unknown age

.

For all the features it hoards and displays

age seems to be without substance at any time

whether morning or evening it is a moment of air

held between the hands like a stunned bird

while I stand remembering light in the trees

of another century on a continent long submerged

with no way of telling whether the leaves at that time

felt memory as they were touching the day

and no knowledge of what happened to the reflections

on the pond's surface that never were seen again

the bird lies still while the light goes on flying

.

~ W.S. Merwin

from The Shadow of Sirius

the secret signature

.

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you've been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

~  C. S. Lewis

excerpt from The Problem of Pain

I was thinking

Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

How many times the sunrise was

there, behind a mountain!

How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off

was already a golden body full of thunder!

This rose was poison.

That sword gave life.

I was thinking of a flowery meadow

at the end of a road,

and found myself in the slough.

I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,

and found myself in the divine.

~ Juan Ramon Jimenez

from The Winged Energy of Delight

translated by Robert Bly

grasp you with my heart

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;

slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;

and without any feet can go to you;

and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.

Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you

and grasp you with my heart as with a hand;

arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;

and if you set this brain of mine afire,

upon my blood I then will carry you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Hours

the supple deer

.

.

The quiet opening

between fence strands

perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves,

four feet off the ground,

the deer poured through.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don't know how a stag turns

into a stream, an arc of water.

I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer:

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

to be published this summer

.

fragment from lost days

 

 

...Like birds that get used to walking

and grow heavier and heavier, as in falling:

the earth sucks out of their long claws

the brave memory of all

the great things that happen high up,

and makes them almost into leaves that cling

tightly to the ground, -

like plants which,

scarcely growing upward, creep into the earth,

sink lightly and softly and damply

into black clods and sicken there lifelessly, -

like mad children, - like a face

in a coffin, - like happy hands that 

grow hesitant, because in the full goblet

things are mirrored that are not near, -

like calls for help which in the evening wind

collide with many dark huge chimes, -

like house plants that have dried for days,

like streets that are ill-framed, - like bright curls

within which jewels have grown blind, -

like early morning in April

facing the hospital's many windows:

the sick press up against the hall's seam

and look: the grace of a new light 

makes all the streets seem vernal and wide;

they see only the bright majesty

that makes the houses young and laughing,

and don't know that all night long

a storm ripped the garments from the sky,

a storm of waters, where the world still freezes,

a storm which this very moment roars through the streets

and takes all burdens

off the shoulder of each thing, -

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

art by Dali

to sing

.

.

To sing is to begin a sentence

like "I want to get well.

I am not born for nothing

and neither are you:

Heaven never wept

over nothing."

~ Thomas Merton

from an untitled poem

thanks to whiskey river

Ithaka

.

.

As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don't be afraid of them: you'll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won't encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope your road is a long one. May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to learn and go on learning from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you're destined for. But don't hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you're old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you've gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. 

~ C.P. Cavafy

translated by Edmund Keeley

his birthday is today

Constantine Cavafy was born Konstantínos Pétrou Kaváfis in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, the ninth child of Constantinopolitan parents. His father died in 1870, leaving the family poor. Cavafy's mother moved her children to England, where the two eldest sons took over their father's business. Their inexperience caused the ruin of the family fortunes, so they returned to a life of genteel poverty in Alexandria. The seven years that Constantine Cavafy spent in England—from age nine to sixteen—were important to the shaping of his poetic sensibility: he became so comfortable with English that he wrote his first verse in his second language.

After a brief education in London and Alexandria, he moved with his mother to Constantinople, where they stayed with his grandfather and two brothers. Although living in great poverty and discomfort, Cavafy wrote his first poems during this period, and had his first love affairs with other men. After briefly working for the Alexandrian newspaper and the Egyptian Stock exchange, at the age of twenty-nine Cavafy took up an appointment as a special clerk in the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works—an appointment he held for the next thirty years. Much of his ambition during these years was devoted to writing poems and prose essays.

ignorant of their ignorance

.

Ignorant of their ignorance, yet wise

In their own esteem, those deluded men

Proud of their vain learning go round and round

Like the blind led by the blind.  Far beyond

Their eyes, hypnotized by the world of sense,

Opens the way to immortality.

"I am my body; when my body dies,

I die." Living in this superstition,

They fall life after life under my sway.

It is but few who hear about the Self.

Fewer still dedicate their lives to its

Realization.  Wonderful is the one

Who speaks about the Self.  Rare are they

Who make it the supreme goal of their lives.

.

~ Katha Upanishad

death as teacher

translated by Eknath Easwaran

the divine faculty of the seer

.

.

We begin to die, not in our senses or extremities, but in our divine faculties.  

Our members may be sound, our sight and hearing perfect, 

but our genius and imagination betray signs of decay.  

You tell me that you are growing old and are troubled to see without glasses, 

but this is unimportant if the divine faculty of the seer shows no signs of decay.

.

~  Henry David Thoreau

from his journal, 1854

art by Roderick Maclver

'we must die because we have known them'

.

(Papyrus Prisse.  From the sayings of Ptah-hotep, manuscript from ca. 2000 B.C.)

.

'We must die because we have known them.'  Die

of their smile's unsayable flower.  Die

of their delicate hands.  Die

of woman.

Let the young man sing of them, praise

these death-bringers, when they move through his heart-space,

high overhead.  From his blossoming breast

let him sing to them:

unattainable!  Ah, how distant they are.

Over the peaks

of his feeling, they float and pour down 

sweetly transfigured night into the abandoned

valley of his arms.  The wind

of their rising rustles in the leaves of his body.  His brooks run

sparkling into the distance.

But the grown man

shudders and is silent.  The man who 

has wandered pathless at night

in the mountain-range of his feelings:

is silent.

As the old sailor is silent,

and the terrors that he has endured

play inside him as though in quivering cages.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Uncollected Poems

be helpless, dumbfounded

.

Be helpless, dumbfounded, 

Unable to say yes or no. 

Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up. 

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty. 

If we say we can, we're lying. 

If we say No, we don't see it, 

That No will behead us 

And shut tight our window onto spirit. 

So let us rather not be sure of anything, 

Beside ourselves, and only that, so 

Miraculous beings come running to help. 

Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute, 

We shall be saying finally, 

With tremendous eloquence, Lead us. 

When we have totally surrendered to that beauty, 

We shall be a mighty kindness.

~ Rumi

sawing firewood

.

.

Probably no moon has furnished me with as much light as this one,  in this clear weather.  Now it is past full, and I can arise before daybreak and see my way about, sawing firewood.  One feels alone on the earth, no sounds, no lights, anywhere, unless a boat passes.  In a light fog, as this morning, the isolation is even more strongly felt.  It brings peace, contentment and a sure faith that all is well.

.

~ Harlan Hubbard

from his journal, Dec. 28th, 1958

woodcut by the author

.

the monk stood beside a wheelbarrow

.

.

The monk stood beside a wheelbarrow, weeping.

God or Buddha nowhere to be seen-

these tears were fully human,

bitter, broken,

falling onto the wheel barrow's rusty side.

They gathered at its bottom,

where the metal drank them in to make more rust.

You cannot know what you do in this life, what you have done.

The monk stood weeping.

I knew I also had a place on this hard earth.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

when you see

When you see yourself

and someone else

as one being,

when you know the most joyful day

and the most terrible night

as one moment, then

awareness is alone

with its Lord.

~ Lalla

art by Klimt