Poem for the day from Larry Robinson

Sacred Site



For Kathryn H.



I’m facing a wall

across the subway track:

old paint and rust

blotched

into billows

of white

smeared with rose, ochre,

even azure –

chemical

efflorescences

of decay.



Yet by another alchemy,

I find a baroque cloud,

a face, a torso.

Not seeking but only seeing

a transformation takes place.



We were talking of journeys, of pilgrimages

to sacred sites.

And you said

Any site can be sacred.



And I thought: so that’s how it works.

If any sight can be transformed

by an act of attention,

perhaps so too – with a deeper seeing –

any site.



So that one might glimpse

for an instant

(how could one hope for more?)

the world

that shimmers

on the other side

of sight.

- Nina Mermey Klippel

Gone Gone Gone

"The wan moon is sinking under the white wave and time is sinking with me. O!"
- Robert Burns

yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away
gone gone gone
won't be back today
gone gone gone
just like yesterday
gone gone gone
isn't any more
gone to the other shore
gone gone gone
it wasn't here to stay
yes it's gone gone gone
all gone out to play
yes it's gone gone gone
until another day
no one here to pray
gone gone gone
yak your life away
no promise to betray
gone gone gone
somebody else will pay
the national debt no way
gone gone gone
your furniture layaway
plans gone astray
gone gone gone
made hay
gone gone gone
Sunk in Baiae's Bay
yes it's gone gone gone
wallet and all you say
gone gone gone
as you can waive your pay
yes it's gone gone gone
gone last Saturday
yes it's gone gone gone
tomorrow's another day
gone gone gone
bald & old & gay
gone gone gone
turned old and gray
yes it's gone gone gone
whitebeard & cold
yes it's gone gone gone
cashmere scarf & gold
yes it's gone gone gone
warp & woof & wold
yes it's gone gone gone
gone far far away
to the home of the brave
down into the grave
yes it's gone gone gone
moon beneath the wave
yes it's gone gone gone
so I end this song
yes this song is gone
gone to kick the gong
yes it's gone gone gone
No more right & wrong
yes it's gone gone gone
gone gone away.

- Allen Ginsberg

Cyberspace Theology

Aphrodite lurks somewhere in the sites of the internet. If
we seek the root directory, all the goddesses can be found,

dancing around the labyrinthine algorithm that generates
perfect bodies and transparent minds. The gods are there,

too, riding search engines on heroic quests. We want our
will translated into binary values. All the ones, we will add

up, but delete the zeroes. Some build fortunes through post-
modern pixel castles in the air, money made truly from

nothing. We no longer believe in heaven above earthly space
or in infinite mercy, so we seek salvation in more megabytes,

from e-mails from the furthest reaches, and maybe beyond,
counting files instead of sins, and cleanse not our souls, but

our hard drives. Cyberspace exists nowhere within real time
or space--the same location where the old heaven was supposed

to be. Its revelation is no burning bush or walking on water,
since these feats are only beginner's level on our kids' video

games. We no longer want a higher reality. We'd rather gossip
in Plato's cave of moving shadows and winking virtuality.

- Glen A. Mazis

Half Life

our hands stretch out across the sea
between us
only reaching half-way into the fear and
the darkness
who could know when and how
the contours of the earth might shift
taking us down a few feet
throwing us down where
we are now in the muck of our souls
the one soul
taking us down
to examine half-heartedly the words the
last words
so many empty decaying words
that only survive half their meaning
now
we wish we could know or do
what is truly required
to see through the many arms of fate
waving invisibly as they
obscure half the sky on any given day
what shall we do
we are in this together
not just half of us
the half that drills down to the
tender heart at the center
of it all but also the other terrified
half that lives in every heart
dragged before the mirror of
this world
vigilantly protecting itself from
the claws of a jaguar night
the half-darkness of what cannot be shared
there is no other way but to wrap
ourselves around these holy messengers
not half way but fully touching
the countless fingers reaching this way
they are still soft they are
still warm
they are still our
children mothers blood kin of all time
sighing
I spoke to you unkindly
the other day I want to make it
right if you
will give me half a chance

- Gary Horvitz

O sweet spontaneous earth

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the doting

fingers of
prurient philosophies pinched
and poked

thee
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy
knees squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring
- e. e. cummings

A Cold Spring

for Jane Dewey, Maryland

Nothing is so beautiful as spring. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practiced leaping over your fences.
The infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer,
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the south.
In his cap the lilacs whitened,
then one day they fell like snow.
Now, in the evening,
a new moon comes.
The hills grow softer. Tufts of long grass show
where each cow-flop lies.
The bull-frogs are sounding,
slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs.
Beneath the light, against your white front door,
the smallest moths, like Chinese fans,
flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt
over pale yellow, orange, or gray.
Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies
begin to rise:
up, then down, then up again:
lit on the ascending flight,
drifting simultaneously to the same height,
–exactly like the bubbles in champagne.
–Later on they rise much higher.
And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer
these particular glowing tributes
every evening now throughout the summer.

- Elizabeth Bishop

A Chat About Otis Before We Chat About You

Because Otis the dog lies

Collapsed at my feet

On the gold of the old oak floor,

And I wanted to ask you

How you would describe the complicated and simple



Act of a dog laying itself down.



First he is standing, then he

Makes the decision to recline, then he –– But

Let me shut up, for it’s your view



Of the matter I desire to know.

For when I consider Egypt,

The ponderous pondering Bassett,

Or Sandy the good or Miss Prism

The Pug or the huge farm Shepherd

Of course called Lady,



I see that all these dogs knew, right away,

Without schooling, how to

Lie down.



I want your view of

Of how something so natural and easy

Came to be installed in dogs everywhere

Like a universal language.



Let me hear your sorrows in a minute

Or two, sure, but just now let’s turn to Otis



Lying on his side here the whole length

Of this poem -- sandy flanks,

White collar and tummy, and sixty-five pounds

Of get-the-cat -- and turn over

Together how this great knowledge

Operates

And came to be.


- Bruce Moody

Tsunami Tango

I Tango with my Japanese partner.
I wondered what he is feeling.

He says it is all OK.
That the media is making this big.
We both dance on.

Then I ask, what about his family?
What about our connection to this?
Who is speaking that voice?
We Tango again around the floor.

I that earthquake,
I that tsunami,
I that melt down.

We Tango that.

- Mary Morgan

Seven Days in March

On one side of the Pacific, it’s as if the Japanese were overrun by a variation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: earthquake, tsunami, volcano, near nuclear explosions. Then came the snowstorms that frustrate the efforts of finding vanished loved ones. It’s heartbreaking. But rising like the sun above clouds of chaos, the Japanese give the rest of the world an image of how to suffer with grace when blessings are hard to imagine.

On the other side, voices of divine nature, though more muted, express their power in short and long waves of water and weather: sunken harbors, landslides, flooding -- dreams sink with their boats. And yet, amidst the mayhem, the snowpack is replenished for another season.


massive earthquake

days now just a split-second
:
longer



power outage

nubs of ten candles

alight again



wind hail rain

the Laguna reclaims its

… name



radiation leaks

news of her family

leaves us teary-eyed



creek joins

river

green water

brown water



after the drenching

legs of grape vines

underwater



above

where the village used to be

budding lilacs



- andrew zarrillo
march 2011

Shirt

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

- Robert Pinsky

Persephone’s Lament

Persephone rises from the earth a pale shadow.
Like mist from the water she rises,
Riding the air currents,
Invisible yet palpable, bird-like, with silent flapping wingspan
She turns and wheels,
Uneven, troubled,
Moving at random, integrating this burdensome freedom.

Wherever she drifts the earth quickens below.
A frenzy of surging new growth,
Tremendous bursts of color and beauty explode forth
With the charge of released life-force;
Life-force that hums in the ear and enlivens the heartbeat.
And yet Persephone sees none of it.
She is possessed by the months spent in the fiery molten core of existence.

Her being pumped full of the plans of Pluto her husband,

She consumed it all and swelled with his power.

But the mother fought back through her daughter’s essential goodness

And their conflicting thoughts ripped at her mind

Till she tore into warring fragments,

Each fighting each

And both being her.

Death, fertility,

Power, vengeance,

Passion uncontrollable and

Rage,

Pure rage,

Unleashed rage,

These she now knows and is.



Released, she floats in the heavy winds and gentler breezes,

Whispering unthinkable paradoxes into the ears

Of people who do not see her

And disbelieve their hearing.

Jogging their fingers in their ears

They shake their heads and go on.

And so Persephone’s shattered being

Calls forth rejuvenation while pleading death.



“Oh, beware,” she moans over the fertile valleys, the dusty valleys,

through mutilated aching forests

and petrified endarkened cities.

“Pluto knows the Mother!

He bends the elements,

Shaping them to heavy forms.

He rapes the Mother as he raped me

And his being, engorged with power,

Knows no limitation.

Can you not see his flexed muscles

Gleaming upon your foreheads?

The Mother will not long suffer his violation

And you will bear the loss!”



“Do you not see?” she hisses through fields and sooty streets,

crumbling junkyards and antiseptic shopping centers.

“You feed him with your indifference;

He steps upon your bowed heads.

If his deadly fireballs do not destroy you, your neglect of the Mother will!

And how you will shriek

As the life pours from your broken bodies.

Feigning surprise, you will drink from the cup of fear that he offers

As the Mother’s fury screams out to the heavens.

Her shifting body, her storming elements

Will toss your helpless forms about

Like miniature sailboats caught in a tempest.”



The angel of the earth spews her torments into the winds.

She does so every Spring.

Perhaps once she was recognized and greeted as she passed

But those days are gone.

Very few puzzle over the irony of her release from earth and fire.

The masses are content to live out her effect.

All too eager to accept the affirmations of her flight

They neglect the despair of her voice;

A despair that deepens each year

And awaits the retribution.



- Maya Spector

This Didn’t Happen Over There


This didn’t happen over there.

Each of us is lost
in the tsunami
of swirling gray water.

Each of us feels
how close the
the damaged reactors
are to our bodies.

Each of us knows
how it would be
for our entire village
to be swept away.

There ia a moss-covered stone
in the hills above Miyako
that marks where the tsunami
of 1896 crested.

Each of us has heard
the nuclear scientists
promise that we’re safe,

and we built walls
beyond our shoreline
to diffuse
another tsunami,
should it come.

“Should it come.”

Each of us knows
how this tiny blue planet
continues to re-assemble itself,
how mountains grow,
and how gravity
pulls everything.

Each of us holds
our loved-ones close.
Each of us knows
how fragile
it all is.

- Trout Black

The Spring

(After Rilke)

Spring has returned! Everything has returned!
The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes
Poems, so many poems. ... Look, she has learned
So many famous poems, she has earned so many prizes!

Teacher was strict. We delighted in the white
Of the old man's beard, bright like the snow's:
Now we may ask which names are wrong, or right
For "blue," for "apple," for "ripe." She knows, she knows!

Lucky earth, let out of school, now you must play
Hide-and-seek with all the children every day:
You must hide that we may seek you: we will! We will!

The happiest child will hold you. She knows all the things
You taught her: the word for "hope," and for "believe,"
Are still upon her tongue. She sings and sings and sings.


- Delmore Schwartz

Creation Story


I am not afraid of love
or its consequence of light.
It is not easy to say this
or anything
when my entrails dangle
between paradigms and fear.

I am ashamed.

I never had the words
to carry a friend from her death
to the stars correctly,
or the words to keep my people safe
from drought or gunshot.

The stars who were created by words
are circling over this house
formed of calcium and of blood,
this house in danger of being torn apart
by stones of fear.

If these words can do anything,
if these songs can do anything,
I say, bless this house with stars,
transfix us with love.

- Joy Harjo

Tell the Bees

Tell the bees. They require news of the house;
they must know, lest they sicken
from the gap between their ignorance and our grief.
Speak in a whisper. Tie a black swatch
to a stick and attach the stick to their hive.
From the fortress of casseroles and desserts
built in the kitchen these past few weeks
as though hunger were the enemy, remove
a slice of cake and lay it where they can
slowly draw it in, making a mournful sound.

And tell the fly that has knocked on the window all day.
Tell the redbird that rammed the glass from outside
and stands too dazed to go. Tell the grass,
though it's already guessed, and the ground clenched in furrows;
tell the water you spill on the ground,
then all the water will know.
And the last shrunken pearl of snow in its hiding place.

Tell the blighted elms, and the young oaks we plant instead.
The water bug, while it scribbles
a hundred lines that dissolve behind it.
The lichen, while it etches deeper
its single rune. The boulders, letting their fissures widen,
the pebbles, which have no more to lose,
the hills—they will be slightly smaller, as always,

when the bees fly out tomorrow to look for sweetness
and find their way
because nothing else has changed.

- Sarah Lindsay

Repair Of The World

A Kabalistic* Creation Story



In the beginning

Before there were any beginnings or endings

There was no place that was not already God.

We call this unimaginable openness

Ein Sof,

Being without end, world without end,

Ein Sof.



Then came the urge to give life

To our world and us.

But there was no place that was not already God.

So Ein Sof breathed in to make room

Like a father steps back

So his child will walk to him.

And we call this withdrawing

Tzim Tzum.



Into the emptiness Ein Sof set vessels

And began to fill them with Divine Light

Like a mother places bowls

In which to pour her delicious soup.

We call these bowls,

Kaleem.



As the light poured forth

A perfect world was being created.

Think of it, a world without greed

And cruelty and violence.

But then something happened.

The Kaleem shattered.

No one knows why.

Perhaps the bowls were too frail,

Perhaps the light too intense

Perhaps Ein Sof was learning.

After all, no one makes perfect the first time.



With the shattering of the bowls

The Divine Sparks flew everywhere.

Some rushing back to Ein Sof,

Some falling, falling,

Trapped in the broken shards,

To become our world and us.

Though this is hard to believe,
The perfect world is all around us,

But broken into jagged pieces

Like a puzzle thrown to the floor,

The picture lost,

Each piece without meaning until

Someone puts them back together again.



We are that someone.

There is no one else.

We are the ones, who can find the broken pieces,

Remember how they fit together

And rejoin them.

And we call this repair of the world

Tikkun Olam.



In every moment with every act

We can heal our world and us.

We are all holy sparks, dulled by separation.

But when we meet and talk

And eat and make love,

When we work and play and disagree

With holiness in out eyes,

Seeing Ein Sof everywhere,

Then our brokenness will end.



Then our bowls will be strong enough

To hold the light.

And our light gentle enough

To fill the bowls.

As we repair the world together

We will learn that there is no place,

No person, no land, sea or air being,

No plant, tree, or rock

That is not

God.



- Naomi Newman



*Inspired by Rabbi Isaac Luria’s (1534-1572) theory of creation. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Safed, Palestine became the center of a new form of Jewish mysticism. Lurianic Kabala focused on the questions of suffering and evil and how the world can be saved and redeemed. © Naomi Newman, April 1994

After chopping off all the arms

that reached out to me; after

boarding up all the windows

and doors; after filling all the

pits with poisoned water; after

building my house on a rock of

a no, inaccessible to flattery and

fear; after cutting out my tongue

and eating it; after hurling handfuls

of silence and monosyllables of

scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name

and the name of my birth place

and the name of my race; after

judging and sentencing myself to

perpetual waiting and perpetual

loneliness, I heard against the

stones of my dungeon of syllogisms

the humid, tender, insistent

onset of spring.

　- Octavio Paz
(Elliot Weinberger translation)

Diminution

I have read volumes,
Written volumes,
Taught from volumes.
Now my words are fewer,
More long breaths between them.
I look up after committing
A single phrase to paper,
Linger a while,
Note the long shadows
On blackjack oak
In the late afternoon sun.
At times, I give up
Words altogether, listen
To the wind, watch
The winter wheat grow, savor
The taste of silence,
And give myself over
To the speech of the stars.

- Howard Stein

Meeting At An Airport

You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”

And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure . . .
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed . . .
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.

. . . A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question . . .

And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”

And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”

And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

- Taha Muhammah Ali

For The Future

Planting trees early in spring,
we make a place for birds to sing
in time to come. How do we know?
They are singing here now.
There is no other guarantee
that singing will ever be.

- Wendell Berry

Sea Stacks

Thrust skyward, closely crowding the coast
Random relentless risings of Earth's crust
Storied sea stacks more ancient than
Any ancestors acknowledged by us

Rubbed glass-smooth from mastodons
Scratching their woolly hides akin to whales
Attempting to slip-off salty barnacles barely budging
When they too thrust skyward, then back into the sea.

- Tim Smith

Sebastopol

Its hard won fitness climbing
the ashen road that carries you up
the “Three Sisters” by bike.
Three ever steeper climbs, hot,
exposed, until the peak.
At the top, the air is cool dappled-shade.
Lying down beneath thick-knuckled trees.

Today, at the peak all is bare.
The trees split like boxed bodies in a magic trick.

Many fields have been cleared.
Apples for grapes. *The new farmers say: Apples
are yesterday—as they till the earth for a new crop.
The old, who for generations have trimmed
the delicate limbs of the Gravenstein
are now red-faced and gnarled as their heirloom trees.

At the top, the ridge is a permeable line
between green hills that roll to the sea,
and the patchwork of farmed valley that leads to town.
What is good/bad is brackish as history:
A two-day stand-off between two men,
one inside the general store, the other
pacing the street. *Nothing could come between.
Crowds gathered murmuring—it’s like the battle of Sebastopol—
and the name stuck. **But, after the naming, what happened?
Someone must have stepped outside,
or someone must have stepped inside—
that much isn’t remembered.

I crest at the top—this time without stopping
look out at the ridge dividing sea from town,
push the pedal down, into the descent
into the rush and risk of air.

***- Iris Dunkle

Words Can Describe

Did you ever think the astronauts should have done
a better job describing the Moon for the rest of us?

We spent billions of dollars to send them there,
to walk around on that glassy sand in those

synthetic mukluk boots, driving their goofy, lunar
dune buggies, slapping a golf ball 5386 yards

to an endless sand trap. We heard that static through
corridors of space until they had the chance to describe

exactly, ROGER, what they saw, AFFIRMATIVE,
and instead we heard: "Words can’t describe,"

CHECK, "the stark beauty," A-OKAY,
"of the landscape . . . I mean the moonscape."

They were young. Inarticulate. Absolutely
without words to describe what they saw. But then,

when they watched the Earth Rise from the Moon’s
fluorescent horizon, I remember, their words were pure

excitement and Oh, my God and It’s so beautiful.
We knew what they meant from our Earth-bound

imaginations. We knew that the rising Earth was
the jewel of our breathing, the swirling of our weather,

a wondrous cat’s eye marble rolling across black velvet,
reminding us of our daughters’ faces, the freckled

continents, those oceans of blue eyes, the determined set
of our son’s jaw in the angle of a peninsula. And that stillness

around the globe like a lake viewed through the pine woods.
They were speechless because they were reminded of everything

they missed. From their tin-foil shed, on the Sea of Tranquility,
first witnessing, ROGER, the beloved’s face out there.

- Timothy J. Nolan

Her Voice Grabbed Me So Hard I Almost Remembered Who I Was
for Sarah Ballard Smith (Last Native Speaker of Bodega Miwok)

Her voice is reel-to-reel crackling, earthbound, but all air.
Her voice reflects back like the cool, pearled shells of abalone.
Her voice stitched stories out of lightning and rain clouds.
Her voice collected the rains for fear of the drought.
Her voice was combed free of the trouble it must have contained.
Her voice could gather salt from the sea, leech acorns and smooth clamshells
into tiny, white beads.
Her voice was annotated with this currency.
Her voice skimmed the cool, shallow depths of Bodega Bay.
Her voice was quick as a baby tiger shark dodging predators, darting from
the sway of kelp leaf to kelp leaf.
Her voice contains the tiny blue stars of forget-me-nots and the nervous
beauty of quails.
Her voice still lingers in the grey combed clouds that stretch across the
too, blue above the restless sea.

- Iris Dunkle

Dodo

Each twig a field of oxygen

Each pebble a frog’s hike

- Cozi

Instructed to draw a bird, any bird,

On a large sheet of cream-colored paper,

And out the windows, right when I needed them,

No birds to copy in their flight.

Out of the crayons came a wavering outline, colored in:

A short, portly gentleman

Led by a great yellow beak,

And empty circles for eyes, no wings, no feet,

And to take advantage of my ignorance

In large letters I printed DODO.

Extinct bird:

What might have been before it wasn’t anymore.


Over my shoulder this condensed block

Of an elderly presence loomed.

Miss Brown. In our grammar schools back then,

No teacher could be a Mrs.,

Lest pregnancy, with its yeasty mountain-moving,

Perturb our tiny brains.

Some teachers had brains

That could be measured in milligrams, like the dodo’s,

In inverse proportion to their spinsterly meanness

And it’s a good thing most are extinct by now,

Having borne no offspring into our little world.


DODO . Miss Brown took offense,

Wrote a note, folded it, sent me down

The ghost-inhabited hallway to the principal. In the hallway air,

The distinct but merging essences

Of generations of chalk dust and spattered urine,

Spirits of ancient white bread and bologna sandwiches.

This the same hallway my father trod. There he was

With his thoughts, what he knew and what he didn’t yet know

Clicking into their proper places,

So I wonder if they beat the imagination out of him

And that’s why there are so many salesmen in my family.


The cramped, scarred desks, children sounding out

The words in staggered unison,

The dull, planned minutes of Seth Thomas clocks,

And between each click

Eternity showed its face –

Sometimes it yawned, sometimes it grinned –

And me striding

Past classroom after classroom, angry, ashamed, prideful,

Carrying the injustice on my shoulders, on my big way

To the principal’s big office.

The ruler slapped

The back of my hand, once, twice.

Up went her hand for the third.

I took off, and instead of choosing home

I chose a hike to my Saturday place,

Down the hill through the woods

Into the doorless world of trees.

No Miss Brown to castigate me, no dodos to instruct me

In the ancient ways of impulse,

But plenty of birds and much bird song.


Between each rallying signaling of my presence,

I filled in – twitters and trills and tweets –

Until I was a bird among the birds.

Oh, I could fly

But had drawn no wings

So had no need to fly.


- Steve Orlen

Milk and Honey


O dear God: the land You have promised us
already has people living in it. Why
didn't we hear that before the exodus?
So this is the choice, to live as slaves or die
as slaves to war? Now think: some other place
You haven't got? We sent out men to spy
for us, a sorry lot who claim a race
of giants lives up there—no doubt a lie,
more likely long-lost relatives. Hebron's
a town as old as Esau, walled with stones
they'll gladly throw at us, blood brothers or not.
Couldn't we come in peace, share what we've got
including You, settle down and call
it off? But No, You answer: You must dispossess them all.

Shelach-lecha, Numbers 12:1-15:41

- Dan Bellm

The Wolf God

Like a painting we will be erased, no one can remain.
I saw my life as a wolf loping along the road
And I questioned the women of that place.

Some regard the wolf as immortal, they said.
Now you know this only happened in one case and that
Wolves die regularly of various causes—

Bears kill them, tigers hunt them,
They get epilepsy,
They get a salmon bone crosswise in their throat,

They run themselves to death no one knows why—
But perhaps you never heard
Of their ear trouble.

They have very good ears,
Can hear a cloud pass overhead.
And sometimes it happens

That a windblown seed will bury itself in the aural canal
Displacing equilibrium.
They go mad trying to stand upright,

Nothing to link with.
Die of anger.
Only one we know learned to go along with it.

He took small steps at first.
Using the updrafts.
They call him Huizkol,

That means
Looks Good in Spring.
Things are as hard as you make them.

- Anne Carso

Meditations At Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed . It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry .

- Robert Hass

Being a Person

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here to make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

- William Stafford

The Smile


Why do you smile at a joke you have not heard

if something in the grey-morning-cheeping of the birds

accompanies the joke, like an audience laughing along with you,

and the traffic of the bridge with its nose down

or the other-grey water of the river that does not seem to move, but does,

this congregation, all these things forgetting themselves

dumb, like you, making up a religion second by second

whose collection plate is this smile of gratitude and certainty, full

in the presence of the invisible and ever-present

Lord.

- Bruce Moody