lighthouse

Its vision sweep its one path

like a aged monk raking a garden,

his question long ago answered or moved on.

Far off, night-grazing horses,

breath scented with oat grass and fennel,

step through it, disappear, step through it, disappear.

~ Jane Hirshfield

From Taos to Gallup and Canyon de Chelly

.

.

You still come to me like a fresh lover

Woman of brown and pale pink

I should have left everything for you

should have gone so deep into your heart

I'd get lost in yellow aspen leaves

stand on the straw of your autumn

.

I should never have taken another lover

I should have walked your hills

till my soles burned

till the sky, that old dwarf,

opened its secrets

till someone stopped whispering your name 1,000 miles away

.

~ Natalie Goldberg

painting, Abstract at Ghost Ranch,  by the author

.

.

Into this world

.

.

Let us die gracefully into this world

like a leaf pressed in stone

let us go quietly breathing our last breath

let  the sun continue to revolve in its great golden dance

let us leave it be as it is

and not hold on 

not even to the moon

tipped as it will be tonight 

and beckoning wildly in the sea

.

~ Natalie Goldberg

.

somewhere i have never traveled

.

.

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will enclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of you eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain,has such small hands

.

e. e. cummings

.

the simple truth

.

And this is the simple truth - 

that to live is to feel oneself lost. 

He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, 

to be on firm ground. 

Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, 

he will look around for something to which to cling, 

and that tragic, ruthless glance,

absolutely sincere, 

because it is a question of his salvation,

will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. 

These are the only genuine ideas; 

the ideas of the shipwrecked.

All the rest is rhetoric, 

posturing, farce.

.

- Søren Kierkegaard

.

no more real than is a cinematograph film

The human being may be no more real than is a cinematograph film. 

When the projected light is switched off all that remains is a blank screen. 

That which has been projected by light was a series of 'stills'.

Such also is what is being projected by 'life'. 

The more you consider the analogy 

the more perfect it seems to be: it could help us to understand.

~ Wei Wu Wei

The flower invites the butterfly

.

.

The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind;

The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind.

The flower opens, the butterfly comes;

The butterfly comes, the flower opens.

I don’t know others,

Others don’t know me.

By not-knowing 

we follow nature’s course

.

~ Ryokan

.

Instant Glimpsable Only for an Instant

.

Moment. Moment. Moment.

- equal inside you, moment,

the velocitous mountains and cities rising and falling,

songs of children, iridescence even of beetles.

It is not you the locust can strip of all leaf.

Untouchable green at the center,

the wolf too lopes past you and through you as he eats.

Insult to mourn you, you who mourn no one, unable.

Without transformation,

yours the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens.

The living step forward: choosing to enter, to lose.

I, who am made of you only,

speak these words against your unmasterable instruction -

A knife cannot cut itself open,

yet you ask me both to be you and to know you.

~ Jane Hirshfield

To my granddaughters

.

To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust

Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin

Now you know the worst

we humans have to know

about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.

To those of our bodies given

without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer

but loving one another,

even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:

when a man of war becomes a man of peace,

he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.

When a man of peace is killed

by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.

If you will have the courage for love,

you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered

for peace. It will be

your light.

~ Wendell Berry

from: A Timbered Choir

I Am Completely Different

I am completely different.

Though I am wearing the same tie as yesterday,

am as poor as yesterday,

as good for nothing as yesterday,

today

I am completely different.

Though I am wearing the same clothes,

am as drunk as yesterday,

living as clumsily as yesterday, nevertheless

today

I am completely different.

Ah ...

I patiently close my eyes

on all the grins and smirks

on all the twisted smiles and horse laughs---

and glimpse then, inside me

one beautiful white butterfly

fluttering towards tomorrow.

~ Kuroda Saburo

so small

With strokes that ring clear and metallic, the hour
to touch me bends down on its way:
my senses are quivering. I feel I've the power-
and I seize on the pliable day.

Not a thing was complete till by me it was eyed,
every kind of becoming stood still.
Now my glances are ripe and there comes like a bride
to each of them just what it will.

There's nothing so small but I love it and choose
to paint it gold-groundly and great
and hold it most precious and know not whose
soul it may liberate...




~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The Weighing

The heart's reasons

seen clearly,

even the hardest

will carry

its whip-marks and sadness

and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved

eland forgives

the drought-starved lion

who finally takes her,

enters willingly then

the life she cannot refuse,

and is lion, is fed,

and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

~ Jane Hirshfield

There is a solitude of space

.

.

There is a solitude of space, 

A solitude of sea, 

A solitude of death, but these 

Society shall be, 

Compared with that profounder site, 

That polar privacy, 

A Soul admitted to Itself: 

Finite Infinity.

.

~  Emily Dickinson

.

Just look

.

.

"Just look down the road and tell me if you can see either of them.”

.

“I see nobody on the road” said Alice.

.

“I only wish I had such eyes to see Nobody! And at such a distance too!”

.

~  Lewis Carroll, from:

 'Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There'

.

reblogged from: http://saturnrising.tumblr.com/

.

A hand

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,

not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,

not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines

with their infinite dramas,

nor what it has written,

not on the page,

not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping--

not sponge of rising yeast-bread,

not rotor pin's smoothness,

not ink.

The maple's green hands do not cup

the proliferant rain.

What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

~  Jane Hirshfield