what difference

Some time when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made. Ask me whether

what I have done is my life. Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt: ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait. We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

~ William Stafford
from Ask Me

what is happening

Instant to instant

we ask, what is happening?

The sound of shattering everywhere,

is it the world, fragmenting at last,

or our own hearts cracking,

the final break-up of ice?

~ Dorothy Walters

from Marrow of Flame

how much

~  Beth Cioffoletti
 louie louie blog

this moment this love

This moment this love comes to rest in me,

many beings in one being.

In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.

Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars.

Listen, if you can stand to.

Union with the friend

means not being who you have been,

being instead silence, a place,

a view where language is inside seeing.

From the wet source

someone cuts a reed to make a flute

The reed sips breath like wine,

sips more, practicing. Now drunk,

it starts the high clear notes.

There is a path from me to you

that I am constantly looking for,

so I try to keep clear and still

as water does with the moon.

We do not have to follow the pressure-flow of wanting.

We can be led by the guide.

Wishes may or may not come true

in this house of disappointment.

Let's push the door open together and leave.

My essence is like the essence of a red wine.

My body is a cup that grieves because it is inside time.

Glass after glass of wine go into my head.

Finally, my head goes into the wine.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

from The Big Red Book

A clear midnight

This is thy hour O soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

~ Walt Whitman

the wild earth

Even through these trivial crowded days,

I never lose sight of the wild earth on which I live,

of the ravishing perfection of its beauty.

I stand before infinity and look out over a virgin wilderness.

The potential for reproducing fragments

of this in a form worthy of it are endless.

~ Harlan Hubbard

from his journal, January 15, 1987

silent journal

Inaudible consonant inaudible vowel 

The word continues to fall 

in splendor around us 

Window half shadow window half moon 

back yard like a book of snow 

That holds nothing and that nothing holds 

Immaculate text 

not too prescient not too true

~ Charles Wright

from Xionia

forgetting words

A water egret planes down like a page of blank paper

Toward the edge of the noon sky.

Let me, like him, find an island of white reeds

To settle down on, under the wind, forgetting words.

~ Charles Wright

 from T’ang Notebook,
 The Other Side of the River: Poems

it is

Almost noon, the meadow 

Waiting for someone to change it into an other. Not me. 

The horses, Monte and Littlefoot, 

Like it the way it is. 

And this morning, so do I.

~ Charles Wright

from Lightfoot

the night watch

Outdoors, like a false morning,

 Fog washes the pine trees. It 

 Shoulders against the windows,

 Spreading across their surface

 On its way upward. In this 

 Moment between sleep and thought 

 This holding back, I can hear 

 The fog start to rise, the slow 

 Memory of an ocean, 

 And I, like a ship, begin 

 To stir, to lurch in its swell, 

 And to move outward, beyond 

 The steel jetty, the lighthouse, 

 The red-flagged channel buoys,

 --Beyond, at last, sleep even--

 Into a deeper water,

 Pale, oracular, its waves

 Motionless, seagulls absent. 

~ Charles Wright

art by andrew wyeth

wind

There is an otherness inside us 

We never touch, 

no matter how far down our hands reach. 

It is the past, 

with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ... 

Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it 

Year after year, 

But who can ever remember enough?

...

The life of this world is wind 

Windblown we come, and windblown we go away. 

All that we look on is windfall. 

All we remember is wind.

~ Charles Wright

from The Southern Cross

open

What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can-opener in his hand, wondering where to begin - to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.

I know it because I feel so marvelous myself most of the time. And when I feel that way everybody seems marvelous … everybody and everything … even pebbles and pieces of cardboard … a match stick lying in the gutter . . . anything . . . a goat's beard, if you like. That's what I want to write about … and then we're all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is.

~ Henry Miller

from Sexus