Printable View
Everyone Sang
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was fill’d with such delight
As prison’d birds must find freedom
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on; on and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun.
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
- Siegfried Sasson
Sunday Phone Call
Drab December, sleet falling.
Dogs loosely coiled in torpor.
Horses nose-down in hay.
It's the hour years ago
I used to call my parents
or they'd call me.
The phone rings. Idly
empty of expectation
I answer. It's my father's
voice. Pop! I say, you're dead!
Don't you remember
that final heart attack,
Dallas, just before
Kennedy was shot?
Time means nothing here,
kiddo. He's jolly, expansive.
You can wait eons for an open line.
Time gets used up but
comes back. You know.
Like Ping-Pong.
Ping-Pong! The table in
the attic. My father, shirtsleeves
rolled, the wet stub of
a burnt-out cigarette
stuck to his lower lip as
he murdered each one
of my three older brothers
and me yearning under the eaves,
waiting for my turn.
You sound ... just like yourself,
I say. I am myself, goddammit!
Anyway, what's this
about an accident?
How did you hear about it?
I read it somewhere. Broke
your neck, et cetera.
He says this vaguely,
his shorthand way
of keeping feelings at bay.
Now I'm indignant.
But I almost died!
Didn't I tell you
never buy land on a hill?
It's worthless. What's
an educated dame like you
doing messing with horses?
Messing with horses is
for punks. Then, a little
softer, I see you two've
put a lot of work into
that hunk of real estate.
Thanks. Thanks for even
noticing. We love it here.
We'll never sell.
Like hell you won't!
You will!
Pop, I say, tearing up,
let's not fight for once.
My only Poppa, when
do I get to see you?
A long pause. Then,
coughing his cigarette cough,
Pupchen, he says,
I may be dead but
I'm not clairvoyant.
Behave yourself.
The line clicks off.
- Maxine Kumin
this amazing day
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
- e.e. cummings
Arrival
Evening arrives unnoticed,
like a large black cat
lying down,
encircling the house,
its purring felt,
not heard,
stars in its
curled
tail.
- Scott O'Brien
wow, that was gorgeous.
Thanks! :):
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Begin
*
Begin again to the summoning birds
to the sight of light at the window,
begin to the roar of morning traffic
all along Pembroke Road.
Every beginning is a promise
born in light and dying in dark
determination and exaltation of springtime
flowering the way to work.
Begin to the pageant of queuing girls
the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal
bridges linking the past and future
old friends passing though with us still.
Begin to the loneliness that cannot end
since it perhaps is what makes us begin,
begin to wonder at unknown faces
at crying birds in the sudden rain
at* branches stark in the willing sunlight
at seagulls foraging for bread
at couples sharing a sunny secret
alone together while making good.
Though we live in a world that dreams of*ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever*begin.
*
- Brendan Kennelly
Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?
Don't call this world adorable, or useful, that's not it.
It's frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.
But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn't the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven't the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard?
Don't call this world an explanation, or even an education.
When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking
to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring,
as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust?
- Mary Oliver
*Promise of Blue Horses
A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning,
then the sun --
relating the difference between sadness
and the need to praise
that which makes us joyful, I can't calculate
how the earth tips hungrily
toward the sun - then soaks up rain -- or the density
of this unbearable need
to be next to you. It's a palpable thing -- this earth
philosophy
and familiar in the dark
like your skin under my hand. We are a small earth. It's no
simple thing. Eventually
we will be dust together; can be used to make a house, to stop
a flood or grow food
for those who will never remember who we were, or know
that we loved fiercely.
Laughter and sadness eventually become the same song turning us
toward the nearest star --
a star constructed of eternity and elements of dust barely visible
in the twilight as you travel
east. I run with the blue horses of electricity who surround
the heart
and imagine a promise made when no promise was possible.
- Joy Harjo
Global Vomit
some black gooey stuff
emerged from the bottom
under emerald water
trapping an entire civilization
in its fragrance
its convenient charming essence
of self propulsion and frantic travel
it fooled us all
the wealthy and impoverished alike
accepted the inevitable
oil cracking to gasoline
transforming our lush world
addiction rules the land
now we feel the pangs of remorse
as the vomit rages across air land and sea
taking life and livelihood at will
defiling and dishonoring everything it touches
we, back in the driver's seat
check the rearview mirror
for what is to come
- Richard Nichols
Already The Ripening Barberries
Already the ripening barberries are red
and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.
The man who cannot quietly close his eyes
certain that there is vision after vision inside,
simply waiting for nighttime
to rise all around him in darkness –
it’s all over for him, he’s like an old man.
Nothing else will come; no more days will open
and everything that does happen will cheat him.
Even You, my God. And You are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Reinventing America
The city was huge. A boy of twelve could walk
for hours while the closed houses stared down at him
from early morning to dusk, and he'd get nowhere.
Oh no, I was not that boy. Even at twelve I knew
enough to stay in my own neighborhood,
I knew anyone who left might not return.
Boys were animals with animal hungers
I learned early. Better to stay close to home.
I'd try to bum cigarettes from the night workers
as they left the bars in the heavy light of noon
or I'd hang around the grocery hoping
one of the beautiful young wives would ask me
to help her carry her shopping bags home.
You're wondering what I was up to. Not much.
The sun rose late in November and set early.
At times I thought life was rushing by too fast.
Before I knew it I'd be my half-blind uncle
married to a woman who cried all day long
while in the basement he passed his time working
on short-wave radio calls to anywhere.
I'd sneak down and talk to him, Uncle Nathan,
wiry in his boxer's shorts and high-topped boots,
chewing on a cigar, the one dead eye catching
the overhead light while he mused on his life
on the road or at sea. How he loved the whores
in the little Western towns and the Latin ports!
He'd hold his hands out to approximate
their perfect breasts. The months in jail had taught him
a man had only his honor and his ass
to protect. "You turn your fist this way," he said,
taking my small hand in both of his, "and fire
from the shoulder, so," and he'd extend it out
to the face of an imaginary foe.
Why he'd returned to this I never figured out,
though life was ample here, a grid of crowded blocks
of Germans, Wops, Polacks, Jews, wild Irish,
plus some square heads from the Upper Peninsula.
Six bakeries, four barber shops, a five and dime,
twenty beer gardens, a Catholic church with a shul
next door where we studied the Talmud-Torah.
Wonderful how all the old hatreds bubbled
So quietly on the back burner you could
forget until one day they tore through the pool halls,
the bowling alley, the high school athletic fields
leaving an eye gone, a long fresh, livid scar
running to touch a mouth, young hands raw or broken,
boys and girls ashamed of what they were, ashamed
of what they were not. It was merely village life,
exactly what our parents left in Europe
brought to America with pure fidelity.
- Philip Levine
Twilight in Hendy Woods
This is the hour of magic
When this world and the other world
Touch in a lingering kiss
And a deep stillness settles over all things.
This is the hour of magic
When the Earth,
For one eternal moment, holds its breath
Before turning from the sun.
This is the hour of magic
When, if you listen
With an open heart and a quiet mind,
You can hear the Ancient Ones, the elders of the forest
Telling the old stories:
Of the chainsaw massacres and the fires;
Of the great ice ages and the birth of mountain ranges;
Of the times long past when they were many and covered the Earth.
They are leaving us now.
When they are gone,
Who will tell these stories?
- Larry Robinson
Saint Francis And The Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
Put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessing of the earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
- Galway Kinnell
A Story That Could Be True
If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.
He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by -
you wonder at their calm.
They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?” -
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”
- William Stafford
A Name For All
Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page
And still wing on, untarnished of the name
We pinion to your bodies to assuage
Our envy of your freedom—we must maim
Because we are usurpers, and chagrined—
And take the wing and scar it in the hand.
Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;
But we must die, as you, to understand.
I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang
As only they can praise, who build their days
With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang
Struck free and holy in one Name always.
- Hart Crane
My beloved caressed me yesterday
and let me,
who has tasted nothing but sorrow,
taste his soul.
He gave wisdom to my mind
and put an earring my ear.
He gave light to my eyes
and brought sweetness to my taste.
He spoke to me:
"O one who's become wasted
because of me,
O one who is afraid of me,
know that I'm kind.
I would never sell a slave I've bought."
Look and see
how he does help,
the differences he makes.
Joseph remembers the ones
who cut off their hands for him.
He embraced me like his own soul.
My doubts and ill feelings left me.
He put his beautiful face on my shoulder.
- Jellaludin Rumi
(translation by Nevit O. Ergin & Will Johnson)
Reckless Poem
Today again I am hardly myself.
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.
It flows through me
like the blue wave.
Green leaves – you may believe this or not –
have once or twice
emerged from the tips of my fingers
somewhere
deep in the woods,
in the reckless seizure of spring.
Though, of course, I also know that other song,
the sweet passion of one-ness.
Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
**********tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
**********is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything
**********until I came to myself.
And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand,
I have flown from the other window of myself
to become white heron, blue whale,
**********red fox, hedgehog.
Oh, sometimes already my body has felt like the body of a flower!
Sometimes already my heart is a red parrot, perched
among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming.
- Mary Oliver
The One Thing You Can Do
You cannot by willing it alter the vast world outside of you.
You cannot cut the lash from one whip.
You cannot strike the handcuffs from one chained hand.
You cannot even remake your own soul so that there shall be no inclination to evil in it.
The great world rolls on, and you can do nothing to change it.
But this one thing you can do.
In that one, small, minute, almost infinitesimal place
in the universe where you stand,
there where, as God, your will prevails,
strive to make what you hunger for real.
- Howard Thurman
Ithaca
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.
Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.
- C.P. Cavafy
In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.
On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.
- Wislawa Szymborska
(Translated by Stanislaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh)
To praise is the whole thing! A man who can praise
Comes toward us like oar out of the silences
of rock. His heart, that dies, presses out
For others a wine that is fresh forever.
When the god's energy takes hold of him,
His voice never collapses in the dust.
Everything turns to vineyards, everything turns to grapes,
Made ready for harvest by his powerful devotion.
The mold in the catacomb of the king
Does not suggest that his praising is lies, nor
The fact that the gods cast shadows.
He is one of the servants who does not go away,
Who still holds through the doors
Of the tomb trays of shining fruit.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(translation by Robert Bly)
The Watch Of A Swan
I read somewhere that a swan snow-white
In the sun all day, in the moon all night,
Alone by a little grave would sit,
Waiting and watching it.
Up, out of the lake her mate would rise
And call her down, with his piteous cries,
Into the waters, still, and dim:
With cries she would answer him.
Hardly a shadow would she let pass
Over the baby's cover of grass;
Only the wind might dare to stir
The lily that watched with her.
Do I think that the swan was an angel? Oh,
I think it was only a swan, you know,
That for some sweet reason, winged and wild,
Had the love of a bird for a child.
- Sarah Piatt
(from Youth's Companion, 1883)
The Beauty Of Hopelessness
You are hanging from a branch
by your teeth. No
way to save yourself
or others who hang, too.
Arms that cannot reach
any branch, legs stretch but
cannot find the smooth safe trunk.
All around, your loved ones,
friends, strangers hang--
teeth clamp bony twigs
that suspend necessary hopes
and plans.
It is hopeless. No rescue will arrive.
So you relax, taste the clean,
unfamiliar tang of sap,
feel the forgiving wind against
your waving arms, arms
that swim through emptiness.
Without hope, life is
focused, fluid, a ledge
of fragile earth suspended
over the ocean of unknowing, the end
of the branch. Life is
the glorious moment
before the fall when all
plans are abandoned,
the love you give
as you hang, loving
those who hang with you.
- Rebecca del Rio
aaaaaaaaaaaaah. hopelessness - relief, release, refreshed. free to just be.
the antidote to "hope" - now defiled, debased by political usage and trickery.
thanks, larry, and blessings, judith
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Blazing Trees
You have only to see
the blazing sunset through
the trees to be
in that dazzling presence
and hear a voice say
“Take off your masks.”
With a clatter they land
but you barely
notice because the fire
in your heart is bursting
towards that bright glow.
And when its last glimmering
rays are gone
you're left with a gateway
that will open at any—
even the darkest— hour.
- Raphael Block
Paul Robeson
That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other's
harvest:
that we are each other's
business:
we are each other's
magnitude and bond.
- Gwendolyn Brooks
Cross That Line
Paul Robeson stood
on the northern border of the USA
and sang into Canada
where a vast audience
sat on folding chairs
waiting to hear him.
He sang into Canada.
His voice left the USA
when his body was not allowed
to cross that line.
Remind us again, brave friend!
What countries may we sing into?
What lines should we all be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?
- Naomi Shihab Nye
Congratulations and blessings on crossing the line once again on your journeys around the sun...Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Happy Birthday Larry!
And thank you for blessing us with your thoughtful selections that "deepen our days".
Barry
How Birds Sing
One is not taxed;
one need not practice;
one simple tips
the throat back
over the spine axis
and asserts the chest.
The wings and the rest
compress a musical
squeeze which floats
a series of notes
upon the breeze.
- Kay Ryan
Where We Are
(after Bede)
A man tears a chunk of bread off the brown loaf,
then wipes the gravy from his plate. Around him at the long table, friends fill their mouths with duck and roast pork, fill their cups from pitchers of wine. Hearing a high twittering, the man
*
looks to see a bird -- black with a white patch
beneath its beak -- flying the length of the hall,
having flown in by a window over the door. As straight as a taut string, the bird flies beneath the roofbeams, as firelight flings its shadow against the ceiling.
*
The man pauses -- one hand holds the bread,
the other rests upon the table -- and watches the bird, perhaps a swift, fly toward the window
at the far end of the room. He begins to point it out to his friends, but one is telling hunting stories, as another describes the best way
*
to butcher a pig. The man shoves the bread in his mouth, then slaps his hand down hard on the thigh of the woman seated beside him, squeezes his fingers to feel the firm muscles and tendons beneath the fabric of her dress.
A huge dog snores on the stone hearth by the fire.
*
From the window comes the clicking of pine needles blown against it by an October wind.
A half moon hurries along behind scattered clouds, while the forest of black spruce and bare maple and birch surrounds the long hall the way a single rock can be surrounded
*
by a river. This is where we are in history -- to think the table will remain full; to think the forest will remain where we have pushed it; to think our bubble of good fortune will save us from the night -- a bird flies in from the dark, flits across a lighted hall and disappears.
*
******- Stephen Dobyns
When Your True Heart
When you find yourself
at the bottom of the ocean
no one has to say,
"Swim! Swim for your life
toward the light!"
Your arms, your heart, your legs
your lungs, your brain, your eyes,
every part of you is fixated
on that point of light,
and your body works
with all the efficiency of which
it is capable
to propel you toward it.
When your true heart
reveals to you
that which you really want,
though a lioness stand at the gate
with teeth like snow white daggers
pointing up and down,
she will not keep you from entering.
Ancient chains of clinging, judgment,
"This is how I do it," mind, and fear
slip away like silk off silk.
Open to your true heart
and the Surging Tide that
knows no season
will fill you up with Joy.
When you stop being
separate and can speak
from inside things,
all of creation will be
nothing but mouth singing
songs of joy and praise.
- Diane La Rae Bodach
Seventieth Birthday
There was rain in early November but afterwards
The land’s hope failed, the small grass on the mountain withered and died,
Dry fell the frost. Even the southwind brought no clouds,
The sun blazed in the air like a block of ice.
I rode up over the ridge from the ocean
And came into death’s own country; there were dead cows and calves under every bush and the little broken-
Windowed farmhouse was as dead as the cows. They lay flat on their flanks, black and white hides
Rather than carcasses, keeping their tryst with the earth, settling into the ground.
That’s the trouble with death—
So submissive, so docile ,so humbled, it tries to hide, to slide underground, it has no effrontery
Except the stench. I do not want to be humbled.
But now my love has died and I am half dead.
My friends are dying, even my dogs have died, even the grim and psychotic bull-dog
That used to turn and attack me from time to time and in mid-leap become sane. I loved him well
But when he hurt my grandchild we had him killed. That was betrayal; he trusted us. I fondled him going to die’
I was Judas. I have been perhaps all men.
Why do I dream lately so much about death?
Today’s my seventieth birthday: do I wan to die?
When I turned fifty I had the strength to be willing
To live forever. Even now twenty years weaker, I might endure it,
But the gleam is gone.
When I came down from the height—
The corpse-crowned hill—I saw a comedy of two survivors. Nearer the ocean a little nourishment
Under the kindly sea-fog grows from the ground. There was a worried cow grazing and walking,
Bone-gaunt, with a gaunt pig at here teats. She would step forward, he would catch and such, he would follow her
And she could not refuse him. Her calf no doubt had died but her watery milk was made to be sucked.
It was very funny: she would neither kick nor submit, she was like me with death, she with her pig.
- Robinson Jeffers
After the War
a day
after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
I will hold you in my arms
a day after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
if after the war I have arms
and I will make to you with love
a day after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
if after the war there is love
and if there is what it takes to make love
- Jotamario Arbeláez
(Colombia, 1940)
As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse
I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.
I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,
and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow
so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.
Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,
singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.
- Billy Collins
The Banker
His smile is like a cold toilet seat.
He shakes my hand as if he's found it
floating two weeks dead in a slough.
I tell him I need money.
Tons of it.
I want to buy a new Lamborghini,
load it with absinthe and opium,
and hit the trail out of these rainy hills
for a few years in Paris.
I try to explain
I'm at that point in my artistic development
where I require a long period
of opulent reflection.
The banker rifles my wallet.
Examines my mouth.
Chuckles when I offer 20 Miltonic sonnets
as security on the loan.
Now he's shaking his head, my confidence,
my hand good-bye. "Wait," I plead,
"I have debts and dreams
my present cash flow can't possibly sustain."
"Sorry," he mumbles, "nothing I can do,"
and staples some papers
in a way that makes me feel
he'd rather nail my tongue to an ant hill.
I stare at him in disbelief.
And under the righteous scathing of my gaze
the banker begins to change form.
First, he becomes a plate of cold french fries
drenched in crankcase oil.
Then a black spot
on a page of Genesis.
Finally, a dung beetle,
rolling little balls of shit
across a desk bigger than my kitchen.
Yet even as I follow these morbid transformations
I never lose sight of his bloated face,
the green, handled skin
shining like rotten meat.
But then his other faces
open to mine:
father, lover, young man, child -
our shared human history
folding us into one.
And only that stops me
from beating him senseless
with a sock full of pennies.
- Jim Dodge
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow —
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows —
so I thought:
maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —
as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.
- Mary Oliver
Men at Work
I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”
He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich.
—“Down Under.”
We middle-aged sense them immediately:
four brittle pop stars sprawled across
the rigid fibreglass chairs at the airport gate.
It’s not just that they’re Australian, that gorgeous
thunk of English, the stacked electric-guitar cases
draped with black leather jackets, or their deep
tans on this Sunday night in midwinter Toronto
that holds everyone’s attention, drawn as we are,
pale filings to their pull. Even their rail-thin
lassitude attracts us, as it must Doug, the portly
Air Canada gate manager in his personalized jacket,
who arrives to greet the band, cranking hands
and cracking jokes. Doug, who must live in
Mississauga with the wife and a couple of kids,
and who insists the boys come back to play Toronto
next year, when we clutchers of boarding passes
will have abandoned our carry-ons for tickets
to a midsized arena and a resurrected band
whose lyrics never did make sense but
which are laced to a beat that won’t let go—
propelling us down the carpeted ramps
of late-night flights on feeder airlines, hips
back in charge of our strange young bodies,
now shaking down runways in rows.
- Julie Bruck
The Lights in the Hallway
The lights in the hallway
Have been out a long time.
I clasp her,
Terrified by the roundness of the earth
And its apples and the voluptuous rings
Of poplar trees, the secret Africas,
The children they give us.
She is slim enough.
Her knee feels like the face
Of a surprised lioness
Nursing the lost children
Of a gazelle by pure accident.
In that body I long for,
The Gabon poets gaze for hours
Between boughs toward heaven, their noble faces
Too secret to weep.
How do I know what color her hair is? I float among
Lonely animals, longing
For the red spider who is God.
- James Wright
The Lives of the Heart
Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible;are glassy;are clay;blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffle;snort;cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn.
Thrash in the net until hit. .
Rise up as cities, as serpentined magma, as maples,
hiss lava-red into the sea.
Leave the strange kiss of their bodies
in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost,
can be carried, broken, sung.
Lie dormant until they are opened by ice,
by drought. Go blind in the service of lace.
Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad.
Are stamped out in plastic, in tin.
Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod,
are strung on the blue backs of flies
on the black backs of cows.
Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets
heavy with slaughter.
Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers.,
Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blossom.
Not one is not given to ecstasy's lions.
Not one does not grieve.
Each of them opens and closes, closes and opens
the heavy gate --violent, serene, consenting, suffering it all.
- Jane Hirshfield
The Lesson Of The Falling Leaves
the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
- Lucille Clifton
Do these leaves know as much as I?
They must
Know that and more—or less. We
See each other through the glass.
We bless each other
Desk and tree, a fallen world of holiness.
Blessed Francis taught the birds
All the animals understood.
Who will
Pray for us who are less than stone or wood?
- Zenshin Philip Whalen
The Icelandic Language
In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.
In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.
But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.
The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.
In this language, you can't chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can't
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.
Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.
- Bill Holm
I will be traveling until September 25 so this will be my last poetry post until September 26. I apologize for the interruption of service.
Larry
The Snakes of September
All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.
- Stanley Kunitz
The Excesses of God
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.
- Robinson Jeffers
The Loss Of Memory
I have become reconciled to the forgetfulness.
The overtaking birds upon the unidentified traveler.
The reluctance to alter and the regret that accompanies the reluctance,
the dark, probable rose.
The room is uncertain like the spider's shining window.
Looking out upon the snow
across the squares and statues of the gameboard,
there is only the dissonance.
As if in preparation for an arrival, as if remembering
a promise of a return, a meeting,
not taken seriously, that now will occur.
The almost endless sequence of summers is about to conclude.
The loss of memory upon the mountain.
The wandering without pattern upon the snow,
misted unexpected crests and an immediate unlocatable bell...
Lord upon the mountain
I have not glimpsed the hanging monastery through the snowfall
in a moment of distance
where passage is unassisted. Is nothing, or is everything, revocable?
I follow the extinct figures that invented the firelight.
The unnoticeable bird at dusk like a small difficult word.
My heart will fall silent, that moment of inattention,
the last, instant, pointed stars and the unmistakable field.
- Fred Ostrander
The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
- Jack Gilbert
Acrobat
The nimble artist hangs upside down
amber belly skyward
into the dawn’s first
light miraculously
catching tiny glimmers
of his multifarious
suspension hangar,
afloat in the lightest of
autumnal breezes,
each leg a
three joint crane
reaching ever so
delicately
out somehow to find
its best hold.
Unfooled, this master,
by my puffs of breath to test
his response, no he is
quite all business
between
creation time
and breakfast.
- Scott O'Brien
Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you.
We lived long together
a life filled,
if you will,
with flowers. So that
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in hell.
Today
I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers
that we both loved,
even to this poor
colorless thing-
I saw it
when I was a child-
little prized among the living
but the dead see,
asking among themselves:
What do I remember
that was shaped
as this thing is shaped?
while our eyes fill
with tears.
Of love, abiding love
it will be telling
though too weak a wash of crimson
colors it
to make it wholly credible.
There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you
and you alone
but it must wait
while I drink in
the joy of your approach,
perhaps for the last time.
And so
with fear in my heart
I drag it out
and keep on talking
for I dare not stop.
Listen while I talk on
against time.
It will not be
for long.
I have forgot
and yet I see clearly enough
something
central to the sky
which ranges round it.
An odor
springs from it!
A sweetest odor!
Honeysuckle! And now
there comes the buzzing of a bee!
and a whole flood
of sister memories!
Only give me time,
time to recall them
before I shall speak out.
Give me time,
time.
When I was a boy
I kept a book
to which, from time
to time,
I added pressed flowers
until, after a time,
I had a good collection.
The asphodel,
forebodingly,
among them.
I bring you,
reawakened,
a memory of those flowers.
They were sweet
when I pressed them
and retained
something of their sweetness
a long time.
It is a curious odor,
a moral odor,
that brings me
near to you.
The color
was the first to go.
There had come to me
a challenge,
your dear self,
mortal as I was,
the lily's throat
to the hummingbird!
Endless wealth,
I thought,
held out its arms to me.
A thousand tropics
in an apple blossom.
The generous earth itself
gave us lief.
The whole world
became my garden!
But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden
when the sun strikes it
and the waves
are wakened.
I have seen it
and so have you
when it puts all flowers
to shame.
Too, there are the starfish
stiffened by the sun
and other sea wrack
and weeds. We knew that
along with the rest of it
for we were born by the sea,
knew its rose hedges
to the very water's brink.
There the pink mallow grows
and in their season
strawberries
and there, later,
we went to gather
the wild plum.
I cannot say
that I have gone to hell
for your love
but often
found myself there
in your pursuit.
I do not like it
and wanted to be
in heaven. Hear me out.
Do not turn away.
I have learned much in my life
from books
and out of them
about love.
Death
is not the end of it.
There is a hierarchy
which can be attained,
I think,
in its service.
Its guerdon
is a fairy flower;
a cat of twenty lives.
If no one came to try it
the world
would be the loser.
It has been
for you and me
as one who watches a storm
come in over the water.
We have stood
from year to year
before the spectacle of our lives
with joined hands.
The storm unfolds.
Lightning
plays about the edges of the clouds.
The sky to the north
is placid,
blue in the afterglow
as the storm piles up.
It is a flower
that will soon reach
the apex of its bloom.
We danced,
in our minds,
and read a book together.
You remember?
It was a serious book.
And so books
entered our lives.
The sea! The sea!
Always
when I think of the sea
there comes to mind
the Iliad
and Helen's public fault
that bred it.
Were it not for that
there would have been
no poem but the world
if we had remembered,
those crimson petals
spilled among the stones,
would have called it simply
murder.
The sexual orchid that bloomed then
sending so many
disinterested
men to their graves
has left its memory
to a race of fools
or heroes
if silence is a virtue.
The sea alone
with its multiplicity
holds any hope.
The storm
has proven abortive
but we remain
after the thoughts it roused
to
re-cement our lives.
It is the mind
the mind
that must be cured
short of death's
intervention,
and the will becomes again
a garden. The poem
is complex and the place made
in our lives
for the poem.
Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.
Begin again.
It is like Homer's
catalogue of ships:
it fills up the time.
I speak in figures,
well enough, the dresses
you wear are figures also,
we could not meet
otherwise. When I speak
of flowers
it is to recall
that at one time
we were young.
All women are not Helen,
I know that,
but have Helen in their hearts.
My sweet,
you have it also, therefore
I love you
and could not love you otherwise.
Imagine you saw
a field made up of women
all silver-white.
What should you do
but love them?
The storm bursts
or fades! it is not
the end of the world.
Love is something else,
or so I thought it,
a garden which expands,
though I knew you as a woman
and never thought otherwise,
until the whole sea
has been taken up
and all its gardens.
It was the love of love,
the love that swallows up all else,
a grateful love,
a love of nature, of people,
of animals,
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you.
I should have known,
though I did not,
that the lily-of-the-valley
is a flower makes many ill
who whiff it.
We had our children,
rivals in the general onslaught.
I put them aside
though I cared for them.
as well as any man
could care for his children
according to my lights.
You understand
I had to meet you
after the event
and have still to meet you.
Love
to which you too shall bow
along with me-
a flower
a weakest flower
shall be our trust
and not because
we are too feeble
to do otherwise
but because
at the height of my power
I risked what I had to do,
therefore to prove
that we love each other
while my very bones sweated
that I could not cry to you
in the act.
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
- William Carlos Williams
A Spiritual Journey
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.
- Wendell Berry
On the Day the Last Drag Queen Leaves Town
for Issan
The boys downstairs huff gasoline
off strips of Mother’s emerald gown,
making what joy they can
out of fume and a knockoff Halston.
No note, no explanation, only thing
she left is a hole where reason should be.
You grow a heart and feed it leftovers:
stray earrings, scuffed-out pumps,
the soft pink flame of her first feather boa.
How it curled around her shoulders
when she did the lucky snake dance,
the one with the shimmy, where her hands
dangled at her side and slapped her hips.
And then she’d wave her hand across the air
just as she did every morning when
you’d wake her with an orange for breakfast,
a bowl of milk for her facial, and she’d give
you a word: banana, somehow transformed
by the dissonance of painted lips and baritone.
Truth is you’ll be just fine. Remember a girl
in high heels can still win a race.
You’re just missing the way she knew you—
the way the tree stump loves the ax,
because the blade still sees a use in an old piece
of oak. Drive into town and get drunk,
watch the sole streetlight turn yellow,
sway in the breeze. Wait for someone to ask
about him, then testify. Tell them she was
last seen two-stepping into the dawn, working
the moon for its last bit of butter, the wig
slipping from her head. Because if somebody
goes asking about Mother, seems they need
a happy ending. Go ahead, give it.
- Eric Leigh
On the Day the Last Drag Queen Leaves Town
for Issan
The boys downstairs huff gasoline
off strips of Mother’s emerald gown,
making what joy they can
out of fume and a knockoff Halston.
No note, no explanation, only thing
she left is a hole where reason should be.
You grow a heart and feed it leftovers:
stray earrings, scuffed-out pumps,
the soft pink flame of her first feather boa.
How it curled around her shoulders
when she did the lucky snake dance,
the one with the shimmy, where her hands
dangled at her side and slapped her hips.
And then she’d wave her hand across the air
just as she did every morning when
you’d wake her with an orange for breakfast,
a bowl of milk for her facial, and she’d give
you a word: banana, somehow transformed
by the dissonance of painted lips and baritone.
Truth is you’ll be just fine. Remember a girl
in high heels can still win a race.
You’re just missing the way she knew you—
the way the tree stump loves the ax,
because the blade still sees a use in an old piece
of oak. Drive into town and get drunk,
watch the sole streetlight turn yellow,
sway in the breeze. Wait for someone to ask
about him, then testify. Tell them she was
last seen two-stepping into the dawn, working
the moon for its last bit of butter, the wig
slipping from her head. Because if somebody
goes asking about Mother, seems they need
a happy ending. Go ahead, give it.
- Eric Leigh
Go Deeper Than Love
Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.
Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.
And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.
Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.
For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths
out of sight, in the deep living heart.
- D.H. Lawrence
i am a little church
i am a little church (no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
- i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness
around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains
i am a little church (far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
- i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing
winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)
- e.e.cummings
Our Eyes Are Sweet Obedient Dogs
The mind must reach beyond time,
not revise or think at all;
thought is always late for truth.
Take the one bright element
from heaven on earth, the blazing
word inside the throat of rivers
and sky, desert and fields,
that will not burn, and speak
its flame without a sound.
Fire catches in sight and feeds
on gross imagination.
We do not see for fear
of burning here alive.
- Chard de Niord
October
O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day.
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost -
For the grape' sake along the wall.
- Robert Frost
Poem In October
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
- Dylan Thomas
God Does Not Answer Prayer
God does not answer prayer.
It is a sacrilege to think so.
An insult to the god-drenched hearts
of all who pray through the night
and in the morning are nonetheless
handed a dead child.
The churches in Salem used to burn heretics
to increase attendance. Now those who feel
their prayer didn't reach quite far enough,
that they were not pure enough,
are victims of a merciless atheism
that says all good fortune comes from God
though the brutal often prosper
and it is not uncommon to torture
the pure of heart.
We pray for the best, forgetting
the unpredictable unfolding
that must occur for us to learn
prayer for others works better
than for ourselves. Jesus prays
in the garden of Gethsemane
and is refused. Ten thousand,
ten million prayers rise in Latin,
Arabic, Hindi, and Hebrew
yet their husbands and wives,
children and sisters, fathers and brothers
do not survive well if at all
though in their chest beats the strong sacred heart.
No prayers are granted, none denied.
True prayer reaches well beyond the edge of the world.
It enters head bowed into the arms of the Beloved.
- Stephen Levine
To My Students
You who can read,
do not take it for granted;
you who cannot,
there are worlds, there are gods
yet to be quickened in your dreams.
The worlds await to form on your tongue,
the gods to tremble in your ears.
These little marks, black as fly-droppings
on the page, and as small,
speak to you - you do not hear.
I cannot tell you the beginning of naming,
only how it changes and magic
sparks and sputters at the base of the skull.
I do not know if there is answer;
perhaps our speaking is enough.
Men have died always alone;
these small blemishes on the page
their final legacy.
Do not lose them,
these the enchanted cinders
of our stars.
- Rafael Jesus Gonzalez
(Rafael Jesus Gonzales turns 75 this coming Sunday, October 10, 2010)
Moss
Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory
or an archetypal memory, but something far older - a
fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.
Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by
rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.
To perceive of the earth as round needed something else
- standing up! - that hadn't yet happened.
What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of
course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like
blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier
moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees
and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.
When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn,
I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing
upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,
sweet cousin.
- Mary Oliver
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter and inland among stones
The surface of the slate grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
- Seamus Heaney
(from Opened Ground)
The Distance
The distance between us
is holy ground
to be traversed
feet bare
hands raised
in joyous dance
so that once it is
crossed
the tracks of our pilgrimage
shine in the darkness
& light our coming together
in a bright & steady light.
- Rafael Jesús González
The Past
The past is an interest-bearing investment,
an estate enclosing more territory each day,
a delta always creating land.
Now, in my 60s,
I'm a great landowner,
a don unable to survey
all my holdings at once,
even from the highest hill.
To do so, I have to take
to the winding back roads.
Whole years I'd forgotten
come into view.
Everything is growing,
rooted in soil.
I didn't know the past blossomed
with such passionate, poignant flowers
or yielded such succulent fruit.
Blossoms have faces and speak.
Resurrected old homes straddle valleys.
Memories graze on hillsides.
I return from such excursions knowing
there are still more such loops. How
did the tiny sharecropper's yard
I knew as a young man
ever accrue to this? What Hand
has watered the once-arid precincts
and made them fertile?
I wonder, hearing people say,
“the past is dead”, when I find it so alive,
nearly as unknown, at times,
as what has not yet been dreamed,
and though I do not live in the past,
it is the foundation upon which I stand
- Max Reif
There Is No One Story and One Story Only
The engineer’s story of hauling coal
to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
The flight attendant’s story murmured
to the flight steward in the dark galley
of her fifth-month loss of nerve
about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen
The story of the forensic medical team’s
small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
of the body in the bag they had to drag
over the ice like the whole life of that body
The story of the man driving
600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming
easy when leaving but afterward
writing in a letter difficult truths
Of the friend watching him leave remembering
the story of her body
with his once and the stories of their children
made with other people and how his mind went on
pressing hers like a body
There is the story of the mind’s
temperature neither cold nor celibate
Ardent
The story of
not one thing only.
- Adrienne Rich
Excerpt for Little Gidding
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
- T.S. Eliot
(The Four Quartets)
Let Me Be Beautiful Like Sea Glass
Let my edges that cut be stroked by sand and salt
let my slick surface coarsen till it’s crushed to bits
let my colors soften as they scrape the bottom
let the waves love me in their rough way
let me be changed by that love
let me not forget I held another
yet fully inhabit my particularity
let me be smooth enough to be rubbed by small fingers
and slipped inside a pocket or a bowl
let me prove that beauty is born when something breaks
- Gwynn O’Gara
Hope
Old spirit, in and beyond me,
keep and extend me. Amid strangers
friends, great trees and big seas breaking,
let love move me. Let me hear the whole music,
see clear, reach deep. Open me to find due words,
that I may shape them to ploughshares of my own making.
After such luck, however late, give me to give to
the oldest dance.... Then to good sleep,
and - if it happens - glad waking.
- Philip Booth
First Rain
The first day of rain
should be declared
a natural holiday.
All stops, somehow.
A new season so simply turns.
All is immediate.
The instant of first wet on skin.
Sounds dance and mingle.
Soils, leaves, muddy waters
blend into deeply breathed
fragrances, become a
raw tonic
gone far too long.
We go through the day
cocooned.
A fire perhaps,
and time to enjoy it,
if we are lucky.
There’s something Sunday
about the first day of rain,
suspended between
today and
forever.
Memories take us,
deeper than words.
Further back than
recall can bring us.
Leave us off to
wander further beyond thought
to pure feeling,
back to some safety
of somewhere we
seem to have
lost.
Close the shops,
silence the clocks.
It’s the first day of rain.
- Scott O'Brien
For The Time Of Necessary Decision
The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it's time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.
Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us anymore.
We drift through this gray, increasing
nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.
May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul's desire.
- John O'Donohue
Fresh
To move
Cleanly.
Needing to be
Nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
From any store.
To lift something
You already had
And set it down in
A new place.
Awakened eye
Seeing freshly.
What does that do to
The old blood moving through
Its channels?
- Naomi Shihab Nye
At Lake Scugog
1.
Where what I see comes to rest,
at the edge of the lake,
against what I think I see
and, up on the bank, who I am
maintains an uneasy truce
with who I fear I am,
while in the cabin’s shade the gap between
the words I said
and those I remember saying
is just wide enough to contain
the remains that remain
of what I assumed I knew.
2.
Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were
gingerly trades spots
with the person you are
and what I believe I believe
sits uncomfortably next to
what I believe.
When I promised I will always give you
what I want you to want,
you heard, or desired to hear,
something else. As, over and in the lake,
the cormorant and its image
traced paths through the sky.
- Troy Jollimore
The Chinese Peaks
For Donald Hall
I love the mountain peak
but I know also its rolling
foothills
half-invisible
in mist and fog.
The Seafarer gets up
long before dawn to read.
His soul
is a whale feeding
on the Holy Word.
The soul who loves the peak
also inhales the deep
breath rising
from the mountain
buried in mist.
- Robert Bly
The Man Watching
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translation by Robert Bly
I Found Myself in Walmart
Spiritually speaking
I was on a candy high.
Perhaps that is why
I found myself foraging
basket in hand
(while most others pushed
oversized carts
toward a supersized Nirvana)
among the cocoa harvests
of foreign lands.
You followed me reluctantly.
You love Wal-Mart
but you were puzzled.
"Eric" you said patiently
"what do you need?"
As you spoke
a shaft of light crashed
like a Chinese paratrooper
through the store's skylight.
It bounced off high stacked shelves.
It barged its way between
overweight shoppers
illuminating spandex mysteries.
It flashed upon my eyes
and I knew.
I knew that while our bodies
did not so often
pound love into speaking flames-
that I still wanted you,
only you,
just you,
not even candy.
Not cut-price plastic hole fillers,
not anything blue, green or yellow
seen on a T.V. in aisle 3
nor did I need more coffee
or anything.
How even here
in this warehouse of hope and light
we could find each other
like Adam discovering Eve
and Eve peeking at Adam
in their Garden of Eden
for the first time.
And how like Adam
I had found God.
- Eric Ashford
Why Bodhidharma Went to Howard Johnson's
"Where is your home," the interviewer asked him.
Here.
"No, no," the interviewer said, thinking it a problem of translation,
"when you are where you actually live."
Now it was his turn to think, perhaps the translation?
- Jane Hirshfield
Oil and Ash
What’s organic emits carbon when burned so animal
dung or dried seaweed picked from rocks or a child left
too long in the sun will all eventually rise toward the place
we used to think god lived: among the clouds on a big chair.
So apparently it’s come to this: the way to save the sky is sell
the sky to those who would release ash into it, through pipes.
I understand this economically, and I’d rather not
mention the resemblance to prostitution, but when I open my
mouth it also fills with something called sky, each inhalation
drags sky across the fine hairs of my nostrils stirring them
in patterns resembling the locomotion of centipedes.
The inverted trees of my lungs filter sky into blood a shade
darker than a cardinal, blood so red it seems it should sing.
The seashell whorls of my ears hold barely two-thimbles-
worth of sky but without those twin pockets of stratosphere
thrumming my drums the world would fall as silent as a world
where they had inexplicably fed their own kind into steel machines.
Later, visiting archaeologists might ponder what had driven them
to do such a thing? There might be conjecture about belief systems
or native religions but for the first thousands of years there would be
nothing but the sound of ash sifting through dried leaves, a sound that is
in some ways similar—but also different—from the sound of falling snow.
- Michael Bazze
Rippling and Astir
There's a rippling
in the air
stealing
across the hillside
misty sheets
slant and race
towards
this terrible
thirst.
All green things
are dressed in
see-through pearls.
Droplets pounce
dance polkas on
wooden fenceposts.
Brushing, rushing
shimmering
bush and tree
limbs flap, sway
opening to
volleys' intensity.
A hushed soaring
roars.
- Raphael Block
Ripening
The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done,
as much as by what we intend.
Our hair turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!
- Wendell Berry
Sick and Old, Same As Ever:
a Poem to Figure It All Out
Splendor and ruin,
sorrow and joy,
long life or early death:
when this human realm's
a figment of prank
and whimsy,
is it really so strange
if I'm soon a bug's arm
or rat's liver?
And chicken skin
or crane plumage-
what would it hurt?
In yesterday's winds,
I was happy to begin
my long journey,
but today, in all this sunlit
warmth of spring,
I feel better.
And now that I'm packed
and ready for that
distant voyage,
what does it matter
if I linger on a little while
longer here?
- Po Chu-I
This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.
No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.
No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.
That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.
- Gregory Orr
Tor House
If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind
Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from
Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.
Come in the morning you will see white gulls
Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
Their dance-companion, a ghost walking
By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.
My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings and the day moon.
- Robinson Jeffers
Old Man, Old Man
Young men, not knowing what to remember,
Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
Where did you find what you remember? Was it perched in a tree?
Did it hover deep in the white water? Was it covered over
With dead stalks in the grass? Will we taste it
If our mouths have long lain empty?
Will we feel it between our eyes if we face the wind
All night, and turn the color of earth?
If we lie down in the rain, can we remember sunlight?
He answers, I have become the best and worst I dreamed.
When I move my feet, the ground moves under them.
When I lie down, I fit the earth too well.
Stones long underwater will burst in the fire, but stones
Long in the sun and under the dry night
Will ring when you strike them. Or break in two.
There were always many places to beg for answers:
Now the places themselves have come in close to be told.
I have called even my voice in close to whisper with it:
Every secret is as near as your fingers.
If your heart stutters with pain and hope,
Bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.
- David Wagoner
Where The Mind Is Without Fear
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls,
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action,
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!
- Rabindranath Tagore
The Second Coming
Turning and turning on the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of*Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: Somewhere in the sands of the*desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know*
That twenty centuries of stony sleep*
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- William Butler Yeats
Becoming A Redwood
Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,
And all the other life too small to name.
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.
Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.
And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.
Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,
rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall
and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.
The old windmill creaks in perfect time
to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,
and the last farmhouse light goes off.
Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.
You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,
part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,
Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows
there is no silence but when danger comes.
- Dana Gioia
The Old Devotée
I know what it is to live
a simple life of nothing.
Like the monk who bows
and prays and sits
every day in death-like routine.
The ages do not trumpet his renown
for wisdom and peace.
He writes nothing and cannot write.
He does his devotions which no one marks,
and he makes no boast, no sound.
He is surrounded by a million like himself
for miles of generations
backward and forward. If they earn
God’s smile it is everything to them
and enough. To make a sect of a smile
they know is not within their hand. O my closed eyes!
O my beautiful life
- Bruce Moody
SONNET LXXIII: THAT TIME OF YEAR THOU MAYST IN ME BEHOLD
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
- William Shakespeare
Parable
First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated
pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as
a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it
glimmering among the stones, and not
pass blindly by; each
further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,
so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,
like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem
to have achieved an agreement; our canteens
hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.
- Louise Gluck
Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
- Mary Oliver
The Man In The Dead Machine
High on a slope in New Guinea
The Grumman Hellcat
lodges among bright vines
as thick as arms. In 1943,
the clenched hand of a pilot
glided it here
where no one has ever been.
In the cockpit, the helmeted
skeleton sits
upright, held
by dry sinews at neck
and shoulder, and webbing
that straps the pelvic cross
to the cracked
leather of the seat, and the breastbone
to the canvas cover
of the parachute.
Or say the shrapnel
missed him, he flew
back to the carrier, and every
morning takes the train, his pale
hands on the black case, and sits
upright, held
by the firm webbing.
- Donald Hall
Eagle Affirmation
You’ve got to understand that sighting the pair
of eagles over the block, right over our house,
not more than twenty feet above the roof,
so massive their wings pull at the corrugated
tin sheeting even with gentlest tilt, counteracts
bitterness against all the damage I see and hear
around me on an exclusively crisp blue morning,
when clarity is pain and even one small missing
wattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here
at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony;
a region is not a pinpoint and a different compass
works in my head, having magnetics for all
directions and all pointing to one spot
I know and observe as closely as possible;
and even one small vanished or vanquished
wattle tree is agony close to death for me,
where I find it hard to breathe to feed myself
to get past the loss; but the pair of eagles
still appearing and keeping their sharp
and scrupulous eyes honed, overrides
this ordeal, though I wish their victims
life too and their damage is traumatic
as anything else; that’s as much sense
or nonsense as I can make in such blue light.
- John Kinsella
Often I Imagine The Earth
Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.
- Dan Gerber
Pray for Peace
Pray to whomever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or marble or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the Bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah, raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.
Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, Record Keeper
of time before, time now, time ahead, pray. Bow down
to terriers and shepherds and siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.
Pray to the bus driver who takes you to work,
pray on the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus
and for everyone riding buses all over the world.
If you haven't been on a bus in a long time,
climb the few steps, drop some silver, and pray.
Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.
Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.
Making love, of course, is already a prayer.
Skin and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile case we are poured into,
each caress a season of peace.
If you're hungry, pray. If you're tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
Pray to the angels and the ghost of your grandfather.
When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else's legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheel chair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer that as the earth revolves
we will do less harm, less harm, less harm.
And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, writing on a blackboard
with yellow chalk, twirling pizzas, pray for peace.
With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.
Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds for peace, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.
Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your VISA card. Gnaw your crust
of prayer, scoop your prayer water from the gutter.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.
- Ellen Bass
Rest
I ask
these hands
to touch
the body
on the
burning pavement.
It lies.
Bereft.
There are no flowers
no wreaths...
no one weeps.
The spinning wheels
that tore its heart
have gone.
Gone...
Rushing to
that eight am appointment.
To pick up a child from school?
Or perhaps,
perhaps to meet a lover?
To hold someone in arms that
are lonely. To smile.
To kiss.
Into this moment
It stepped.
This furry creature
from the woods....
Its heart pounding
with
this
thing.
This thing that
runs in
the bosom of
the wild,
its shadow caught
in the laden
sweep
of the wing of an owl.
That sudden woosh...
thrashing air
through the fleeting glance
of ghost eyes.
This thing.
This thing
that comes
to me at twilight
in the perfumed mystery
of jasmine.
That sudden
startling
scent...
stunning my feet.
This thing.
It ran fierce in the
creature who
stepped
from the woods
to the road,
into this
other world.
Its feet
stumbled.
Unsure, it turned its head.
Then.
Rushing wheels and
the theft
of dignity.
I ask
these hands
to touch
the body
on the
burning pavement.
To return grace.
To bring the pieces
back
to the woods...
To make a home
in the wild
for
Rest.
- Araliya Navaratne
Epiphany on Highway One
Maybe I’d been working too hard
or maybe I was just looking forward to meeting a friend for a hike
or maybe it was just time
but my brain stuttered
when I saw the group of small brown cattle
grazing intently
bunched together
headed toward the old
tilted roadside barbed
wire fence
for the small green shoots among the dun parched fall
grasses
up alongside the high road
on the coastal highway
where the sky feels
somehow closer,
and all at once I
could see that everything that had ever
happened had led up to this moment
as if only for the sake of this very one
soon to be gone forever
and that my existence made no sense at all
of course!
because it was begotten in a miracle
and everything had since unfolded
and that these all were
God’s minutes,
and therefore
God’s breath, in a sense,
was blowing through my lungs
and God’s blood was
flowing through my veins,
and it was all I could do
to keep the car from literally lifting
off the road,
because it is really true,
isn’t it, that we are all alive
in miracle, nothing less?
- Scott O'Brien
I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God,
and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name.
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.
And as to you death, and you bitter hug of mortality.....it is idle to try to alarm me.
- Walt Whitman
KITES
Every thing, every sensation, every
Occurrence, common or not,
Is miracle.
Who said anything had to exist, anyway?
It is all joy,
And we are kites
Held aloft in the joy
By all that we cannot see,
Though we sense the movement that carries us,
The breath that ripples the thin paper
Of our longing.
- bSue
Here
Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face
how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be
at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration
that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.
- Grace Paley
Keeper of Last Glances
Every night under the vault of stars
Birds are lost in flight or a snake sloughs his skin,
But what if a man feels the forlorn longing
For the invisible and inconceivable realm?
Sometimes I see them, the departed
with their bearded congregation bending
In reverence or swaying like a creaky, rusty swing
filling the neighborhood with phantoms, filling up time
Like nets on empty piers like moons
in the hug of the sky appealing for permanence
A presence comes upon the blur of ground
It might be the dust of the moon in which I see
a hand in a disappearing farewell wave, eyes
of friends hovering far up in the kite-like flutter
In the twilight of last appearance when the keeper
of mortal things lets go the string.
- Richard Meyers
Beautiful poems. Rilke is a master. D.H.Lawrence exquisite.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock; but of wisdom,
no clock can measure.
All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.
Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
A dead body revenges not injuries.
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Folly is the cloak of knavery.
Shame is Pride's cloke.
Prisons are built with stones of law,
brothels with bricks of religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves,
the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword,
are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
Let man wear the fell of the lion,
woman the fleece of the sheep.
The bird a nest, the spider a web,
man friendship.
The selfish, smiling fool, and the sullen,
frowning fool shall be both thought wise,
that they may be a rod.
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit watch the roots;
the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant watch the fruits.
The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.
One thought fills immensity.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
He who has suffer'd you to impose on him, knows you.
As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Expect poison from the standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
Listen to the fool's reproach! it is a kingly title!
The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air,
the mouth of water, the beard of earth.
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow;
nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.
The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.
If others had not been foolish, we should be so.
The soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd.
When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius;
lift up thy head!
As the caterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on,
so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
Damn braces. Bless relaxes.
The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.
Prayers plow not! Praises reap not!
Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!
The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty,
the hands and feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish,
so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish'd every thing was black,
the owl that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.
Improvement makes strait roads;
but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not, nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
Enough! or too much.
- William Blake
Thank you Larry Robinson for the wonderful poems you post. If I read nothing else on Waccobb, I always read your poems. As to Highway One by O'brien, he'd better take a good look now because soon that natural setting will be overtaken by vineyards as the rest of Sonoma Coounty has been over the past 30 years.Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
The Rhythm of Each
I think each comfort we manage-
each holding in the night, each opening
of a wound, each closing of a wound, each
pulling of a splinter or razored word, each
fever sponged, each dear thing given
to someone in greater need-each
passes on the kindness we've known.
For the human sea is made of waves
that mount and merge till the way a
nurse rocks a child is the way that child
all grown rocks the wounded, and how
the wounded, allowed to go on, rock
strangers who in their pain
don't seem so strange.
Eventually, the rhythm of kindness
is how we pray and suffer by turns,
and if someone were to watch us
from inside the lake of time, they
wouldn't be able to tell if we are
dying or being born.
- Mark Nepo