handy guide

Avoid adjectives of scale.

Dandelion broth instead of duck soup.

Don’t even think you've seen a meadow, ever.

The minor adjustments in our equations

still indicate the universe is insane,

when it laughs a silk dress comes out its mouth

but we never put it on. Put it on.

Cry often and while asleep.

If it’s raw, forge it in fire.

That’s not a mountain, that’s crumble.

If it’s fire, swallow.

The heart of a scarecrow isn't geometrical.

That’s not a diamond, it’s salt.

That’s not the sky but it’s not your fault.

My dragon may be your neurotoxin.

Your electrocardiogram may be my fortune cookie.

Once an angel has made an annunciation,

it’s impossible to tell him he has the wrong address.

Moonlight has its own befuddlements.

The rest of us can wear the wolf mask if we want

or look like reflections wandered off.

Eventually armor, eventually sunk.

You wanted love and expected what?

A parachute? Morphine? A gold sticker star?

The moment you were born—

you have to trust others because you weren't there.

Ditto death.

The strongest gift I was ever given

was made of twigs.

It didn't matter which way it broke.

~ Dean Young

from Poetry, Nov. 2011

art by van gogh

like two negative numbers multiplied by rain

Lie down, you are horizontal.

Stand up, you are not.

I wanted my fate to be human.

Like a perfume

that does not choose the direction it travels,

that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.

Yes, No, Or

—a day, a life, slips through them,

taking off the third skin,

taking off the fourth.

And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple,

an animal question, scuffing.

Old shoes, old roads—

the questions keep being new ones.

Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain

into oranges and olives.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from September 2012 issue of Poetry magazine

known and unknown, intensity, surprise, and disorder

I think I’m allergic to fixed ritual, when it comes to poetry—writing, for me, both needs and constellates big doses of freedom. I do have one habit: somewhere along the way, I developed a liking for writing on the back of torn-in-half sheets of already-used paper. There’s always a little stack by the bed. Even before that, it was always loose paper, not notebooks. My one requirement for writing has always been solitude, and I think it is somehow connected to a sense of privacy from childhood. I've always wanted the freedom to throw things away. A notebook feels to me like a little society, not a scattering of hermits. For me, it’s too self-aware of its own formal purpose, like a graveyard: a good place for the finished, not for conception. This feeling about notebooks is also somehow a metonym for my whole relationship to the act of writing. Creativity comes from some mixture of known and unknown, intensity, surprise, and disorder. The disorderliness makes the intensity permeable to the surprise.

~ Jane Hirshfield

 from Attention, Solitude, and First Books: 

Jane Hirshfield in Conversation

astir with the harvest of night

May morning be astir with the harvest of night;

Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,

Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse

That cut right through the surface to a source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,

When the gift within you slips clear

Of the sticky web of the personal

With its hurt and its hauntings,

And fixed fortress corners,

A Morning when you become a pure vessel

For what wants to ascend from silence,

May your imagination know

The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,

And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all

The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields

And something original begins

To stir toward your senses

And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth

In a clean line of form,

That claims from time

A rhythm not yet heard,

That calls space to

A different shape.

May it be its own force field

And dwell uniquely

Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye

By how deftly it fits

About its secret loss.

~ John O'Donohue

revenge

At times ... I wish

I could meet in a duel

the man who killed my father

and razed our home,

expelling me

into a narrow country.

And if he killed me,

I'd rest at last

and if I were ready -

I would take my revenge!

But if it came to light,

when my rival appeared,

that he had a mother

waiting for him,

or a father who'd put

his right hand over

the heart's place in his chest

whenever his son was late

even by just a quarter-hour

for a meeting they'd set -

then I would not kill him,

even if I could.

Likewise ... I

would not murder him

if it were soon made clear

that he had a brother or sisters

who loved him and constantly longed to see him.

Or if he had a wife to greet him

and children who

couldn't bear his absence

and who his presents thrilled.

Or if he had

friends or companions,

neighbors he knew

or allies from prison

or a hospital room,

or classmates from his school...

asking about him

and sending him regards.

But if he turned

out to be on his own -

cut off like a branch from a tree -

without mother or father,

with neither a brother nor sister,

wifeless, without a child,

and without kin or neighbors or friends,

colleagues or companions,

then I'd add not a thing to his pain

within that aloneness -

nor the torment of death,

and not the sorrow of passing away.

Instead I'd be content

to ignore him when I passed him by

on the street - as I

convinced myself

that paying him no attention

in itself was a kind of revenge.

~  Taha Muhammad Ali

with thanks to rebel girl at
http://themarkonthewall.blogspot.com/

I am the pause

Between going and staying the day wavers, 

in love with its own transparency. 

The circular afternoon is now a bay 

where the world in stillness rocks. 

All is visible and all elusive, 

all is near and can't be touched. 

Paper, book, pencil, glass, 

rest in the shade of their names. 

Time throbbing in my temples repeats 

the same unchanging syllable of blood. 

The light turns the indifferent wall 

into a ghostly theater of reflections. 

I find myself in the middle of an eye, 

watching myself in its blank stare. 

The moment scatters. Motionless, 

I stay and go: I am a pause.

~ Octavio Paz

photo by David Orndorf

farming for life

~ Wendell Berry

supposing

supposing i dreamed this)

only imagine,when day has thrilled

you are a house around which

i am a wind-

your walls will not reckon how

strangely my life is curved

since the best he can do

is to peer through windows,unobserved

-listen,for(out of all

things)dream is noone's fool;

if this wind who i am prowls

carefully around this house of you

love being such,or such,

the normal corners of your heart

will never guess how much

my wonderful jealousy is dark

if light should flower:

or laughing sparkle from

the shut house(around and around

which a poor wind will roam

~ e.e. cummings

quenching darkness

God

pours light

into every cup,

quenching darkness.

The proudly pious

stuff their cups with parchment

and critique the taste of ink

while God pours light

and the trees lift their limbs

without worry of redemption,

every blossom a chalice.

Hafiz, seduce those withered souls

with words that wet their parched lips

as light

pours like rain

into every empty cup

set adrift on the Infinite Ocean.

~ Hafiz

The solitary is one who is aware of solitude in himself as a basic and inevitable human reality, not just as something which affects him as an isolated individual. Hence his solitude is the foundation of a deep, pure and gentle sympathy with all other men, whether or not they are capable of realizing the tragedy of their plight. More - it is the doorway by which he enters into the mystery of God, and brings others into that mystery by the power of his love and his humility.

- Thomas Merton

  from Disputed Questions

Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude

with thanks to http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/




photo by Thomas Merton

What the solitary renounces is not his union with other men, but rather the deceptive fictions and inadequate symbols which tend to take the place of genuine social unity - to produce a facade of apparent unity without really uniting men on a deep level.  We are all alike in our aloneness at the deepest level, yet most of us try to distract ourselves from awareness of this in the ways Pascal called "divertissement," the "occupations and recreations so mercifully provided by society, which enable a man to avoid his own company for twenty-four hours a day."

~ John Barbour

from The Value of Solitude

here quoting Thomas Merton

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “universe,” 

a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, 

as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires 

and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. 

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison 

by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures 

and the whole of nature in its beauty.

~ Albert Einstein

Ghazal the Rain - 02 Dawn

~ Kayhan Kalhor and Shujaat Husain Kahn

with thanks to catherine willis

a story about Alexander the great

When Alexander, that unconquered lord,

Who subjugated empires with his sword,

Required a lengthy message to be sent

He dressed up as the messenger and went.

"The king gives such an order," he would say,

And none of those who hurried to obey

Once guessed this messenger's identity -

They had no knowledge of such majesty,

And even if he said:  "I am your lord,"

The claim was thought preposterous and ignored.

Deluded natures cannot recognize

The royal way that stands before their eyes.

~ Farid Attar

from The Conference of Birds

translation by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

a dimension called love

So when you ask what love is, you may be too frightened to see the answer. It may mean complete upheaval; it may break up the family; you may discover that you do not love your wife or husband or children—do you?—you may have to shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple. 

But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity. 

So if you eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower, which man always hungers after. 

If you have not got love—not just in little drops but in abundance—if you are not filled with it, the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love? 

Will any authority, any method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is not love. Can you say, “I will practice love. I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practice being kind and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others”? 

Do you mean that you can discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out the window. By practicing some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of nonviolence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love. 

In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty. Beauty is not something you see—not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building, or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. 

Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will—improve society, feed the poor—you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind. 

But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.

So we reach the point: Can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader—come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset? It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive—passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can only come into being when there is total self-abandonment. 

A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it—to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many. 

Like a flower that has a perfume, you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes the trouble to breath it deeply and to look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and, therefore, it is sharing with everybody. 

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world, which is not innocent. 

To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict. 

You may ask, “If I find such love, what happens to my wife, my children, my family? They must have security.” When you put such a question you have never been outside the field of thought, the field of consciousness. When once you have been outside that field you will never ask such a question because then you will know what love is in which there is no thought and therefore, no time. You may read this mesmerized and enchanted, but actually to go beyond thought and time—which means going beyond sorrow—is to be aware that there is a different dimension called love. 

But you don’t know how to come upon this extraordinary fount, so what do you do? If you don’t know what to do, you do nothing, don’t you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no center at all. Then there is love.

~ J. Krishnamurti 

from Freedom from the Known

planting trees

In the mating of trees,

the pollen grain entering invisible

the domed room of the winds, survives

the ghost of the old forest

that was here when we came. The ground

invites it, and it will not be gone.

I become the familiar of that ghost

and its ally, carrying in a bucket

twenty trees smaller than weeds,

and I plant them along the way

of the departure of the ancient host.

I return to the ground its original music.

It will rise out of the horizon

of the grass, and over the heads

of weeds, and it will rise over

the horizon of men’s heads. As I age

in the world it will rise and spread,

and be for this place horizon

and orison, the voice of its winds.

I have made myself a dream to dream

of its rising, that has gentled my nights.

Let me desire and wish well the life

these trees may live when I

no longer rise in the mornings

to be pleased by the green of them

shining, and their shadows on the ground,

and the sound of the wind in them.

~ Wendell Berry

from The Country of Marriage

at last to the dark

We come at last to the dark

and enter in.  We are given bodies

newly made out of their absence

from one another in the light

of the ordinary day.  We come

to the space between ourselves,

the narrow doorway, and pass through

into the land of the wholly loved.

~ Wendell Berry

 from Sabbaths 2002,
Given

waiting for the barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What's the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,

and why is he sitting enthroned at the city's main gate,

in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and the emperor's waiting to receive their leader.

He's even got a scroll to give him,

loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today

wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,

rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes

beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and things like that dazzle the barbarians

Why don't our distinguished orators turn up as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people's faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

~ Constantine Cavafy

translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Cavafy understood the word "barbarian" in its original Greek meaning, as applied to all those who are outside and have, instead of human speech, incoherent gibberish.  His intuition allowed him to capture a centuries-old opposition between the inside and the outside.

~ comment by Czeslaw Milosz