rain in May

.

The blackened iron

of the stove

is ticking into coolness

when the first drops 

start against the roof.

It is late: the night

has darkened into this

like a fruit--

a sudden pear-aroma fills the room.

Just before dawn 

it comes up harder again,

a white, steady drum of day-rain

caught in the moon's deep pail.

A battered tin-light

overspills ocean and sky,

hill opens to facing hill,

and I wake to a simple longing,

all I want of this ordinary hour,

this ordinary earth

that was long ago married to time:

to hear as a sand-crab hears the waves,

loud as a second heart;

to see as a green thing sees the sun,

with the undividing attention of blind love.

~ Jane Hirshfield

the ending earth-

.

stand with your lover on the ending earth-
and while a (huge by which huger than

huge) whoing sea leaps to greenly hurl snow, suppose we could not love, dear; imagine

ourselves like living neither nor dead these

(or many thousands hearts which don't and dream

or many million minds which sleep and move)

blind sand, at pitiless the mercy of

time time time time time

how fortunate are you and I, whose home

is timelessness: we who have wandered down

from fragrant mountains of eternal now

to frolic in such mysteries as birth

and death a day (or maybe even less)

~ e.e.cummings

contemplation

.

Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself. 

Contemplation does not feed the hungry; it does not clothe the naked… 

and it does not return the sinner to peace, truth, and union with God. 

But without contemplation we cannot see what we do… 

Without contemplation we cannot understand the significance of the world in which we must act. 

Without contemplation we remain small, limited, divided, partial; 

we adhere to the insufficient, permanently united to our narrow group and its interests, 

losing sight of justice and charity, seized by the passions of the moments… 

Without contemplation, without the intimate, 

silent, secret pursuit of truth through love, 

our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous.

~ Thomas Merton

art by leonardo da vinci

the silence

.

.

How many of your birthdays

I have by now been

glad of!  And all that time

I've been trying to tell you

how with you was born

my truest life and most 

desired, the better man

by your birth I am, however

fallen short. I'll never

get it right by half.

Between us, by now, what

is more telling than the silence

in which once more an old 

redbud simply blooms?

.

~ Wendell Berry

photo by Eliot Porter

on creativity

.

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer - say, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.  Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them...

When I proceed to write, the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished... But why my productions take from my hand that particular form and style that makes them Mozartish, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so large or so aquiline, or, in short, make it Mozart's, and different from those other people. For I really do not study or aim at originality.

~ Mozart

translation by Edward Holmes

Mozart as a child, painted by Greuze

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting.  Yes, before in a thought , but not in careful thinking.  It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition... The great thing is not ever to think about form but let it come.  Does that sound strange from me?  They have accused me of thinking about nothing else.  Do you see the real joke?  It is the critics who have really thought about form always, and I have thought about - writing!

~ Gertrude Stein

The artist is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter where: from the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. This is why one must not discriminate between things.  There is no rank among them.  One must take one's good where one finds it...

When we invented cubism, we had no intention of inventing cubism, but simply of expressing what was in us. Nobody drew up a program of action, and through our friends the poets followed our efforts attentively, they never dictated to us.  The young painter of today often outline a program for themselves to follow and try to do their assignments correctly like well-behaved schoolboys.

The painter passes through states of fullness and emptying.  That is the whole secret of art.

~ Pablo Picasso

translated by Brewster Ghiselin

quotations taken here from Nine Gates - Entering the Mind of Poetry

by Jane Hirshfield

the ancient womb

The world rests in the night. 

Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. 

Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. 

Darkness is the ancient womb. 

Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. 

The darkness absolves everything; 

the struggle for identity and impression falls away. 

We rest in the night.

~ John O’Donohue 

from  Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

the unseeable animal

.

My Daughter: "I hope there's an animal

Somewhere that nobody has ever seen.

And I hope nobody ever sees it."

Being, whose flesh dissolves

at our glance, knower

of the secret sums and measures,

you are always here,

dwelling in the oldest sycamores,

visiting the faithful springs

when they are dark and the foxes

have crept to their edges.

I have come upon pools

in streams, places overgrown

with the woods' shadow,

where I knew you had rested,

watching the little fish 

hang still in the flow;

as I approached they seemed

particles of your clear mind

disappearing among the rocks.

I have waked deep in the woods

in the early morning, sure

that while I slept

your gaze passed over me.

That we do not know you

is your perfection

and our hope. The darkness

keeps us near you.

~ Wendell Berry

from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

the rain

.

All night the sound had 

come back again, 

and again falls 

this quiet, persistent rain. 

What am I to myself 

that must be remembered, 

insisted upon 

so often? Is it 

that never the ease, 

even the hardness, 

of rain falling 

will have for me 

something other than this, 

something not so insistent— 

am I to be locked in this 

final uneasiness. 

Love, if you love me, 

lie next to me. 

Be for me, like rain, 

the getting out 

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- 

lust of intentional indifference. 

Be wet 

with a decent happiness.

~ Robert Creeley

with thanks to the mark on the wall

time and space?

We tend to misunderstand the nature, 

and exaggerate the importance, of "time" and "space."

There are no such "things" (they do not exist in their own right):

 these come into apparent existence, i.e. they "function"

 only as a mechanism whereby events, extended spatially and sequentially, 

may become cognizable. 

 

 They accompany events and render their development realizable.

   In themselves they have no existence whatever.  They are appearances, 

and their apparent existence is deduced from the events they accompany

 and render perceptible.  They are hypothetical,

 like the "ether," symbols, like algebra, psychic inferences to aid 

in the cognizance of the universe we objectify,

 and they neither preexist, nor survive apart from, 

the events they accompany, but are utilized in function

 of each such event as it occurs.

Where there is no event there is no need of "time" or of "space"

 - and in their absence we are no longer in bondage- 

for there is no one to believe that he is bound.

Time is only an inference, devised in an effort to explain growth, 

development, extension and change, which constitute a further direction 

of measurement beyond the three that we know 

and at right-angles to volume; and "past," "present" and "future" 

are inferences derived from this temporal interpretation 

of the further dimension in which extension appears to occur. 

 

 All forms of temporality, therefore, are conceptual and imagined.

~ Wei Wu Wei

from Open Secret

this rain

.

Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,

you are sitting under your porch roof,

looking down through the trees

to the river, watching the rain.  The circles

make by the raindrops' striking

expand, intersect, dissolve,

and suddenly (for you are getting on

now, and much of your life is memory)

the hands of the dead, who have been here

with you, rest upon you tenderly

as the rain rests shining

upon the leaves.  And you think then

(for thought will come) of the strangeness

of the thought of Heaven, for now

you have imagined yourself there,

remembering with longing this 

happiness, this rain.  Sometimes here

we are there, and there is no death.

~ Wendell Berry

from A Timbered Choir

photo by laffy4k

the great harvest

.

Consider the vast crop is thus annually shed upon the earth.  

This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year.  

This annual decay and death, this dying by inches, 

before the whole tree at last lies down and turns to soil.  

As trees shed their leaves, so deer their horns, and men their hair or nails.  

The year's great crop.   

I am more interested in it than in the English grass alone or in the corn.  

It prepares the virgin mold for future cornfields on which the earth fattens.  

They teach us how to die.

~ Henry David Thoreau

from his journal entry, 1853

the wren from Carolina

.

Just now the wren from Carolina buzzed

through the neighbor's hedge

a line of grace notes I couldn't even write down

much less sing.

Now he lifts his chestnut colored throat

and delivers such a cantering praise -

for what?

For the early morning, the taste of the spider,

for his small cup of life

that he drinks from every day, knowing it will refill.

All things are inventions of holiness.

Some more rascally than others.

I'm on that list too,

though I don't know exactly where.

But every morning, there's my own cup of gladness,

and there's that wren in the hedge, above me, with his

blazing song.

~ Mary Oliver

from Why I Wake Early

overtone

.

Some listening were certain they could hear

through the notes summoned from the strings one more

following at a distance low but clear

a resonance never part of the score

not noticed during the rehearsals nor

prayed into the performance and yet here

with the first note it had been waiting for

holding silent the iced minors of fear

the key of grief the mourning from before

the names were read of those no longer there

that sound of what made no sound any more

made up the cords that in a later year

some still believed that they could overhear

echoing music played during a war

~ W.S. Merwin

from The Pupil

photo found at child of danu's little book of wonder

the pear

.

November. One pear

sways on the tree past leaves, past reason.

In the nursing home, my friend has fallen.

Chased, he said, from the freckled woods

by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais.

Delusion too, it seems, can be well-read.

He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread.

The old fineness in him hangs on

for dear life. "My mind now?

A small ship under the wake of a large.

They force you to walk on your heels here,

the angles matter.  Four or five degrees,

and you're lost." Life is dear to him yet,

though he believes it his own fault he grieves,

his own fault his old friends have turned against him

like crows against an injured of their kind.

There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy.

Descend, descend,

some voice must urge, inside the pear-stem.

The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it.

Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.

~ Jane Hirshfield 

from Come, Thief

art by janis zroback

only a state of being

.

There is in fact only one state, 

not two states such as the conscious and the unconscious there is only a state of being, 

which is consciousness, 

though you may divide it as the conscious and the unconscious. 

But that consciousness is always of the past, never of the present; 

you are conscious only of things that are over. 

You are conscious of what I am trying to convey the second afterwards, are you not? 

You understand it a moment later. 

You are never conscious or aware of the now. 

Watch your own hearts and minds and you will see that 

consciousness is functioning between the past and the future 

and that the present is merely a passage of the past to the future.

If you watch your own mind at work, 

you will see that the movement to the past and to the future is a process in which the present is not. 

Either the past is a means of escape from the present, which may be unpleasant, 

or the future is a hope away from the present. 

So the mind is occupied with the past or with the future and sloughs off the present. 

It either condemns and rejects the fact or accepts and identifies itself with the fact. 

Such a mind is obviously not capable of seeing any fact as a fact. 

That is our state of consciousness, which is conditioned by the past and our thought, 

is the conditioned response to the challenge of a fact; 

the more you respond according to the conditioning of belief, of the past, 

the more there is strengthening of the past.

That strengthening of the past is obviously the continuity of itself, which it calls the future. 

So that is the state of our mind, 

of our consciousness;a pendulum swinging backwards and forwards between the past and the future.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from The Book of Life

thanks to j. krishnamurti online