the same ancient smile

.

.

Poor flowers in geometric beds

Of formal gardens:

They seem to dread the police...

And yet so fair, they flower in the same way,

With the same ancient smile

They had for the gaze of the first man

When he saw they were out

For the first time, and lightly touched them

Wondering if they spoke!

.

~ Thomas Merton

from The Keeper of the Flocks

.

Once: An Assay

.

.

Once wakes up in the morning, brews coffee, 

goes outside in its bathrobe to bring the paper from the street.

Once notices the day is possible rain.

.

At the same time, Once is lightly climbing a tree, a tall sycamore

slanting over a late-summer stream.

A single yellow leaf at once floats down.

.

A water snake flows one way, the leaf the other.

Once goes with both. 

Then coils in a spring-latched doorknob,

while also swinging its large head around

to scratch the itch that troubles one coarse-haired hip.

.

Once knows again exists

but this is theoretical knowledge.

Thus Once is ceaselessly tender, though without large passion.

.

Once doesn't know any better and so loves this world,

in which babies starve, after long enough,

in silence.

.

Is Once heartless?

- You may well ask,

who pass your life inside its large, dry hand.

.

Once turns its face toward the question:

a horse-shaped clock of bright blue plastic, with red tail.

The dream its whinny wakes you from is also Once's.

.

This sneeze, this pain, this rage or weeping: one moment only.

Leaving, Once takes in its pocket your slightest sigh.

.

Just try to breathe it again, Once murmurs, You'll see.

.

If you protest, it is Once's own and only protest.

If you agree, it is Once that for its instant accedes.

.

This Mobius is hard to understand but easy to manufacture.

A single strip of paper, turned once, and it's yours.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

.

thank you

.

I thank you, deep power

that works me ever more lightly

in ways I can't make out.

The day's labor grows simple now,

and like a holy face

held in my dark hands.

.

Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Poverty and Death, I,62

.

fresh always with new tears

A slow singer, but loading each phrase

With history’s overtones, love, joy

And grief learned by his dark tribe

In other orchards and passed on

Instinctively as they are now,

But fresh always with new tears.

~ R.S. Thomas

 “A Blackbird Singing”

art by Sandra Merwin

remembering

Rather the flying bird, leaving no trace

Than the going beast

Marking the earth with his track.

The bird flies by and forgets

(As is only right). The beast

Where he no longer is

(And is therefore no use)

Marks that he was there before

(Which is also no use).

For to remember is to betray

Nature, since the nature of yesterday

Is not nature.

What has been, is nothing.

Remembering

Is failure to see.

Move on, bird, move on, teach me

To move on.

~ Fernando Pessoa

translation by Thomas Merton

.

Envy: An Assay

.

.

A mother sings to her infant,

Most beautiful in all the world, and you stand helpless.

Wind outside the window,

looking in with shackled ankles, wrists.

Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.

Yet you, too, had a mother. Had two sisters.

A photo shows the bone structure's slow shifting:

your face, small, blurred with something almost sorrow,

peers between them.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

.

to exist clearly

.

.

Last evening a city man

Was talking in the hotel door

To everyone, including me.

.

He talked of justice, of the struggle to obtain

Justice, of the workers

Suffering: of unending work

Of hungry men, of rich men turning

Their backs to it all.

.

Then, looking at me, he saw me with tears

In my eyes.  He smiled, happy,

Thinking I felt the same hatred he felt

And the compassion

He claimed to feel.

.

(But I was hardly listening to him.

What do I care about people

And what they suffer, or suppose they suffer?

Let them be like me - they will not suffer.

All the ill in the world comes from people interfering

With one another:

Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.

Our soul, heaven and earth, these are enough:

To want more is to lose these and be wretched.)

.

What I was thinking when this friend of man

Spoke (and this moved me to weep)

Was that the far murmur of cowbells

In the evening air

Was nothing like small chapel bells

Where flowers and brooks might have heard Mass

Along with simple souls

Simple as mine.

.

(Praise be to God I am not good and have

The natural selfishness of flowers

And rivers, going on their way

Concerned only, and not knowing it,

To flower and go.

This is the only mission in the world:

This - to exist clearly

And to know how

Without thinking about it.)

.

The man fell silent,

He viewed the setting sun.

But what have sunsets to do

With haters and lovers?

.

~ Thomas Merton

from the Portuguese of Fernando Pessoa

#8, of twelve poems from The Keeper of Flocks

.

life partakes of the freshness

.

.

Our zest for the river did not wane...

We went on in much the same way, in surroundings which had become familiar, 

with not even a flood to make the year memorable.

.  

Ruts, however, are worn only in traveled ways on land: 

a river life partakes of the freshness of the river itself.  

.

Each rise and fall affords a new outlook 

and gives to a well-known shore the feel of one 

at which you have just landed for the first time...

.

~ Harlan Hubbard

from Shantyboat Journal

edited by Don Wallis

.

the current

.

For a long time some of us

lie in the marshes like dark coats

forgetting that we are water

.

dust gathers all day on our closed lids

weeds grow up through us

.

but the eels keep trying to tell us 

writing over and over in our mud

our heavenly names

.

and through us a thin cold current

never sleeps

.

its glassy feet move on until they find stones

.

then cloud fish call to it again

your heart is safe with us

.

bright fish flock to it again touch it

with their mouths say yes

have vanished

.

yes and black flukes wave to it

from the Lethe of whales

.

~ W.S. Merwin

from Migration, The Carrier of Ladders 1970

.

.

Hesitation: An Assay

.

.

Sometimes only a slowing

so momentary it can scarcely be seen -

as if a dog

chasing something large and swift and important,

were distracted by the white tremor of an overhead moth.

.

Other times a full lifetime tentative, lost.

.

The line of the roof in a child's crayoned drawing

can show a hesitation almost fatal.

The rain

comes to it hard or less hard,

knowing nothing of hesitations's rake-toothed debate

.

And the two lovers

now concealed around the corner?

They fool no one, not even themselves,

pausing in their own shadows outside a locked door.

.

If pleasure requires prolonging, then these lovers.

.

Yet slowness alone is not to be confused

with the scent of the plum tree just before it opens.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After


.

our own limits transgressed

We need the tonic of wildness, 

to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, 

and hear the booming of the snipe; 

to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder 

and more solitary fowl builds her nest, 

and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.  

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, 

we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, 

that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed 

by us because it is unfathomable. 

We can never have enough of nature.  

We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, 

vast and titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, 

the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, 

the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, 

and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

  

~ Thoreau

from Walden, "Spring," 1854

photo above by Kathleen Connally

.

True freedom

.

.

True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such

a way as if you had completely chosen whatever

you feel or experience at this moment.

This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering.

Is suffering really necessary? Yes and no.

If you had not suffered as you have, 

there would be no depth to you as a human being, 

no humility, no compassion.

You would not be reading this now. 

Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, 

and then comes a point when it has served its purpose.

Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.

.

~ Eckhart Tolle

.

I am fishing with the one who made the river

.

.

When I go out on the water at night, and as I bait hooks, watch Cassiopeia, rising in the eastern sky, draw up her fishingline, Perseus with the misty Pleiads as bait and bright Venus caught, and then all grow dim in the faint beginning light of dawn, then I feel that I am fishing with the one who made the river and set her flowing.  I feel its length and sinuous flowing, fed by swift streams in the wooded eastern mountains; and somewhere, through a country unknown to me except by hearsay, past the mouths of new rivers and towns known only by name, it will at last enter an ocean and lose its identity, as I will too, at the end of my devious flowing.

.

~ Harlan Hubbard

from Shantyboat Journal

edited by Don Wallis

dog still barking at midnight

.

.

It has come to this:

three ants, seemingly separate, seemingly aimless,

wandering on a shelf.

.

They've appeared and disappeared for days between jars and bottles.

Luckless, they move without pausing.

.

A single breath-puff could send any one to the floor.

How distant they must be from the nest -

yet none consults with another,

none turns to the others for reassurance or warmth.

.

In their cold bodies: calcium, carbons, a trace of nickel.

.

Inexhaustible solitude, how did you come so far

to waver on the slim antennae of these my sisters?

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

.

the promise

.

.

Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.

Mysteriously, they left.

As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,

who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.

It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,

only a stepping back from the petty.

I gazed at the range of blue mountains,

I drank from the stream.  Tossed in a small stone from the bank.

Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted.

Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted.

There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger.

The dogs tail wagged a little in his dream.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

photo by shreve stockton

.