;
or looking at water or distant hills,
or watching the slow meditation of the clouds
as they follow deliberately, gracefully
their invisible shepherd.

Cares begin to fly off,
first the ones that always come
at work or in traffic or even at home,
those small, silent freeloaders,
then, after awhile, the bigger cares,
more deeply buried,
cranes or geese leaving on migration,

and one is again the pilgrim
he was at twenty,
pack tied on a stick over the shoulder,
steadying staff in the other hand

and even the next step
a letter as yet unwritten
by the Moving Hand

- Max Reif

[Larry Robinson]

The Moon

The moon can be taken in teaspoons
or as a capsule every two hours.
It is a good hypnotic or narcotic
and can also relieve
hangovers of those drunk on philosophy.
A piece of the moon tucked in the pocket
is a better good luck charm than a rabbit’s foot;
It works as a love charm,
to get rich without connections
and to ward off doctors.
It can be given as a treat to children
when they can’t sleep.
A few moon drops in the eyes of the elderly
help them die well.

Put a fresh moon leaf
under your pillow
and you will see your heart’s desire.
Always carry a small jar of moon air
for when you are drowning,
And give a key to the moon
to prisoners and the disillusioned,
to those condemned to death
and those condemned to life.
There is no better tonic than the moon
given in precise, controlled doses.

- Jaime Sabines (1926-99), unauthorized translation by Rebeca del Rio

The Moon

La luna se puede tomar a cucharadas
o como una cápsula cada dos horas.
Es buena como hipnótico y sedante
y también alivia
a los que se han intoxicado de filosofía.
Un pedazo de luna en el bolsillo
es mejor amuleto que la pata de conejo:
sirve para encontrar a quien se ama,
para ser rico sin que lo sepa nadie
y para alejar a los médicos y las clínicas.
Se puede dar de postre a los niños
cuando no se han dormido,
y unas gotas de luna en los ojos de los ancianos
ayudan a bien morir.

Pon una hoja tierna de la luna
debajo de tu almohada
y mirarás lo que quieras ver.
Lleva siempre un frasquito del aire de la luna
para cuando te ahogues,
y dale la llave de la luna
a los presos y a los desencantados.
Para los condenados a muerte
y para los condenados a vida
no hay mejor estimulante que la luna
en dosis precisas y controladas.

- Jaime Sabines

[Larry Robinson]

I have walked along many roads,
and opened paths through brush,
I have sailed over a hundred seas
and tied up on a hundred shores.

Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve seen
excursions of sadness,
angry and melancholy
drunkards with black shadows,

and academics in offstage clothes
who watch, say nothing, and think
they know, because they do not drink wine
in the ordinary bars.

Evil men who walk around
polluting the earth. . .

And everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen
men who dance and play,
when they can, and work
the few inches of ground they have.

If they turn up somewhere,
they never ask where they are.
When they take trips, they ride
on the backs of old mules.

They don’t know how to hurry,
not even on holidays.
They drink wine, if there is some,
if not, cool water.

These men are the good ones,
who love, work, walk and dream.
And on a day no different from the rest
they lie down beneath the earth.

- Antonio Machado
(translated by Robert Bly)

[Larry Robinson]

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

- Jane Hirschfield

[Larry Robinson]

Altered

A hand moves across the room, deliberately, in slow motion, making a half moon as if to spread its essence onto the pilgrims gathered there, as if to feed these mortal souls with one divine gesture. Alerted by this single motion, these seekers spread their thoughts and prayers across the skies, rain clouds that seep into gaps where longing waits to be filled yet is never sated. It is the prayers that feed. Some digest, some do not. The whole world, an altar, moved by a single soul willing to extend itself, stretching like the scirocco to cover more ground, stretching, to touch more pilgrims of the heart, souls ready to absorb every vibration. Bodies born and growing, grown then gone, so ethereal, so desirous of, so resistant to states of divinity — a feather floating, a moving cloud, a subtle breeze.

- Clara Rosemarda

[Larry Robinson]

Sunrise

You can
die for it--
an idea,
or the world. People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Married Love

You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one coffin.

- KUAN TAO-SHÊNG (1262-1319)

[Larry Robinson]

Four Poems for Robin

Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest

I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen.
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.


A spring night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.


An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.


December at Yase
You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
“Again someday, maybe ten years.”

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I’ve always known
where you were—
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn’t.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.

And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

- Gary Snyder

[Larry Robinson]

Sunday Breakfast at Willow Wood

“I suppose you’ll have the usual, right?”
“Right. The French Folded Eggs and a triple shot latté”

But when it came, all I saw was the golden mustard that had popped out overnight in the meadow, in the apple orchard, in the vineyard between the rows of dormant vines—mustard, everywhere, the color of French Folded Eggs which lie on my plate in their mustard perfection surrounded by the bare branches of hundred-year-old apple trees. And the way the sun pushed away the clouds and let the rain remain on the branches hit the yellow mustard in a brazen reflection of itself, and it was as if the sun had settled into the earth and come up beaming.

I looked down into my plate of French mustard eggs folded into a perfect breakfast. The latté was dark and hot.

- Fran Claggett

[Larry Robinson]

History of Desire

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

- Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

The Comfort of Questions
for Larry

We built a house
together, one without a roof.
All night it opened
to dark, abundant emptiness—
the questions without answers.

Gradually those questions
became stars. Red dwarfs and blue giants
consoled me, allowed the darkness
inside to be, to sprout like a safe seed,
slowly with grace.

In that house, all those days,
those years of your patient presence,
I learned to live
under freedom’s open sky,
with the walls of kindness
surrounding me.

In the beginning, what I knew could
fill volumes and teach me
nothing. Now I look to the shadows,
the starry questions and inhale,
every exhalation a Thank You.

- Rebeca del Rio

[Larry Robinson]

On Winter's Margin

On winter’s margin, see the small birds now
With half-forged memories come flocking home
To gardens famous for their charity.
The green globe’s broken; vines like tangled veins
Hang at the entrance to the silent wood.
With half a loaf, I am the prince of crumbs;
By snow’s down, the birds amassed will sing
Like children for their sire to walk abroad!
But what I love, is the gray stubborn hawk
Who floats alone beyond the frozen vines;
And what I dream of are the patient deer
Who stand on legs like reeds and drink that wind; -
They are what saves the world: who choose to grow
Thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

- Billy Collins

[Larry Robinson]

The Enkindled Spring

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up, and the flickering, watery rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, these sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

- D. H. Lawrence

[Larry Robinson]

Jerusalem

"Let's be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let's fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine."
-Tommy Olofsson, Sweden

I'm not interested in
Who suffered the most.
I'm interested in
People getting over it.

Once when my father was a boy
A stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother's doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.

Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
"I am native now."
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child's poem says,
"I don't like wars,
they end up with monuments."
He's painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it's ridiculous.

There's a place in my brain
Where hate won't grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.

It's late but everything comes next.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

[Larry Robinson]

Just Now

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever
believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

- W.S. Merwin

[Larry Robinson]

Poverty

Poverty seizes me in the middle of things
and my life will never be the same:
I will face outwards to the trees
and animals
and not look back.

Silent, furred creatures,
and the tall eucalypts
gather slowly about me;

they have given me this new life,
walking alone in the moonlight,
not knowing who I am.

- John Tarrant

[Larry Robinson]

Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, 'We are All Writing God's Poem'

Today, the sky's the soft blue of a work shirt washed
a thousand times. The journey of a thousand miles
begins with a single step. On the interstate listening
to NPR, I heard a Hubble scientist
say, "The universe is not only stranger than we
think, it's stranger than we can think." I think
I've driven into spring, as the woods revive
with a loud shout, redbud trees, their gaudy
scarves flung over bark's bare limbs. Barely doing
sixty, I pass a tractor trailer called Glory Bound,
and aren't we just? Just yesterday,
I read Li Po: "There is no end of things
in the heart," but it seems like things
are always ending—vacation or childhood,
relationships, stores going out of business,
like the one that sold jeans that really fit—
And where do we fit in? How can we get up
in the morning, knowing what we do? But we do,
put one foot after the other, open the window,
make coffee, watch the steam curl up
and disappear. At night, the scent of phlox curls
in the open window, while the sky turns red violet,
lavender, thistle, a box of spilled crayons.
The moon spills its milk on the black tabletop
for the thousandth time.

- Barbara Crooker

[Larry Robinson]

Ode To Enchanted Light

Under the trees light
has dropped from the top of the sky,
light
like a green
latticework of branches,
shining
on every leaf,
drifting down like clean
white sand.

A cicada sends
its sawing song
high into the empty air.

The world is
a glass overflowing
with water.

- Pablo Neruda

[Larry Robinson]

The Birthing
*
Call out the names in the procession of the loved.
Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness
to the day he stopped the car,
we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.
In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,
what*he called front leg presentation,
the calf comes out nose first, one front leg dangling from his mother.
A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves
of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.
I watched him thrust his arms entire
into the yet to be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering
in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.
With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and*grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one’s shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.
Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,
until a bull calf, in*a whoosh of blood and water,
came falling whole and still onto the meadow.
We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.
The mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,
until he moved a little, struggled.
I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,
and his a tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry
while he set out to find the farmer.
When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,
the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,
leaving our coats just where they lay
we huddled in the car.
And then made love toward eternity,
Without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.
*
*****- Deborah Digges

[Larry Robinson]

The Esquimos Have No Word for “War”

Trying to explain it to them
Leaves one feeling ridiculous and obscene.
Their houses, like white bowls,
Sit on a prairie of ancient snowfalls
Caught beyond thaw or the swift changes
Of night and day.
They listen politely, and stride away.

With spears and sleds and barking dogs
To hunt for food. The women wait
Chewing on skins or singing songs,
Knowing that they have hours to spend,
That the luck of the hunter is often late.

Later, by fires and boiling bones
In streaming kettles, they welcome me,
Far kin, pale brother,
To share what they have in a hungry time
In a difficult land. While I talk on
Of the southern kingdoms, cannon, armies,
Shifting alliances, airplanes, power,
They chew their bones, and smile at one another.

- Mary Oliver

[Larry Robinson]

That Twitching

When I sleep
That twitching you see is really a leisurely stroll

Dogs dream seven times faster than you do

Do strangers come up to you
And scratch your head?

Dogs love seven times stronger than you do

If your beloved died would you sit patiently by the train platform
For years?

Dogs wait seven times longer than you do

It is not to late
To find your dog heart

- Warren Peace
(Translated by Brian Narelle)

[Larry Robinson]

Narcissus

Encircled by her arms as by a shell,
she hears her being murmur,
while forever he endures
the outrage of his too pure image...

Wistfully following their example,
nature re-enters herself;
contemplating its own sap, the flower
becomes too soft, and the boulder hardens...

It's the return of all desire that enters
toward all life embracing itself from afar...
Where does it fall? Under the dwindling
surface, does it hope to renew a center?

- Rainer Maria Rilke

[Larry Robinson]

A Message from Space

Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."

- William Stafford

[Larry Robinson]

Lines Written In Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:--
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

- William Wordsworth

[Larry Robinson]

The Pond

Snapping turtles in the pond eat bass, sunfish,
and frogs. They do us no harm when we swim.
But early this spring two Canada geese
lingered, then built a nest. What I’d
heard of, our neighbor feared: goslings,
as they paddle about, grabbed from below
by a snapper, pulled down to drown.

So he stuck
hunks of fat on huge, wire-leadered hooks
attached to plastic milk-bottle buoys.
The first week he caught three turtles
and still there are more: sometimes he finds
the bottles dragged ashore, the wire
wrapped several times around a pine trunk
and the steel hook wrenched straight as a pin.

- Gregory Orr

[Larry Robinson]

From an Atlas of the Difficult World

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

- Adrienne Rich

[Larry Robinson]

The People Of The Other Village

hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.

- Thomas Lux

[Larry Robinson]

A Dance

The stepping-stones, once
in a row along the slope,
have drifted out of line,
pushed by frosts and rains.
Walking is no longer thoughtless
over them, but alert as dancing,
as tense and poised, to step
short, and long, and then
longer, right, and then left.
At the winter's end, I dance
the history of its weather.

- Wendell Berry

[Larry Robinson]

Out of darkness and dread
Shall come dawn and the birds...
Love shall fold warm like a cloak
Round the shuddering earth
Till the sound of its woe cease...
Reach me your hand,
This is the meaning of all that we
Suffered in sleep - the white peace
Of the waking.

- Edna St.Vincent Millay

[Larry Robinson]

The Seven Of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking at what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

- Marge Piercy

[Larry Robinson]

Confluence

Kids play in the creek beneath the redwood canopy,
dark scent of earth, rising, covering everything,
bells of voices, water rushing, sound of frogs and crickets.

I pass – this other life – footsteps on wet pavement.
If this were a painting, I’d step right in –
become the white blossoms in the dappled shadows.

Their thin bodies—ghosts stitching the creeks crevices
playing house, cleaning the creek with found sticks
weaving their voices into the sound of frogs and crickets.

Their minds—open windows, white drapes flapping like tongues.
I’d be – change of camera angle – the weak sun looking down
pushing through the thick mesh of redwood canopy,

yellow fingers probing the streets shadows
like an apostle who doesn’t believe the wounds
that throb from the earth like the sound of frogs and crickets.

Or I’d be the trees themselves – ringed history reaching skyward
everything happening again and again at my feet—roots spread
a net gathering this galaxy—small stars of girls, the past,
the voices, the water, the frogs and crickets—into a chorus of compassion.

- Iris Dunkle