People Like Us

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There are more like us. All over the world

There are confused people, who can't remember

The name of their dog when they wake up, and people

Who love God but can't remember where

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He was when they went to sleep.  It's

All right.  The world cleanses itself this way.

A wrong number occurs to you in the middle

Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

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To save the house.  And the second-story man

Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,

And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief

Goes back to college.  Even in graduate school,

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You can wander into the wrong classroom,

And hear great poems lovingly spoken

By the wrong professor.  And you find your soul,

And greatness has a defender, and even in death

you're safe.

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Robert Bly

for James Wright

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Words the Dreamer Spoke to my Father in Maine

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Ocean light as we wake reminds us how dark

Our old house is.  That's home.  Like Hamlet,

One visit to Wittenberg is enough, and we'll soon be

Back in crazy Denmark.  I dreamt I stood

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In a machine shop; my dead father stands beside me.

We talk, but his eyes remain on my chest.

I say to him for the first him:"Oh look at me

When we talk." I could see cubbyholes

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With dark tools, and a rough floor stained with oil.

Clotted windows, cobwebs, a black vise.

But sunlight outside our windows speaks of ocean

Light, bone light, Labrador light, prairie light.

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It's the same light that glints off swords, and shines

From Idaho rivers some days, and from the thin

Face just before death. I say to my father,

"We could be there if we could lift our eyes."

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~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

photo by Kathleen Connally

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But the silence in the mind

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence

we call God.  This is the deep 

calling to deep of the psalm-

writer, the bottomless ocean

We launch the armada of

our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins;

that calls us out over our 

own fathoms.  What to do

but draw a little nearer to

such ubiquity by remaining still?

~ R. S. Thomas

calmly and smoothly

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The soul, then, being thus inwardly recollected in God or before God,

 now and then becomes so sweetly attentive to the goodness of her well-beloved,

that her attention seems not to her to be attention, so purely and delicately is it exercised;

 as it happens to certain rivers, which glide so calmly and smoothly 

that beholders and such as float upon them, seem neither to see nor feel any motion,

 because the waters are not seen to ripple or flow at all.

 

 

~ Saint Francis de Sales

from An Introduction to the Devout Life

 

 

The spring woods hastening now

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The spring woods hastening now

To overshadow him,

He's passing in to where

He can't see out.  It charms

Mere eyesight to believe

The nearest thing not trees

Is the sky, into which 

The trees reach, opening

Their luminous new leaves.

Burdened only by 

A weightless shawl of shade

The lighted leaves let fall,

He seems to move within

A form unpatterned to 

His eye or mind, design

Betokened to his thought

By leafshapes tossed about.

Ways untranslatable

To human tongue or hand

Seem tangled here, and yet

Are brought to light, are brought

To life, and thought finds rest

Beneath a brightened tree

In which, unseen, a warbler

Feeds and sins.  His song's

Small shapely melody

Comes down irregularly,

As all light's givings come.

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~ Wendell Berry
photo by Kathleen Connally

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the light changes

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Can I see the buds that are swelling 

in the woods on the slopes

on the far side of the valley? I can't,

of course, nor can I see 

the twinleafs and anemones

that are blooming over there

bright-scattered above the dead

leaves.  But the swelling buds

and little blossoms make

a new softness in the light

that is visible all the way here.

The trees, the hills that were stark

in the old cold become now

tender, and the light changes.

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~ Wendell Berry

Given

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Song of the Barren Orange Tree

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Woodcutter.

Cut my shadow from me.

Free me from the torment 

of seeing myself without fruit.

Why was I born among mirrors?

The day walks in circles around me,

and the night copies me

in all its stars.

I want to live without seeing myself.

And I will dream that ants

and thistleburrs are my

leaves and my birds.

Woodcutter.

Cut my shadow from me.

Free me from the torment

of seeing myself without fruit.

~ Federico Garcia Lorca

from The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca

translated by W.S. Merwin

Things to Think

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Think in ways you've never thought before.

If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message

Larger than anything you've ever heard,

Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

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Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,

Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose

Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers

A child of your own whom you've never seen.

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When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about

To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,

Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's

Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

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~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

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the essence of beauty

You know when you see something like a marvelous mountain against the blue sky, the vivid, bright, clear, unpolluted snow, the majesty of it drives all your thoughts, your concerns, your problems away.  Have you noticed that?  You say, 'How beautiful it is', and for two seconds perhaps, or for even a minute, you are absolutely silent.  The grandeur of it drives away for that second, the pettiness of ourselves.  So that immensity has taken us over.  Like a child occupied with an intricate toy for an hour; he won't talk, he won't make any noise, he is completely absorbed in that.  The toy has absorbed him.  So the mountain absorbs you and therefore for the second, or the minute, you are absolutely quiet, which means there is no self.  Now, without being absorbed by something - either a toy, a mountain, a face, or an idea - to be completely without the me in oneself, is the essence of beauty.

J. Krishnamurti

from a talk in Saanen, July 18th 1978

My Doubts on Going to Visit a New Friend

I'm glad that a white horse grazes in that meadow

Outside your kitchen window; even when it rains

There's still someone there.  And it rains often

In the mountains.

I have to ask myself what kind of friend I can be.

You'll want to know whether I do dishes,

Or know my share of stories, or any Wallace

Stevens poems be heart.

I know that I won't talk all the time, or steal

Money, or complain about my room,

Or undermine you, or speak disparagingly

Of your family.

I am afraid there'll be a moment when 

I fail you, friend; I will turn slightly

Away, our eyes will not meet, and out in the field

There will be no one.

Robert Bly

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talkers

There's something dangerous

In being with good talkers.

The fly's stories of his ancestors

Don't mean much to the frog.

I can't be the noisy person I am

If you don't stop talking.

Some people talk so brilliantly

That we get small and vanish.

The shadows near that Dutch woman

Tell you that Rembrandt is a good listener.

Robert Bly

Visiting Sand Island

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Somebody showed off and tried to tell the truth

And drank wine and went to bed.  Someone 

Woke in the night and wanted his children

To walk in the grass on this island under the stars.

Someone was lucky.  Someone had eyes and found

Stars.  Someone had feet and found grass.

Someone loved thought, and knew things to learn.

Someone could turn in the river and go up or down.

Someone thought he was unlucky, thought he didn't try

To tell the truth.  Someone thought his head was dark.

Someone tried to feel as bad as others did; someone

Flapped along the ground to draw the fox to him.

Tell him, friends, that the nest is now gone;

Tell him the little twigs are all dispersed.

Tell him all he has to do is walk under stars.

Tell him the fox has long since eaten his dinner.

Robert Bly

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For Ruth

There's a graceful way of doing things. Birch branches

Curve slightly upward; or the wind brings a few

snowflakes down, and then joins the night;

Or you leave me a sprig of chervil and no more.

Each morning we have this new chance.  We can walk

A few steps behind the others down the mountain;

We can enter a conversation as if we were blessed,

Not insisting on our old way of gaining pity.

There's a way you have of knowing what another

May need ahead of time, before the party

Begins, as smoke sometimes disappears

Downward among branches.  And I've learned

From you this new way of letting a poem be.

Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

detachment from the world

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Confusion arises because certain spiritual teachings say that detachment from the world is necessary for enlightenment.  The concept of detachment can be confused with release from pain, a way of numbing so that you don't have to experience the pains of life.  If you are not willing to fully experience the pains of love, the pains of the heart breaking open, then you close your heart in the name of comfort and control, even in the name of enlightenment.

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Give up every idea of detachment, and experience your detachment fully.  Experience the pain and the beauty of attachment, and the grief as what you are attached to is ripped away.  Then you will recognize what can never be detached, what is not some stoic, unfeeling, unemotional, inhuman existence, but what is freely and consciously all of it.

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~ Gangaji

from: the Diamond in your Pocket

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One of the Butterflies

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The trouble with pleasure is the timing

it can overtake me without warning

and be gone before I know it is here

it can stand facing me unrecognized

while I am remembering somewhere else

in another age or someone not seen

for years and never to be seen again

in this world and it seems that I cherish

only now a joy I was not aware of

when it was here although it remains

out of reach and will not be caught or named

or called back and if I could make it stay

as I want to it would turn into pain

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W.S. Merwin

from: The Shadow of Sirius

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