explanations topple

.

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Explanations topple into their events, 

merely other events, smaller and less

significant.  They disappear, or die away 

like little cries at sundown, and the old trees 

receive the night again in dignity

and patience, present beyond the complex

lineages of cause and effect, each one

lost to us in what it is. For us, the privilege

is only to see, within the long shade,

the present standing of what has come and is

to come: the straight trunks aspiring

between earth and sky, bearing upon all years

the year's new leaves.

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~ Wendell Berry

from A Timbered Choir

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the Russians

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The Russians had few doctors on the front line.

My father's job was this: after the battle

Was over, he'd walk among the men hit,

Sit down and ask: 'Would you like to die on your

Own in a few hours, or should I finish it?'

Most said, 'Don't leave me.' The two would have

A cigarette. He'd take out his small notebook—

We had no dogtags, you know— and write the man's

Name down, his wife's, his children, his address, and what

He wanted to say. When the the cigarette was done,

The soldier would turn his head to the side. My father

Finished off four hundred men that way during the war.

He never went crazy. They were his people.

He came to Toronto. My father in the summers

Would stand on the lawn with a hose, watering

The grass that way. It took a long time. He'd talk

To the moon, to the wind. 'I can hear you growing'—

He'd say to the grass. 'We come and go.

We're no different from each other. We are all

Part of something. We have a home.' When I was thirteen,

I said, 'Dad, do you know they've invented sprinklers

Now?' He went on watering the grass.

'This is my life. Just shut up if you don't understand it.'

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~ Robert Bly

photo by Dmitri Bal'termants

with thanks to  when pen and paper meet

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the nick of time

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In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, 

I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, 

and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities,

 the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. 

You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, 

and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from Economy, 1854

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imaginary career

At first a childhood, limitless and free

of any goals.  Ah sweet unconsciousness.

Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery,

the plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Defiance.  The child bent becomes the bender,

inflicts on others what he once went through.

Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,

he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.

And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone.

Yet hidden deep within the grown-up heart,

a longing for the first world, the ancient one...

Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from the Uncollected Poems

world was in the face of the beloved

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World was in the face of the beloved -,

but suddenly it poured out and was gone:

world is outside, world can not be grasped.

.

Why didn't I,  from the full,  beloved face

as I raised it to  my lips,  why didn't I drink

world,  so near that I could almost taste it?

.

Ah, I drank.  Insatiably I drank.

But I was filled up also,  with too much

world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Uncollected Poems

art by Robin Urton

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the most pertinent question

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The longest silence is the most pertinent question

most pertinently put.

Emphatically silent.

The most important question,

whose answers concern us more than any, 

are never put in any other way.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from his journal, 1851

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ambition

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Three men met at a tavern table.  One was a weaver, another a carpenter and the third a ploughman. 

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Said the weaver, " I sold a fine linen shroud today for two pieces of gold.  Let us have all the wine we want."

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"And I," said the carpenter, "I sold my best coffin.  We will have a great roast with the wine."

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"I only dug a grave," said the ploughman, "but my patron paid me double.   Let us have honey cakes too."

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And all that evening the tavern was busy,  for they called often for wine and meat and cakes.  And they were merry.

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And the host rubbed his hands and smiled at his wife; for his guests were spending freely.

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When they left the moon was high, and they walked along the road singing and shouting together.

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The host and his wife stood in the tavern door and looked after them.

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"Ah!" said the wife, "these gentlemen!  So freehanded and so gay!  If only they could bring us such luck every day!  Then our son need not be a tavern-keeper and work so hard.  We could educate him, and he could become a priest."

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~ Kahlil Gibran

from Poems, Parables, and Drawings

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follow the perfume, not the tracks

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Jalaluddin El-Rumi & Shams El Tabriz from Raphael Rousseau Sason on Vimeo.

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the moon

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After writing poems all day,

I go off to see the moon in the pines.

Far in the woods I sit down against a pine.

The moon has her porches turned to face the light,

But the deep part of her house is in the darkness.

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~ Robert Bly

from Eating the Honey of Words

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the seven selves

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In the stillest hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whispers:

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First Self:

Here, in this madman,  I have dwelt all these years, with naught to do but renew his pain by day and recreate his sorrow by night.  I can bear my fate no longer, and now I rebel. 

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Second Self:

Yours is a better lot than mine, brother, for it is given me to be this madman's joyous self.   I laugh his laughter and sing his happy hours, and with thrice winged feet I dance his brighter thoughts.  It is I that would rebel against my weary existence.  

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Third Self:

And what of me, the love-ridden self, the flaming brand of wild passion and fantastic desires?  It is I the love-sick who would rebel against this madman.

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Fourth Self:

I ,  among you all, am the most miserable, for naught was given me but odious hatred and destructive loathing.  It is I, the tempest-like self, the one born in the black caves of Hell, who would protest against serving this madman.

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Fifth Self:

Nay, it is I, the thinking self, the fanciful self, the self of hunger and thirst, the one doomed to wander without rest in searching of unknown things and things not yet created; it is I, not you, who would rebel.

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Sixth Self:

And I, the working self, the pitiful labourer, who, with patient hands, and longing eyes, fashion the days into images and give the formless elements new and eternal forms - it is I, the solitary one, who would rebel against this restless madman.

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Seventh Self:

How strange that you all would rebel against this man, because each and every one of you has a preordained fate to fulfill.  Ah! Could I but be like one of you, a self with a determined lot!  But I have none, I am the do-nothing self, the one who sits in the dumb, empty nowhere and nowhen, while you are busy re-creating life.  Is it you or I, neighbours, who should rebel?

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When the seventh self thus spake the other six selves looked with pity upon him but said nothing more;  and as the night grew deeper one after the other went to sleep enfolded with a new and happy submission.

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But the seventh self remained watching and gazing at nothingness, which is behind all things.

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~ Kahlil Gibran

from Poems, Parables, and Drawings

art by Pema Rinzin

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they did not hear

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They did not hear my children

Singing in the jungle

They did not hear my sons

Singing in the tropical rain

They did not see my chosen ones

Dance to my dream.

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~ Thomas Merton

from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

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a thinking stillness

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Uninterrupted, capacious,

they ponder.

Able to house many beings 

without distraction.

Traveling upward

no farther than they go down.

Across an ocean, someone

describes them as standing wells -

they sway with contentment,

as if a yellow bird had

perched on their branches;

they are impervious 

to opinion, and still this is so.

It may be that some

keep secrets,

though every touch

alters their bodies.

It may be that some 

are geniuses of their kind.

I would like, even once,

 to embrace on in its own language,

though I imagine, too,

a transaction unrecoverably cold,

as if two widows of anciently 

warring families met on a bus:

Why should even one of them excuse us?

I have listened with pleasure 

through early snow to the sharp

report of their losses.

Mixed gasoline and oil for the saw,

polished the table with bees' wax,

added the extra, unneeded log.

My concern only.  The bus

diesel on, the woman gets off,

buttoning her coat.

Incense of resin and lignin, 

of copper and leaf-sap;

token of circumspection, 

coppice of tranquil indifference,

shore-edge of pure abstain;

meditation of beetles held lightless -

I slip you into her pocket.

Single bead of the rosary: manzanita, cedar,

maple, aspen, willow, tan oak, pine.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Lives of the Heart

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I - notion alone can have "intentions"

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The I - notion alone can have "intentions"

 - for "ego" and "will" are synonymous.

Therefore the absence of the one 

is also absence of the other.

 

"Intentions" simply imply an act of will.  

The Taoist  wu wei does not imply phenomenal inactions,

 but the absence of volitional action. 

 

 The absence of volitional action implies the presence of noumenal action, 

which is the Taoist Te, the dynamic aspect of Tao. 

 What, then is noumenal action?

 

There is a positive implication in Shen Hui's definition of wu nein as a double absence, 

 the absence of no-thought or of non-conceptualization, which is the presence of that absence,

 and that presence is the suchness of thought which is precisely spontaneous action. 

 Non-volitional action (wu wei), whether perceptive, conceptive,

 or somatic is noumenal action, and noumenal action 

is the so-called "non-action" (non-volitional, 

non-egoitic action) of the Sage.

 

 

 

~ Wei Wu Wei

from All else is Bondage

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in their mist-veiled garden

In the town where I was born lived a woman and her daughter, who walked in their sleep.

One night, while silence enfolded the world, the woman and her daughter, walking, yet asleep, met in their mist-veiled garden.

And the mother spoke, and she said: "At last, at last, my enemy!  You by whom my youth was destroyed - who have built up your life upon the ruins of mine!  Would I could kill you!"

And the daughter spoke, and she said: "O hateful woman, selfish and old!  Who stand between my freer self and me!  Who would have my life an echo of your own faded life!  Would you were dead!"

At that moment a cock crew, and both women awoke.  The mother said gently, "Is that you, darling?"  And the daughter answered gently, "Yes, dear."

~ Kahlil Gibran

from Poems, Parables and Drawings
art by gail kirtz

snowbanks north of the house

.

.

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six

feet from the house ...

Thoughts that go so far.

The boy gets out of high school and reads no more

books;

the son stops calling home.

The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no

more bread.

And the wife looks at her husband one night at a

party, and loves him no more.

The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls

leaving the church.

It will not come closer

the one inside moves back, and the hands touch

nothing, and are safe.

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The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the

room where the coffin stands.

He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.

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And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on

through the unattached heavens alone.The toe of the shoe pivots

in the dust ...

And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back

down the hill.

No one knows why he came, or why he turned away,

and did not climb the hill.

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~ Robert Bly

photo by ansel adams

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