the starfish

It is low tide. Fog. I have climbed down the cliffs

from Pierce Ranch to the tide pools. Now the ecstasy

of the low tide, kneeling down, alone. In six inches of

clear water I notice a purple starfish—with nineteen

arms! It is a delicate purple, the color of old carbon

paper, or an attic dress . . . at the webs between the

arms sometimes a more intense sunset red glows

through. The fingers are relaxed . . . some curled up at

the tips . . . with delicate rods . . . apparently globes

on top of each, as at World's Fairs, waving about. The

starfish slowly moves up the groin of the

rock . . . then back down . . . many of its arms rolled

up now, lazily, like a puppy on its back. One arm is

especially active and curved up over its own body as

if a dinosaur were looking behind him.

How slowly and evenly it moves! The starfish is a

glacier, going sixty miles a year! It moves over the pink

rock, by means I cannot see . . . and into marvelously

floating delicate brown weeds. It is about the size of

the bottom of a pail. When I reach into it, it tightens

and then slowly relaxes. . . . I take an arm and quickly

lift. The underside is a pale tan. . . . Gradually, as I

watch, thousands of tiny tubes begin rising from all

over the underside . . . hundreds in the mouth, hun-

dreds along the nineteen underarms . . . all looking. . .

feeling . . . like a man looking for a woman . . . tiny

heads blindly feeling for a rock and finding only air.

A purple rim runs along the underside of every arm,

with paler tubes. Probably its moving-feet.

I put him back in. He unfolds—I had forgotten

how purple he was—and slides down into his rock

groin, the snail-like feelers waving as if nothing had

happened, and nothing has.

~ Robert Bly

 from Selected Poems

photo by nick hobgood

with thanks to writers almanac

bring it back gently

If the heart wanders or is distracted, 

bring it back to the point quite gently and 

replace it tenderly in its Master’s presence. 

And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour 

but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord’s presence, 

though it went away every time you brought it back, 

your hour would be very well employed. 

~ Saint Francis de Sales

with thanks to blue mountain meditation

o lacrimosa

(trilogy for future music of Ernst Krenek)

I

Oh tear-filled figure who, like a sky held back,

grows heavy above the landscape of her sorrow.

And when she weeps, the gentle raindrops fall,

slanting upon the sand-bed of her heart.

O heavy with weeping. Scale to weigh all tears.

Who felt herself not sky, since she was shining

and sky exists only for clouds to form in.

How clear it is, how close, your land of sorrow,

beneath the stearn sky's oneness. Like a face

that lies there, slowly waking up and thinking

horizontally, into endless depths.

II

It is nothing but a breath, the void.

And that green fulfillment

of blossoming trees: a breath.

We, who are still the breathed-upon,

today still the breathed-upon, count

this slow breathing of earth,

whose hurry we are.

III

Ah, but the winters! The earth's mysterious

turning-within. Where around the dead

in the pure receding of sap,

boldness is gathered,

the boldness of future springtimes.

Where imagination occurs

beneath what is rigid; where all the green

worn thin by the vast summers

again turns into a new

insight and the mirror of intuition;

where the flowers' color

wholly forgets that lingering of our eyes.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Stephen Mitchell

art by francoise pothier

rescue the dead

Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf,

is to let rain fall nakedly upon your head,

is to respect fire,

is to study man’s eyes and his gestures

as he talks,

is to set bread upon the table

and a knife discreetly by,

is to pass through crowds

like a crowd of oneself.

Not to love is to live.

To love is to be led away

into a forest where the secret grave

is dug, singing, praising darkness

under the trees.

To live is to sign your name,

is to ignore the dead,

is to carry a wallet

and shake hands.

To love is to be a fish.

My boat wallows in the sea.

You who are free,

rescue the dead.

~ David Ignatow

the signal

How can I regret my life

when I find the blue-green traffic light

on the corner delightful against the red brick

of my house. It is when the signal turns red

that I lose interest. At night

I am content to watch the blue-green

come on against the dark

and I do not torture myself

with my shortcomings.

~ David Ignatow

leap before you look

The sense of danger must not disappear:

The way is certainly both short and steep,

However gradual it looks from here;

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep

And break the by-laws any fool can keep;

It is not the convention but the fear

That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,

The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer

Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;

Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear

Will not be either sensible or cheap,

So long as we consent to live like sheep

And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,

But to rejoice when no one else is there

Is even harder than it is to weep;

No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep

Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:

Although I love you, you will have to leap;

Our dream of safety has to disappear.

~ W. H. Auden

with thanks to knopf poetry

content

I should be content

to look at a mountain

for what it is

and not a comment on my life.

~ David Ignatow

art from the song dynasty

arrogance of reason

The guest is inside you, and also inside me;

you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.

We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.

Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,

the daily sense of failure goes away,

the damage I have done to myself fades,

a million suns come forward with light,

when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,

inside "love" there is more joy than we know of,

rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,

there are whole rivers of light.

The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.

How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.

The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.

With the word "reason" you already feel miles away.

 

~ Kabir

from The Kabir book: Forty-four of the ecstatic poems of Kabir

perspective

U-2 flight to 70,000 ft.

awake awhile

Awake awhile.

It does not have to be

Forever,

Right now.

One step upon the Sky's soft skirt

Would be enough.

Hafiz,

Awake awhile.

Just one True moment of Love

Will last for days.

Rest all your elaborate plans and tactics

For Knowing Him,

For they are all just frozen spring buds

Far,

So far from Summer's Divine Gold.

Awake, my dear.

Be kind to your sleeping heart.

Take it out into the vast fields of Light

And let it breathe.

Say,

"Love,

Give me back my wings.

Lift me,

Lift me nearer."

Say to the sun and moon,

Say to our dear Friend,

"I will take You up now, Beloved,

On that wonderful Dance You promised."

~ Hafiz

walking

A man walking in a field

and everywhere at his feet

in the short grass of April

the small purple violets

are in bloom. As the man walks 

the ground drops away,

the sunlight of day becomes

a sort of darkness in which

the lights of the flowers rise

up around him like 

fireflies or stars in a sort

of sky through which he walks.

~ Wendell Berry

from Leavings

saddness, solitude, and fear of the inexplicable

Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden

August 12, 1904 

I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, although there is almost nothing I can say that will help you, and I can hardly find one useful word. You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. 

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary -- and toward this point our development will move, little by little -- that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space. 

How could it not be difficult for us? 

And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequaled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called "apparitions," the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous in security that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. 

So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else. 

Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn. The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters it, one may not simply call it a vice. One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble. And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the "great thing" that you think you have achieved, although you are right about your feeling; the great thing is that there was already something there which you could replace that deception with, something true and real. Without this even your victory would have been just a moral reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has become a part of your life. Your life, dear Mr. Kappus, which I think of with so many good wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing"? I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow. 

And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words. 

Yours,

Rainer Maria Rilke

~ from Letters to a Young Poet

(letter eight)

art by william t.ayton

moments unnoticed

moments unnoticed
between

words,

thoughts, images, imaginations,

angst and turmoil
action
yes, action to occupy
to avoid
to comfort

ideas

clung to, believed in, 

made important,
obsessed about

boundaries.


look into the gaps, 

smile on the space between
things.

what is left 
when they

are allowed to fall away?

~  naed rellek

from out of nowhere

a note

Life is the only way 

to get covered in leaves,

catch your breath on the sand,

rise on wings;

to be a dog,

or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain

from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,

dawdle in views,

to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance

to remember for a moment

a conversation held

with the lamp switched off;

and if only once

to stumble on a stone,

end up drenched in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;

and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing

something important.

~Wislawa Szymborska

from Monologue of a Dog

the road in the clouds

When people look for the road in the clouds 

The cloud road disappears 

The mountains are tall and steep 

The streams are wide and still 

Green mountains ahead and behind 

White clouds to east and west 

If you want to find the cloud road 

Seek it within

***

The higher the trail the steeper it grows 

Ten thousand tiers of dangerous cliffs 

The stone bridge is slippery with green moss 

Cloud after cloud keeps flying by 

Waterfalls hang like ribbons of silk 

The moon shines down on a bright pool 

I climb the highest peak once more 

To wait where the lone crane flies

***

Old and sick, more than one hundred years 

Face haggard, hair white, I’m happy to still live in the mountains 

A cloth covered phantom watching the years flow by 

Why envy people with clever ways of living?

~ Han Shan