the key

Morning unlocks the lake

as a woman with many keys might

come to open a house

where others are sleeping.

Enjoying the quiet possession.

Wiping the shelves of the mountain

with a lemony rag until they catch.

It is not hers. Those who live

there will claim it with raised voices,

with the closet doors' casual banging.

But for now, a single rowboat

drifts on the silvery water.

The oars are banked, the one sound

drips from the blades and widens

toward the enormous, dark-held shore.

There, the house is dreaming:

a red barrette on a wooden dresser,

somehow important.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Lives of the Heart

art by Elizabeth Torak

supposed to be

It is hard to be as popular as we are supposed to be. 

The superego or interior judge has altered its requirements ...

For one who fails to become successful and well-loved, 

punishment is swift and thorough. 

Self-esteem receives a battering from the inside, 

everyone feels insignificant and unseen until, in desperation, 

we finally agree to go on a talk show and tell it all. 

Once that moment is over, 

and universal love has not poured over our heads 

following the program, we fall still farther.

~ Robert Bly

from The Sibling Society

water

I was born in a drouth year. That summer 

my mother waited in the house, enclosed 

in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind, 

for the men to come back in the evenings, 

bringing water from a distant spring. 

veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank. 

And all my life I have dreaded the return 

of that year, sure that it still is 

somewhere, like a dead enemy's soul. 

 Fear of dust in my mouth is always with me, 

and I am the faithful husband of the rain, 

I love the water of wells and springs 

and the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns. 

I am a dry man whose thirst is praise 

of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup. 

My sweetness is to wake in the night 

after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.

....

Like the water

of a deep stream,

love is always too much.

We did not make it.

Though we drink till we burst,

we cannot have it all,

or want it all.

In its abundance

it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore

to drink our fill,

and sleep,

while it flows

through the regions of the dark.

It does not hold us,

except we keep returning to its rich waters

thirsty.

We enter,

willing to die,

into the commonwealth of its joy.

~ Wendell Berry

... while you're alive

~ Bill Moyers

 interview with Robert Bly

a delicious disease

~ Ibn Hazm

read by Robert Bly

sight, taste, touch, hearing, stopped

~ St. John of the Cross

read by Robert Bly

the present

I wanted to give you something —

no stone, clay, bracelet,

no edible leaf could pass through.

Even a molecule's fragrance by then too large.

Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.

Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.

They remained air.

I offered memory on memory,

but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?

I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

the light that’s blazing

A story is like water

that you heat for your bath.

It takes messages between the fire

and your skin. It lets them meet,

and it cleans you!

Very few can sit down

in the middle of the fire itself

like a salamander or Abraham.

We need intermediaries.

A feeling of fullness comes,

but it usually takes some bread

to bring it.

Beauty surrounds us,

but usually we need to be walking

in a garden to know it.

The body itself is a screen

to shield and partially reveal

the light that’s blazing

inside your presence.

Water, stories, the body,

all the things we do, are mediums

that hide and show what’s hidden.

Study them,

and enjoy being washed

with a secret we sometimes know,

and then not.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

from The Essential Rumi

once, I

Once, I

was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow,

sleepy and nameless.

As-ifness strange to myself, but complete.

Light on the neck-nape

of time

as two wings of one starling,

or lovers so happy

neither needs think of the other.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Poetry (April 2013)

a new loveliness

You cannot live without dying. 

You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. 

This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, 

wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness,

 there must be dying to everything of yesterday, 

otherwise you live mechanically, 

and a mechanical mind can never know what 

love is or what freedom is.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from Freedom from the Known

art by van gogh

an hour is not a house

An hour is not a house,

a life is not a house,

you do not go through them as if

they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,

four walls, a ceiling.

An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.

Some want sleep.

My eyes went

to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Poetry, April 2013

Hildegard von Bingen

Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. 

Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns 

ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. 

Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, 

and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, 

not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along.

Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God.

 - visionary, poet, composer, naturalist, healer, and theologian - 

founded convents; corresponded with secular and ecclesiastical leaders, 

as well as a vast range of people of lesser rank; and 

ventured forth as a monastic trouble-shooter, 

consultant exorcist, and visiting preacher. 

Even more remarkable for a woman of her time was the body of written work she produced. 

Its range - from natural history and medicine to cosmology, 

music, poetry, and theology - 

 possesses great beauty

.

extraordinary creativity was her accomplishment in music. 

In the poetry and melody of her songs, she reveals the full authority,

 intelligence and striking originality of her genius.

~ Hildegard von Bingen

multiplicity in properties

He who has lifted the veil sees multiplicity in properties, 
not in Essence; hence he knows that changes in properties 
cannot touch Essence, which owns a perfection subject to no mutability. 
Light merely seems to change as it shines through colored glass, but

light has no color.

Its rays shine through the glass

and only then 

do hues and tints appear.

Don't you understand?

Come then into my eyes

and...look!

and you will see

a sun shining

through a thousand bits of glass

beaming to plain sight through each

a ray of color

Why should any difference appear

between this one and that?

All light is one

but colors a thousandfold.

~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
from Divine Flashes

the lips of insanity

~ Coleman Barks

~ Rumi

wait for the hour

Always trust yourself and your own feeling, 

as opposed to argumentations, discussion, 

or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, 

then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. 

Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, 

which, like all progress, must come from deep within 

and cannot be forced or hastened. 

Everything is gestation and then birthing. 

To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion,

 entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, 

beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility 

and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: 

this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letters to a young poet, letter 3

translation by Stephen Mitchell
image found at art42