circus animals

Bears are stomping in perfect time.

A lion jumps through flaming hoops.

A whip cracks and the music grinds.

A monkey rides a bike in a yellow suit.

A whip cracks and the animals turn their glance.

Dogs dance in carefully measured movements.

An elephant walks with a pitcher in perfect balance.

Myself, I'm quite embarrassed, I, a human.

People didn't enjoy themselves that day.

You wouldn't know it from the clapping hands

though one hand elongated by a whip

cast a striking shadow on the sand.

~Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translation by Joanna Trzeciak

the end and the beginning

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won't

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired 

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs, 

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag a girder

to prop up a wall,

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,

and takes years,

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about 

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

 sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here 

must make way for 

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translation by Joanna Trzeciak

the frogs after dark

I am so much in love with mournful music

That I don't bother to look for violinists.

The aging peepers satisfy me for hours.

The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet.

The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.

The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion.

Bears are often piled up close to each other.

In caves of bears, it's just one hump

After another, and there is no one to sort it out.

You and I have spent so many hours working.

We have paid dearly for the life we have.

It's all right if we do nothing tonight.

We've heard the fiddlers tuning their old fiddles,

And the singer urging the low notes to come.

We've heard her trying to keep the dawn from breaking.

There is some slowness in life that is right for us.

But we love to remember the way the soul leaps

Over and over into the lonely heavens.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the ear of a Donkey

coursera

~ Daphne Koller

co-creator of Coursera

childhood

It would be good to give much thought, before

you try to find words for something so lost,

for those long childhood afternoons you knew

that vanished so completely - and why?

We're still reminded - : sometimes by a rain,

but we can no longer say what it means;

life was never again so filled with meeting,

with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us

except what happens to things and creatures:

we lived their world as something human,

and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd

and as overburdened by vast distances,

and summoned and stirred as from far away,

and slowly, like a long new thread,

introduced into that picture-sequence

where now having to go on bewilders us. 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

photo by kathleen connally

every atom babbles the mystery

Love plays its lute behind the screen -

where is a lover to listen to its tune?

With every breath a new song,

each split second a new string plucked.

The world has spilled Love's secret -

when could music ever hold its tongue?

Every atom babbles the mystery -

Listen yourself, for I'm no tattletale!

~ Fakhruddin Iraqi

from Divine Flashes 

translation by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson

art by van gogh

a christmas poem

Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where all agree

To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for horses;

All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place

As children, but we never heard the good stories.

Those stories only get told in the big tents, late

At night, when a trapper who has been caught

In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a man

With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of the fire.

As children we knew there was more to it—

Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve

Wasn't explained, nor why we were so often 

Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,

Why so much was lost. Those men and women

Who had died in wars started by others,

Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas tree

Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we

Have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er 

The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not

Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

two water-sellers

A man who lived by selling water found

He'd very little left; he looked around

And saw another water-seller there -

"Have you got any water you could spare?"

He asked.  "No, fool, I certainly have not,"

The other snapped; "make do with what you've got!"

"Oh, give me some," the man began to plead;

"I'm sick of what I have; it's yours I need."

When Adam's heart grew tired of all he knew,

He yearned for wheat, a substance strange and new -

He gave up all he owned for one small grain,

And naked suffered love's relentless pain;

He disappeared in love's intensity -

The old and new were gone and so was he;

He was annihilated, lost, made naught -

Nothingness swallowed all his hands had sought.

To turn from what we are, to yearn and die

Is not for us to choose or to deny."

~ Farid Attar

from The Conference of Birds

art by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez

change?

If something has an essence -

How can it ever change

Into anything else?

A thing doesn't change into something else -

Youth does not age,

Age does not age.

If something changed into something else -

Milk would be butter

Or butter would not be milk.

Were there a trace of something,

There would be a trace of emptiness.

Were there no trace of anything,

There would be no trace of emptiness.

Buddhas say emptiness

Is relinquishing opinions.

Believers in emptiness

Are incurable. 

~ Nagarjuna

from Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime

translated by Stephen Batchelor 
art by klimt

the answer

Then what is the answer?—Not to be deluded by dreams. 

To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, 

and their tyrants come, many times before. 

When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose 

the least ugly faction; these evils are essential. 

To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not 

wish for evil; and not be duped 

By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will 

not be fulfilled. 

To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear 

the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand 

Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and 

his history...for contemplation or in fact... 

Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, 

the greatest beauty is 

Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, 

the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man 

Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, 

or drown in despair when his days darken.

~ Robinson Jeffers

with thanks to http://themarkonthewall.blogspot.com/

on grief and loss

~ Dr. Geoff Warburton

by looking tirelessly

By looking tirelessly, I became quite empty 

and with that emptiness all came back to me except the mind. 

I find I have lost the mind irretrievably. 

I am neither conscious nor unconscious, 

I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions.

Distinctions are created by the mind and apply to the mind only. 

I am pure Consciousness itself, unbroken awareness of all that is. 

I am in a more real state than yours. 

I am undistracted by the distinctions and separations which constitute a person. 

As long as the body lasts, it has its needs like any other, 

but my mental process has come to an end. 

My thinking, like my digestion, is unconscious and purposeful. 

I am not a person in your sense of the word, 

though I may appear a person to you. 

I am that infinite ocean of consciousness in which all happens. 

I am also beyond all existence and cognition, pure bliss of being. 

There is nothing I feel separate from, hence I am all. 

No thing is me, so I am nothing. 

Life will escape, the body will die, but it will not affect me in the least. 

Beyond space and time I am, uncaused, uncausing, yet the very matrix of existence.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

with thanks to http://ashramof1.tumblr.com/

photo by Bea Garth

handy guide

Avoid adjectives of scale.

Dandelion broth instead of duck soup.

Don’t even think you've seen a meadow, ever.

The minor adjustments in our equations

still indicate the universe is insane,

when it laughs a silk dress comes out its mouth

but we never put it on. Put it on.

Cry often and while asleep.

If it’s raw, forge it in fire.

That’s not a mountain, that’s crumble.

If it’s fire, swallow.

The heart of a scarecrow isn't geometrical.

That’s not a diamond, it’s salt.

That’s not the sky but it’s not your fault.

My dragon may be your neurotoxin.

Your electrocardiogram may be my fortune cookie.

Once an angel has made an annunciation,

it’s impossible to tell him he has the wrong address.

Moonlight has its own befuddlements.

The rest of us can wear the wolf mask if we want

or look like reflections wandered off.

Eventually armor, eventually sunk.

You wanted love and expected what?

A parachute? Morphine? A gold sticker star?

The moment you were born—

you have to trust others because you weren't there.

Ditto death.

The strongest gift I was ever given

was made of twigs.

It didn't matter which way it broke.

~ Dean Young

from Poetry, Nov. 2011

art by van gogh

like two negative numbers multiplied by rain

Lie down, you are horizontal.

Stand up, you are not.

I wanted my fate to be human.

Like a perfume

that does not choose the direction it travels,

that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.

Yes, No, Or

—a day, a life, slips through them,

taking off the third skin,

taking off the fourth.

And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple,

an animal question, scuffing.

Old shoes, old roads—

the questions keep being new ones.

Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain

into oranges and olives.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from September 2012 issue of Poetry magazine

known and unknown, intensity, surprise, and disorder

I think I’m allergic to fixed ritual, when it comes to poetry—writing, for me, both needs and constellates big doses of freedom. I do have one habit: somewhere along the way, I developed a liking for writing on the back of torn-in-half sheets of already-used paper. There’s always a little stack by the bed. Even before that, it was always loose paper, not notebooks. My one requirement for writing has always been solitude, and I think it is somehow connected to a sense of privacy from childhood. I've always wanted the freedom to throw things away. A notebook feels to me like a little society, not a scattering of hermits. For me, it’s too self-aware of its own formal purpose, like a graveyard: a good place for the finished, not for conception. This feeling about notebooks is also somehow a metonym for my whole relationship to the act of writing. Creativity comes from some mixture of known and unknown, intensity, surprise, and disorder. The disorderliness makes the intensity permeable to the surprise.

~ Jane Hirshfield

 from Attention, Solitude, and First Books: 

Jane Hirshfield in Conversation