in a train

.

There has been a light snow.

Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness.

I stare at the train window marked with soft dust.

I have awakened at Missoula Montana utterly happy.

.

~ Robert Bly

.

hidden things

.

.

After Long Busyness

.

I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.

Moon gone plowing underfoot no stars; not a trace of light!

Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field?

Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.

.

.

Watering the Horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!

Suddenly I see with such clear eyes

The white flake of snow

That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

.

~ Robert Bly

a life entirely given

.

.

Hell is timely, for Hell is the thought

that Hell will go on, on and on, without end.

Heaven is only present, instantaneous and eternal,

a mayfly, a blue dayflower, a life entirely given,

complete forever in its hour.

.

~ Wendell Berry

from Leavings

photo by magda berny

.

newness

When we are alone on a starlit night,
 when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn
 descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see 
children in a moment when they are really children, 
when we know love in our own hearts; or when, 
like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog
 land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times
 the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, 
the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make
 themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

~ Thomas Merton

photo by Kathleen Connally

One Valley

.

.

Once I thought I could find

where it began

but that never happened

though I went looking for it

time and again

cutting my way past 

empty pools and dry waterfalls

where my dog ran straight up the stone

like an unmoored flame

.

it seemed that the beginning

could not be far then as I went on through the trees 

over the rocks toward the mountain

until I came out in the open

and saw no sign of it

.

where the roaring torrent

raced at one time

to carve farther down

those high walls in the stone

for the silence that I hear now

day and night on its way to the sea

.

~ W.S. Merwin
from The Shadow of Sirius
photo by Ansel Adams

.

a song on the end of the world

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends

Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,

A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,

Vegetable peddlers shout in the street

And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,

The voice of a violin lasts in the air

And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder

Are disappointed.

And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps

Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,

As long as rosy infants are born

No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

There will be no other end of the world,

There will be no other end of the world.

~  Czeslaw Milosz 

losing a language

.

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back

yet the old still remember something that they could say

.

but they know now that such things are no longer believed

and the young have fewer words

.

many of the things the words were about

no longer exist

.

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree

the verb for I

.

the children will not repeat

the phrases their parents speak

.

somebody has persuaded them

that it is better to say everything differently

.

so that they can be admired somewhere

farther and farther away

.

where nothing that is here is known

we have little to say to each other

.

we are wrong and dark

in the eyes of the new owners

.

the radio is incomprehensible

the day is glass

.

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign

everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

.

nobody has seen it happening

nobody remembers

.

this is what the words were made

to prophesy

.

here are the extinct feathers

here is the rain we saw

.

~ W.S. Merwin

from Migration

.

all their actions have vanished

.

.

In an age when the Tao is followed,

no one rewards the talented

or pays special attention

to the lovely, the virtuous, or the wise.

Those who govern

are simply the highest branches

on the tree, and the people wander

in freedom, like deer in the woods.

They are honest but think nothing of it,

they naturally do what is right,

they are kind without any conception

of kindness, and are trustworthy

though they wouldn't know what that means.

They keep no records of their good deeds,

because good deeds are so common.

That is why all their actions

have vanished, without a trace.

.

~ Stephen Mitchell

from The Second Book of the Tao

photo by  Kathleen Connally

.

metempsychosis

Some stories last many centuries,

others only a moment.

All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,

grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree

and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,

ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket

gives off --

the immeasurable's continuous singing,

before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.

Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,

to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:

an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.

To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,

and then keep walking, unimaginably further.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems


photo of the Socratea exorrhiza or walking palm
which can move itself up to about a meter per year

beauty and love

.

.

Look at something which you have seen which is actually marvelously beautiful: a statue, a poem, a lily in the pond, or a well-kept lawn. And when you see such a piece of beauty - no, no, when you see such, not piece - when you see such beauty what takes place? 

.

At that moment, the very majesty of a mountain makes you forget yourself. Right? Have you ever been in that position? When you have seen that you don't exist, only that grandeur exists. But a few seconds later or a minute later the whole cycle begins, the confusion, the chatter. 

.

So beauty is where you are not. Have you understood this? Do you understand, sir? Oh, what a crowd! The tragedy of it. Truth is where you are not. Beauty, love is where you are not. Because we are not capable to look at this extraordinary thing called truth.

.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from a talk in Bombay, January 31st 1982

thanks to J. Krishnamurti Online

.

the call away

.

A cold wind flows over the cornfields;

Fleets of blackbirds ride that ocean.

I want to be in that wild, be

Outdoors, live anywhere in the wind.

I settle down, with my back against

A shed wall where no one can find me.

I stare out at the box elder leaves

Moving in this mysterious water.

What is it that I want? Not money,

Not a large desk, a house with ten rooms.

This is what I want to do: To sit here,

Take no part, be called away by wind.

~ Robert Bly

from Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems

to a writer of reputation

... the man must remain obscure.

                                   ~ Cezanne

.

Having begun in public anonymity,

you did not count on this

literary sublimation by which

some body becomes a "name" -

as if you have died and have become

a part of mere geography.  Greet,

therefore, the roadsigns on the road.

.

Or perhaps you have become deaf and blind,

or merely inanimate, and may 

be studied without embarrassment

by the disinterested, the dispassionate,

and the merely curious,

not fearing to be overheard.

Hello to the grass, then, and to the trees.

.

Or perhaps you are secretly

still alert and moving, no longer the one

they have named, but another,

named by yourself,

carrying away this morning's showers

for your private delectation.

Hello, river.

.

~ Wendell Berry

from Given

.

to bring ourselves to birth

.

One of the lovely things about being a human is that we are called in each moment to bring ourselves to birth.

.

Part of the difficulty of our times is that we have reduced the magnificent adventure of being a human being to endless, wearisome projects of self-improvement and self-analysis according to the flattest and most boring maps that could be made

.

~ John O'Donohue

from Beauty the Invisible Embrace

.

under the day

.

To come back like autumn

to the moss on the stones 

after many seasons 

to recur as a face

backlit on the surface

of a dark pool one day

after the year has turned

from the summer it saw

while the first yellow leaves

stare from their forgetting

and the branches grow spare

.

is to waken backward

down through the still water

knowing without touching

all that was ever there

and has been forgotten 

and recognize without

name or understanding

without believing or

holding or direction

in the way that we see

at each moment the air.

.

~ W.S. Merwin

from The Pupil

.

the comet museum

.

.

So the feeling comes afterward

some of it may reach us only

long afterward when the moment 

itself is beyond reckoning

.

beyond time beyond memory 

as though it were not moving in 

heaven neither burning farther

through any past nor ever to 

arrive again in time to be 

when it has gone the senses wake

.

all through the day they wait for it

here are pictures that someone took

of what escaped us at the time

only now can we remember

.

~ W.S. Merwin

from The Pupil

.