solitude

I was nearly killed here, one night in February.

My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,

right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic

came at me with their lights.

My name, my girls, my job, all

slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,

further and further away. I was a nobody:

a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.

The headlights of the oncoming cars

bore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick

of terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.

The seconds grew and grew – making more room for me –

stretching huge as hospitals.

I almost felt that I could rest

and take a breath

before the crash.

Then something caught: some helpful sand

or a well-timed gust of wind. The car

snapped out of it, swinging back across the road.

A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,

spinning away in the darkness.

And it was still. I sat back in my seat-belt

and watched someone tramp through the whirling snow

to see what was left of me.

~ Tomas Transtromer

Tranströmer is the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. His other honors and awards include the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrach Prize in Germany, and the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum.

He has read at many American universities, often with poet and friend Robert Bly. Tranströmer is a respected psychologist, and has worked at a juvenile prison, and with the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives with his wife Monica in Vasteras, west of Stockholm.

from  poets.org

two things

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend

On one another, as Logos depends

On Eros, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.

Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace

And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense

A passion that we feel, not understand.

Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple

And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers

That walk away together as one in the greenest body.

~ Wallace Stevens

the place of rest

Unto the deep the deep heart goes,

It lays its sadness nigh the breast:

Only the Mighty Mother knows

The wounds that quiver unconfessed.

It seeks a deeper silence still;

It folds itself around with peace,

Where thoughts alike of good or ill

In quietness unfostered cease.

It feels in the unwounding vast

For comfort for its hopes and fears:

The Mighty Mother bows at last;

She listens to her children's tears.

Where the last anguish deepens -- there

The fire of beauty smites through pain:

A glory moves amid despair,

The Mother takes her child again. 

~ A. E. (George William Russell)

with thanks to poetry chaikhana

today

a radiance once seen only in time and space

 shares his blessing without boundary

today a named one 

brings a particular beauty to the nameless 

today the pain and strength of  longing

stretches beyond limits

today that sparkling love can't be seen with eyes,

we seek it everywhere

 ~  nead rellek

for Doug

words' leaves

.

Truly now I've grown old

in the winter rains.

Even the words' leaves

of love

change in their falling

~ Ono no Komachi

care

.

Once upon a time, when Dongshan was ill, a monk asked him, 

"You are ill, teacher, but is there anyone who doesn't get ill?" 


Dongshan said, "There is." 
 

The monk said, "Does the one who doesn't get ill look after you?" 
 

Dongshan said, "No, I look after him." 
 

The monk said, "How is it when you look after him?" 

Dongshan said, "I see that there is no illness." 


~ Dongshan

from the Book of Serenity

Zen dialogue (Case 94)

poetry?

.

Now, what is poetry?

If you say it is simply a matter of words, I will say a good poet gets rid of words.

If you say it is simply a matter of meaning, I will say a good poet gets rid of meaning.

"But," you ask, "without words and without meaning, where is the poetry?"

To this I reply, "Get rid of words and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry."

~ Yang Wan-li

translation by Jonathan Chaves

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