Year’s end,
all corners
of this floating world, swept.
— Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694), “Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter.” Translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto
Notes:
No opera, no gilded columns, no wine-dark seats…
no altos, no basses
and violins sobbing as one; no opera house,
no museum, no actual theatre, no civic center–
and what else? Only the huge doors of clouds
with the setting disc through which we leave and enter…
No masterpieces in huge frames to worship,
on such banalities has life been spent
in brightness, and yet there are the days
when every street corner rounds itself into
a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase,
canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue…
So much to do still, all of it praise.
~ Derek Walcott, from “No Opera” in White Egrets
Notes:
Notes:
A cardinal, the very essence of red, stabs
the hedgerow with his piercing notes;
a chickadee adds three short beats,
part of the percussion section, and a white-
throated sparrow moves the melody along…
And today, the sun, waiting for its cue,
comes out from the clouds for a short sweet
solo, then sits back down, rests between turns.
On the other side of the world, night’s black
bass fiddle rosins its bow, draws it over
the strings, resonates with the breath
of sleepers, animal, vegetable, human.
All the world breathes in, breathes out.
It hums, it throbs, it improvises. So many voices.
Only one song.
~ Barbara Crooker, from “One Song. After Rumi” in Line Dance
Photo credit: via your eyes blaze out. Poem: Beyond the Fields We Know
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and
changing everything carefully
– E. E. Cummings, from “Spring is like a perhaps hand” in The Complete Poems: 1904-1962
Notes: Poem – Thank you Whiskey River. Photo: Floating by Chris A (Ain, Rhone-Alpes, France)
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~ Mary Oliver (Sept 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019), “Summer”
In her poem “When Death Comes,” Oliver wrote this about the inevitable: “When it’s over, I want to say all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement.”
(Source: NPR – Beloved Poet Mary Oliver, Who Believed Poetry ‘Mustn’t Be Fancy,’ Dies At 83)
Photo Credit
A poet is someone
Who can pour Light into a spoon,
Then raise it
To nourish
Your beautiful, parched holy mouth.
~ Hafiz, “Your Beautiful, Parched Holy Mouth” in I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy: Renderings of Hafiz (Penguin, 2006)
Notes:
Carrying a day
is like carrying a mountain,
Brooding over your own horizon
those endless small words
The silence at the end of sentences.
Come to the bank
Breathe the snow
Put your day down
– Terrance Keenan, excerpted and edited from “Lullaby of Crossing the River” in St. Nadie in Winter
Notes: Poem via The Vale of Soul Making. Photo by Patty Maher (The Quiet Storm).
What is silence?
Something of the sky in us.
~ Ilya Kaminsky, from “Deaf Republic: 1,” Poetry
Notes: Poem – The Vale of the Soulmaking. Photo: John White with Blue Sky with small clouds (Eyre Peninsula, Port Lincoln, South Australia, Australia)
When the night slides under with the last dimming star
and the red sky lightens between the trees,
and the heron glides tipping heavy wings in the river,
when crows stir and cry out their harsh joy,
and swift creatures of the night run toward their burrows,
and the deer raises her head and sniffs the freshening air,
and the shadows grow more distinct and then shorten,
then we rise into the day still clean as new snow.
The cat washes its paw and greets the day with gratitude.
Every day we find a new sky and a new earth
with which we are trusted like a perfect toy…
We are given the wind within us, the breath
to shape into words that steal time…
Yet holy breath still stretches our lungs to sing.
We are lent for a time these minerals in water
and a morning every day, a morning to wake up,
rejoice and praise life in our spines, our throats,
our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues…
We are given passion to rise
like the sun in our minds with the new day
and burn the debris of habit and greed and fear.
We stand in the midst of the burning world
primed to burn with compassionate love and justice,
to turn inward and find holy fire at the core,
to turn outward and see the world that is all
of one flesh with us, see under the trash, through
the smog, the furry bee in the apple blossom,
the trout leaping, the candles our ancestors lit for us…
Let silence still us so you may show us your shining
and we can out of that stillness rise and praise.
~ Marge Piercy, from “Nishmat in “Available Light
Notes: Poem – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: Marta Navarro
Some days are like this:
you can’t move.
Can’t be moved.
What growth there is, is imperceptible.
A slow efflorescence.
— Thomas Centolella, from “Setsubun”, in Terra Firma
Notes:
“I like things I can see as much as things I can’t (see)…that inner light was drawing me in.”
It was an innocuous line by Murakami in Killing Commendatore, but for some reason I couldn’t, I can’t, let it go.
And then it’s Baader-Meinhof. You are shopping for a new car, you fall in love with a particular model, and then suddenly you begin to see it everywhere. But the what is what I can’t see.
Murakami is followed by a passage I read by Immanuel Kant:
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”
And it’s early Saturday morning. Light rain.
I’m in bed, it’s dark out. The body is spent from the week. The Mind is off on its own, its finger tips touching, exploring, wandering, free, weightless. [Read more…]
Angels are wonderful but they are so, well, aloof.
It’s what I sense in the mud and the roots of the
trees, or the well, or the barn, or the rock with
its citron map of lichen that halts my feet and
makes my eyes flare, feeling the presence of some
spirit, some small god, who abides there.
If I were a perfect person, I would be bowing
continuously.
I’m not, though I pause wherever I feel this
holiness, which is why I’m so often late coming
back from wherever I went.
Forgive me.
~ Mary Oliver, “Forgive Me” in Blue Horses
Sources: Poem – Thank you Whiskey River. Photo – Lichen by Mathieu Noël
Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening,
hear what I say with eyes open inward,
asleep with all five senses awake, rain, light steps,
a murmuring of syllables,
air and water, words without weight.
— Octavio Paz, “As One Listens To The Rain“ in A Tree Within
Notes: Quote via korraled. Gif via Your Eyes Blaze Out
Iron couplers connect railcars. One to the next, to the next. Synchronicity? Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon?
Terri Gross interviews Leonard Cohen‘s Son, Adam, on a NPR: Fresh Air podcast titled “Leonard Cohen The Poet, Writer, And Father where he talks about his Father: “He was preoccupied with the brokenness of things, the asymmetry of things, as he says forget your perfect offering…or as in his song Anthem…Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
I turn the page in Haruki Murakami’s new novel Killing Commendatore and the title of Chapter 4 flashes and sticks: “From a Distance, Most Things Look Beautiful.”
I’m running to Stamford Cove Park. Off in the distance, a man grips three leashes, two small, white dogs of the same breed on his left (Rat Terriers?), and a larger Mix (Rescue?) on the right.
I approach.
I’m drawn to Mix. All four legs move sideways and forward, a Half Pass dressage. A defect. I slow to follow the pack from a few yards back, the Terriers pull on the leashes, the mix struggles to keep up.
The Mind calls up a passage by Tom Hennen that I came across earlier in the week: “I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their sameness. That each thing on earth has its own soul, its own life, that each tree, each clod is filled with the mud of its own star.” [Read more…]
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us…breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little.
~Denise Levertov, from “Sojourns in the Parallel World” in The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov
Notes: Poem from Make Believe Boutique; Photo by Coleman Guyon
7:28 a.m. Boarding time: 7:52 a.m. Amtrak to Philadelphia. Rocky Balboa. Eagles. Flyers. Liberty Bell. Cheesesteak Sandwiches.
I’m waiting at the Stamford train station, sitting on a hardback plastic seat. So hard, you could substitute it for Kevlar. Lower back, displeased with status. I shift, restless.
To my left and across, two men, middle aged, hard hats on floor, work boots, unshaven – sit and discuss his work injury…hurt so bad…Percocet…Morphine…Floating. Both chuckle.
Across from me, large man, head bobbing, mouth gaping, asleep.
Passengers pass by through the automatic doors to Tracks 2 & 4. The doors hiss, at each open and close.
My eye spots movement below. A centipede. (And I’m not interested in you Entomologists out there telling me that it’s not a centipede. Where’s the 100 feet? We’re going with Centipede.)
Back to my Friend.
His legs are flailing. Turtle on its back, issuing an SOS distress signal. I watch it struggle for a few minutes and then turn away. I flip through emails.
Can’t focus. Distracted. Anxious…must be Centi’s anxiety transference. “Help me DK!”
I look around to see if anyone is watching. Then when I’ve established the coast is clear, I reach down and gently try to flip him. He sees a Giant: Danger! He rolls into a tightly, tucked black ball.
I grab my iPhone recognizing that there’s a story here. I’m 9 snaps in. Fuzzy shots. Too far away. Too close. Blurry. I look up and see the Percocet Boys are now watching. What’s that Idiot Suit doing?
I wait for him to unravel, my head is down, eyes are locked in. Please, unravel, and do so with 100 feet down.
I wait. [Read more…]
Notes:
Sunday morning. 6:15 a.m. Driver is racing down I-95 in light traffic. What’s the rush?
Destination: JFK. On Sunday.
There is something unpleasant at its core about cutting your weekend in half, to fly across the country to get to a conference kick-off on Sunday evening. My weekend (Not). A large paddle wheeler, turning, turning, turning, wooden paddles slapping against the water, pausing briefly when the rhythm is broken by a swell.
There’ll be no sleeping in. No lounging in bed. No CBS Sunday Morning with Jane. There’ll be no Sunday morning papers. No pancake breakfast. No Netflix binge watching. No dozing off on the couch under the comforter, windows open, strands of cool breezes welcoming Autumn.
Thoughts alternate between irritation (did you really need to commit to attend this conference) to mild irritation (you could have left on Monday) to resignation (make the best of it pal, a commitment is a commitment).
I open my backpack, pull out my iPad, and find it’s 13% charged. No! No! No! I Swear I plugged this thing in last night. I walk around Gate 24, and then 25 and find an open power outlet at Gate 26. [Read more…]
Early evening. Heat shimmers from the asphalt. I stand waiting for the Don’t Walk sign to turn…I’m three blocks from the entrance to Grand Central and my Metro North train ride home. Hulking skyscrapers, mid-town Manhattan Gods, offer shade, a welcome cover to a day that needs to end. You are spent.
And…as I stand waiting, here they come. Non consecutive lines from the Keats’ sonnet Bright Star…
The moving waters at their priestlike task…
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell
And why Keats? Why this poem? Why these lines? Why now? What algorithm upstairs decides it’s time for this? Here on 42nd Street, so far from the glacial waters of Home, so many galaxies from The Rockies, so many months from snow. Yet, and somehow, and for some reason, it’s pulled up.
I feel the pillowy softness of snow in August, and the cool melt of crystals on my tongue. And I’m swept away, miles from the cacophony of horns, engines, tourists and the sweltering August heat.
The light turns. I walk. I cross the street and the smell of fried chicken fills my lungs…I inhale deeply…tantalizing. Keats’ grip on me vaporizes. [Read more…]
Live & Learn 