Standing Deer

As the house of a person

in age sometimes grows cluttered

with what is

too loved or too heavy to part with,

the heart may grow cluttered.

And still the house will be emptied,

and still the heart.

As the thoughts of a person

in age sometimes grow sparer,

like a great cleanness come into a room,

the soul may grow sparer;

one sparrow song carves it completely.

And still the room is full,

and still the heart.

Empty and filled,

like the curling half-light of morning,

in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,

like the curling half-light of evening,

in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Beloved, what can be, what was,

will be taken from us.

I have disappointed.

I am sorry. I knew no better.

A root seeks water.

Tenderness only breaks open the earth.

This morning, out the window,

the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.

~ Jane Hirschfield

(The Lives of the Heart)

Lute Music

.

The Earth will be going on a long time

Before it finally freezes;

Men will be on it; they will take names,

Give their deeds reasons.

We will be here only

As chemical constituents—

A small franchise indeed.

Right now we have lives,

Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,

Like everybody had once—

Here at the year's end, at the feast

Of birth, let us bring to each other

The gifts brought once west through deserts—

The precious metal of our mingled hair,

The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,

The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—

Let us celebrate the daily

Recurrent nativity of love,

The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,

While the earth rolls away under us

Into unknown snows and summers,

Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

~ Kenneth Rexroth

(Sacramental Acts)

Jacob's Dream

(After the painting Jacob's Dream by William Blake and Genesis 28: 11-17)

A young man leaving home 

For long years to be gone

Might fall asleep and dream,

His head upon a stone.

A stair appears that bends

In spiral toward the light,

The bright Orb where it ends,

Though he sleeps through the night,

Darkened, below the stars.

Angel in constant motion 

Walk up and down the stairs.

Delight and clear devotion

Make graceful all they do.

The light and dark are bound,

Heaven to all below,

Bright stair and stony ground

In on light joined. In sleep

The dreamer wakes. He sees 

Above the stars the deep

Of Heaven opened. Is

He living, then, his part

Of Heaven's earthly life?

And what shall be the art

By which this sight can live?

Darkened upon the earth, 

He fills with light, is made

A witness to high Truth

And so a man afraid.

His land - this meager sod,

These stones, this low estate -

Is the household of God.

And it is Heaven's gate.

~ Wendell Berry

Sabbaths 2004, I

They come singly

.

.

They come singly, the little streams,

Out of their solitude. They bear

In their rough fall a spate of gleams

That glance and dance in the morning air.

.

They come singly, and coming go

Ever downward toward the river

Into whose dark abiding flow

They come, now quieted, together.

.

In dark they mingle and are made

At one with light in highest flood

Embodied and inhabited,

The budded branch as red as blood.

.

~ Wendell Berry

Sabbaths 2004, II

.

Encounter

.

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. 

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road. 

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive, 

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going? 

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. 

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

~ Czeslaw Milosz

poetry reading

.

I'm curled into a ball

like a dog

that is cold.

Who will tell me 

why I was born,

why this monstrosity

called life.

The telephone rings.  I have to give

a poetry reading.

I enter.

A hundred people, a hundred pairs of eyes.

They look, they wait.

I am supposed to tell them

why they were born,

why there is 

this monstrosity called life.

~  Anna Swirszczynska
translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

never surrender a good question

.

.

A man tortured by doubt travels a great distance 

hoping to ask a famous teacher his question. 

 

 At first, the teacher's disciples will not allow the stranger into the study house, 

but one day he finds a way to slip in, approaches the Rebbe, and speaks:

 

 'Venerable Rebbe, forgive me for disturbing you,

 but I have traveled many weeks and waited many days

 for the chance to ask you a question 

that has troubled me all my adult life.' 

 

 'What is your question?', the teacher responds.  

 

The man asks, 'What is the essence of truth?'  

 

The Rebbe looks at his visitor for a moment, 

rises from his chair, approaches, and slaps him hard.

  Then he withdraws again to his books.

  

Shocked, the questioner retreats to a tavern across the way,

 bitterly and loudly complaining of his mistreatment.  

 

On of the teacher's disciples, overhearing, takes pity and explains:

 'The Rebbe's slap was given you in great kindness,

 to teach you this:

 

 never surrender a good question for a mere answer.'

 

 

 

 

~ Traditional Hasidic story

 

 

 

Izumi Shikibu

.

.

Watching the moon 

at midnight,

solitary, mid-sky,

I knew myself completely,

no part left out.

.

.

.

I cannot say 

which is which:

the glowing 

plum blossom is

the spring night’s moon.

.

.

.

.

It is true,

the wind blows terribly here -

but moonlight

also leaks between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

.

~ Izumi Shikibu, (974-1034)

.

She is considered by some to be the greatest woman poet of Japanese literature.

from:  Women in Praise of the Sacred, edited by Jane Hirshfield

.

until everything is continuous and whole again

.

.

First, forget what time it is for an hour.

Do it regularly every day.

Then forget what day of the week it is,

and do this regularly in company for a week.

Then forget what country you are in,

and practice doing it in company for a week,

and then do them together for a week

with as few breaks as possible.

Follow these by forgetting how to add

or to subtract.

It makes no difference.

You can change them around after a week.

Both will later help you to forget how to count.

.

Forget how to count,

starting with your own age,

starting with how to count backwards,

starting with even numbers,

with roman numerals,

starting with fractions,

with the old calendar,

going on to the alphabet,

forgetting it all until everything

is continuous and whole again.

.

~  W. S. Merwin

.

Can You Imagine

.

.

For example, what the trees do

not only in lightening storms

or the watery dark of a summer's night

or under the white nets of winter

but now, and now, and now - whenever

we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine

they don't dance, from the root up, wishing

to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting

a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly

more shade - surely you can't imagine they just

stand there loving every

minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings

of the years slowly and without a sound

thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,

and then only in its own mood, comes

to visit, surely you can't imagine

patience, and happiness, like that.

.

~ Mary Oliver 

.

.

"the mind" instead of "my mind"

.

.

Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap 

that amplified your thoughts so that everyone 

within a hundred yards of you could hear 

every thought that passed through your head. 

.

Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that 

all about you could overhear your thoughts and fantasies,

 your dreams and fears. 

.

How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? 

.

How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others?

.

 And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, 
imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide.
 And how miraculous it would be to see that all others' minds too 
were filled with the same confusion and fantasies,
 the same insecurity and doubt.
.
 How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp,
 to see through the illusion of separateness,
 to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings' minds,
 the craziness of mind itself?
.
~ Stephen and Ondrea Levine
.
Who Dies?

 .
reblogged from: http://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com/
.

Bonsai

One morning beginning to notice

which thoughts pull the spirit out of the body, and which return it.

How quietly the abandoned body keens,

like a bonsai maple surrounded by her dropped leaves.

Rain or objects call the forgotten back.

The droplets' placid girth and weight. The table's lack of ambition.

How strange it is that longing, too, becomes a small green bud,

thickening the vacant branch-length in early March.

~ Jane Hirshfield

One Life Is Spent

One life is spent, the other spends us.

Rarely, they touch -

like a cat for the first time meeting itself in a mirror.

In the world, mirrors are few.

The slightest wind dissolves them.

In a life, the moments of recognition are few.

Consciousness does not hate or love, it neither grieves nor longs.

Walking and breathing are not its nature.

It is.

Yet something passes and ends, grows wet in rain and then dries.

and the small bowl of kibble empties into a delicate, spotted paw,

a tail slightly kinked, a preference for one windowsill

over another.

~ Jane Hirshfield

you are the future

.

You are the future,

the red sky before sunrise

over the fields of time.

You are the cock's crow when night is done,

you are the dew and the bells of matins,

maiden, stranger, mother, death.

You create yourself in ever-changing shapes 

that rise from the stuff of our days---

unsung, unmourned, undescribed,

like a forest we never knew.

You are the deep innerness of all things,

the last word that can never be spoken.

To each of us you reveal yourself differently:

to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God)

.

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