childhood

It would be good to give much thought, before

you try to find words for something so lost,

for those long childhood afternoons you knew

that vanished so completely - and why?

We're still reminded - : sometimes by a rain,

but we can no longer say what it means;

life was never again so filled with meeting,

with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us

except what happens to things and creatures:

we lived their world as something human,

and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd

and as overburdened by vast distances,

and summoned and stirred as from far away,

and slowly, like a long new thread,

introduced into that picture-sequence

where now having to go on bewilders us. 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

photo by kathleen connally

every atom babbles the mystery

Love plays its lute behind the screen -

where is a lover to listen to its tune?

With every breath a new song,

each split second a new string plucked.

The world has spilled Love's secret -

when could music ever hold its tongue?

Every atom babbles the mystery -

Listen yourself, for I'm no tattletale!

~ Fakhruddin Iraqi

from Divine Flashes 

translation by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson

art by van gogh

a christmas poem

Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where all agree

To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for horses;

All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place

As children, but we never heard the good stories.

Those stories only get told in the big tents, late

At night, when a trapper who has been caught

In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a man

With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of the fire.

As children we knew there was more to it—

Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve

Wasn't explained, nor why we were so often 

Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,

Why so much was lost. Those men and women

Who had died in wars started by others,

Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas tree

Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we

Have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er 

The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not

Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

two water-sellers

A man who lived by selling water found

He'd very little left; he looked around

And saw another water-seller there -

"Have you got any water you could spare?"

He asked.  "No, fool, I certainly have not,"

The other snapped; "make do with what you've got!"

"Oh, give me some," the man began to plead;

"I'm sick of what I have; it's yours I need."

When Adam's heart grew tired of all he knew,

He yearned for wheat, a substance strange and new -

He gave up all he owned for one small grain,

And naked suffered love's relentless pain;

He disappeared in love's intensity -

The old and new were gone and so was he;

He was annihilated, lost, made naught -

Nothingness swallowed all his hands had sought.

To turn from what we are, to yearn and die

Is not for us to choose or to deny."

~ Farid Attar

from The Conference of Birds

art by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez

change?

If something has an essence -

How can it ever change

Into anything else?

A thing doesn't change into something else -

Youth does not age,

Age does not age.

If something changed into something else -

Milk would be butter

Or butter would not be milk.

Were there a trace of something,

There would be a trace of emptiness.

Were there no trace of anything,

There would be no trace of emptiness.

Buddhas say emptiness

Is relinquishing opinions.

Believers in emptiness

Are incurable. 

~ Nagarjuna

from Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime

translated by Stephen Batchelor 
art by klimt

the answer

Then what is the answer?—Not to be deluded by dreams. 

To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, 

and their tyrants come, many times before. 

When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose 

the least ugly faction; these evils are essential. 

To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not 

wish for evil; and not be duped 

By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will 

not be fulfilled. 

To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear 

the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand 

Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and 

his history...for contemplation or in fact... 

Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, 

the greatest beauty is 

Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, 

the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man 

Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, 

or drown in despair when his days darken.

~ Robinson Jeffers

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

on grief and loss

~ Dr. Geoff Warburton

by looking tirelessly

By looking tirelessly, I became quite empty 

and with that emptiness all came back to me except the mind. 

I find I have lost the mind irretrievably. 

I am neither conscious nor unconscious, 

I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions.

Distinctions are created by the mind and apply to the mind only. 

I am pure Consciousness itself, unbroken awareness of all that is. 

I am in a more real state than yours. 

I am undistracted by the distinctions and separations which constitute a person. 

As long as the body lasts, it has its needs like any other, 

but my mental process has come to an end. 

My thinking, like my digestion, is unconscious and purposeful. 

I am not a person in your sense of the word, 

though I may appear a person to you. 

I am that infinite ocean of consciousness in which all happens. 

I am also beyond all existence and cognition, pure bliss of being. 

There is nothing I feel separate from, hence I am all. 

No thing is me, so I am nothing. 

Life will escape, the body will die, but it will not affect me in the least. 

Beyond space and time I am, uncaused, uncausing, yet the very matrix of existence.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

with thanks to http://ashramof1.tumblr.com/

photo by Bea Garth

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