not the flower

As I dig for wild orchids

in the autumn fields,

it is the deeply-bedded root

that I desire,

not the flower.

~ Izumi Shikibu

from The Ink Dark Moon

man born in tao

Fishes are born in water

Man is born in Tao.

If fishes, born in water,

Seek the deep shadow

Of pond and pool,

All their needs 

Are satisfied.

If man, born in Tao,

Sinks into the deep shadow

Of non-action

To forget aggression and concern,

He lacks nothing

His life is secure.

Moral: "All the fish needs

Is to get lost in water.

All man needs is to get lost

In Tao."

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton

art by Bada Shanren 
who lived during the beginning of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911)

the sorrel filly

The songs of small birds fade away

into the bushes after sundown,

the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.

Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters

flare in the dusk.  The aged voices

of a few crickets thread the silence.

It is a quiet I love, though my life

too often drives me through it deaf,

Busy with cost and losses, I waste

the time I have to be here - a time

blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,

if only I would keep aware.  The leaves

rest in the air, perfectly still,

I would like them to rest in my mind

as still, as simply spaced.  As I approach,

the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,

poised there, light on the slope

as a young apple tree.  A week ago

I took her away to sell, and failed

to get my price, and brought her home 

again.  Now in the quiet I stand

and look at her a long time, glad

to have recovered what is lost

in the exchange of something for money.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

photo from hopes creek ranch

some like poetry

Some--

that means not all.

Not even the majority of all but the minority.

Not counting the schools, where one must,

and the poets themselves, there will be perhaps two in a thousand.

Like--

but one also likes chicken noodle soup,

one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf,

one likes to prove one's point,

one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry--

but what sort of thing is poetry?

More than one shaky answer

has been given to this question.

But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,

as to a saving bannister.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

with thanks to parabola

Original painting by

Caspar David Friedrich

Digital adaption by 

Simon Max Bannister 2012

the yellow dot

God does what she wants. She has very large

Tractors. She lives at night in the sewing room

Doing stitchery. Then chunks of land at mid-

Sea disappear. The husband knows that his wife

Is still breathing. God has arranged the open

Grave. The grave is not what we want,

But to God it's a tiny hole, and he has 

The needle, draws thread through it, and soon

A nice pattern appears. The husband cries,

"Don't let her die!" But God says, "I

Need a yellow dot here, near the mailbox."

The husband is angry. But the turbulent ocean

Is like a chicken scratching for seeds. It doesn't

Mean anything, and the chicken's claws will tear

A Rembrandt drawing if you put it down.

~ Robert Bly

in memory of Jane Kenyon-

from Morning Poems

art by georgia o'keeffe

to know the dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming - A Handbook

feasts of wisdom

I was seeking a cure for my trouble;

My trouble became my cure.

I was seeking a proof of my origin;

My origin became my proof.

I was looking to the right and the left

So that I could see the face of the Beloved.

I was searching outside,

But the Soul was within that very soul.

~  Niyazi Misri (1616 - 1694)

translation by Walter Feldman

temporal affections

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. 

There is no greater obstacle to God than time: 

and not only time but temporalities, 

not only temporal things but temporal affections, 

not only temporal affections 

but the very taint and smell of time. 

~  Meister Eckhart

with thanks to blue mountain center of meditation

art by dali

grandsons, unborn

Georg Trakl 

3 February 1887 - 3 November 1914 

Birth

These mountains: blackness, silence, and snow. 

The red hunter climbs down from the forest; 

Oh the mossy gaze of the wild thing.

The peace of the mother: under black firs 

The sleeping hands open by themselves 

When the cold moon seems ready to fall.

The birth of man. Each night

Blue water washes over the rockbase of the cliff;

The fallen angel stares at his reflection with sighs,

Something pale wakes up in a suffocating room. 

The eyes 

Of the stony old woman shine, two moons.

The cry of the woman in labor. The night troubles 

The boy’s sleep with black wings, 

With snow, which falls with ease out of the purple 

clouds 

His language was simple and clear, even in translation, resembling the work of Hoelderlin, with strong and precise imagery, darkly brooding sensitivity, and an adept feeling for color. He wrote about death, decay, and doom, hiding himself in lyrical metaphor and the ambiguity of his images. Trakl saw the world collapsing around him and taking him with it; and while his poetry is overwhelmingly negative, critics find in it a gesture of affirmation.

Otto Dix - Sunrise (1913)

The Ravens (1913)

Over the black crevice

at noon the ravens rush with rusty cries.

Their shadows touch the deer’s back

and at times they loom in gnarled rest. 

O how they derange the brown stillness,

in the one acre itself entranced,

like a woman married to grave premonitions,

and at times you can hear them bicker 

about a corpse they sniffed-out somewhere,

and sharply they bend their flight towards north

and dwindle away like a funeral

march in the air, shivering with bliss. 

One year after Georg Trakl's poem and Otto Dix' painting, visions of the impeding disaster, both men were called to the military. World War I had begun. In July 1914, shortly before being drafted by the Austro-Hungarian Army, Georg Trakl received a large monetary gift from the then unknown philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who was distributing his enormous inheritance to artists. Unfortunately, Trakl never was able to use the money. His emotional instability became worse under the strains of war and he was hospitalized numerous times as a result of depression and suicide attempts. After several bloody defeats at the hands of the Russians, Trakl was left to single handedly care for 90 wounded men in a barn near Grodek where he wrote the following poem:

Albin Egger-Lienz

 Den Namenlosen (Those Who Have Lost Their Names)

 1914

Grodek (1914)

At evening the autumn woodlands ring

With deadly weapons. Over the golden plains

And lakes of blue, the sun

More darkly rolls. The night surrounds

Warriors dying and the wild lament

Of their fragmented mouths.

Yet silently there gather in the willow combe

Red clouds inhabited by an angry god,

Shed blood, and the chill of the moon.

All roads lead to black decay.

Under golden branching of the night and stars

A sister's shadow sways through the still grove

To greet the heroes' spirits, the bloodied heads.

And softly in the reeds Autumn's dark flutes resound.

O prouder mourning! - You brazen altars,

The spirit's hot flame is fed now by a tremendous pain:

The grandsons, unborn.

Trakl could not adequately relieve the pain of his patients on his own, and he witnessed the splattered brains of one soldier who shot himself. Trakl then went outside, and after seeing some of the local Ruthenians hanging from trees, suffered a mental breakdown and threatened to shoot himself. In October, Trakl was hospitalized in Cracow, Poland, and received a visit from a friend who encouraged Trakl to send for his benefactor Wittgenstein. Unfortunately, Trakl injected himself with a fatal dose of cocaine, a probable suicide attempt, on November 3, 1914, three days before Wittgenstein arrived.

~ history and commentary from poetry foundation

a rotten and crumbling edifice

..Are we really so identified with a rotten and crumbling edifice

 that we are bound to collapse with it? 

This is where I stop. I think that if the thing collapses, and it must,

 a great deal of what we have called “Christianity” will go with it,

 and if we’re around to rub the dust out of our eyes 

we will finally see that it wasn't Christianity at all. 

Who will deliver us from this body of death?... 

I have to go along with policies that are often so inert, so blind, 

so stupid that they utterly stifle the true life of the Church 

and make it impossible for the most clear-sighted and courageous

 of her members to do anything that will further the real manifestation

 of the truth and [love] of Christ in the world … 

behind all this spurious Pentecostal wind one can hear,

 if [one] listens a little carefully, the hideous merriment of demons…

~ Thomas Merton

taken from correspondence between Merton and philosopher Leslie Dewart

in Witness to Freedom: Letters in Times of Crisis

winter dreams and butterflys

Winter

Evening. A fire

in the grate and a fire

outside, where a robin

is burning. How they both

sing, offering a friendship

unacceptable to the hand

that is as vulnerable to the one

as it is treacherous to the other.

Ah, time, enemy of their music,

reducing fuel to feathers, feathers

to ash, it was, but a moment ago,

spring in this tinder: flames

in flower that are now embers

on song's hearth.

The leaves fall

from a dark tree, brimming

with shadow, fall on one who,

as Borges suggested,

is no more perhaps than the dream God

in his loneliness is dreaming.

~ R. S. Thomas

from  Mass for Hard Times

You have wakened not out of sleep, 

but into a prior dream, 

and that dream lies within another, and so on, 

to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. 

The path that you are to take is endless, 

and you will die before you have truly awakened.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Once Chuang Tzu dreamt  he was a butterfly, 

a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, 

happy with himself and doing as he pleased. 

 He didn't know he was Chuang Tzu. 

 Suddenly he woke up and there he was, 

solid and unmistakable Chuang Tzu. 

 But he didn't know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, 

or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

~ Chuang Tzu

from The Complete Chuang Tzu

translated by Burton Watson

they bless me

I spend all my morning with the muses;  
- and they bless me also in my walks.

Compelled to contemplate a lasting malady,

 born with an ardent and lively temperament, 

susceptible to the diversions of society, 

I was obliged at an early date to isolate myself and live a life of solitude....

For me there can be no recreation in human society, refined conversation,

 mutual exchange of thoughts and feelings; only so far as necessity

 compels may I give myself to society,—

I must live like an exile. 

~ from the Ludwig van Beethoven journals

with thanks to Roderick Maclver

at heron dance

portrait by 

Joseph Karl Stieler

horses

In truth I am puzzled most in life

by nine horses.

I've been watching them for eleven weeks

in a pasture near Melrose.

Two are on one side of the fence and seven

on the other side.

They stare at one another from the same places

hours and hours each day.

This is another unanswerable question

to haunt us with the ordinary.

They have to be talking to one another

in a language without a voice.

Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers,

sullen, melancholy, jubilant.

Linguists say that language comes after music

and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech

to order our days.

We live far out in the country where I hear

creature voices night and day.

Like us they are talking about their lives

on this brief visit to earth.

In truth each day is a universe in which

we are tangled in the light of stars.

Stop a moment. Think about these horses

in their sweet-smelling silence.

~ Jim Harrison

from Songs of Unreason

with thanks to being poetry

blessing bow

Here at seventy-four, I am having an idea

what I do pretty-well, what not-so-well.

I dream. I keep a journal of my dreams,

and I put images from them in trance-poems.

I do not write or think about poetry

with a very clear intelligence. I love

certain lines and passages without getting

the whole picture, like rocks thrown against

my door without knowing who’s there.

I found this piece of paper on my bookshelf

dated Sept. 2, 1976. It records a three-part

dream from that night. I recall best

what it felt like there at the end, here

thirty-five years later. I am invited to

a dinner table with Gary Snyder, his family

and friends. We sit in the blessing-bow.

He begins, but I raise my head instead,

and open my eyes, feeling a great love

coming. The air is electrical, full of spirit.

He opens his eyes and sees me reaching

my hand toward him. He takes my hand,

still saying the blessing, which is about

filling with love for the ONE, as we are,

and amen to that. Now the dream

feels like an approach into this flawed

and difficult, hilarious, opening-out time

left before death encloses me in its whatever

it-will-be, a full prostration blessing-bow.

~ Coleman Barks

from the Georgia Review

photo by Robert Foah

paying attention to the melody

All right.  I know that each of us will die alone.

It doesn't matter how loud or soft the sitar plays.

Sooner or later the melody will say it all.

The prologue is so long!  At last the theme comes.

It says the soul will rise above all these notes.

It says the dust will be swept up from the floor.

It doesn't matter if we say our prayers or not.

We know the canoe is heading straight for the falls,

And no one will pick us up from the water this time.

One day the mice will carry our ragged impulses

All the way to Egypt, and at home the cows

Will graze on a thousand acres of thought.

Everyone goes on hoping for a good death.

The old rope hangs down from the hangman's nail.

The forty-nine robbers are climbing into their boots.

Robert, don't expect too much.  You've put yourself

Ahead of others for years, a hundred years.

It will take a long time for you to hear the melody.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey