~ Jane Hirshfield

from the San Francisco International Poetry Festival

there is none

Many have gone mad looking for a solid center,

but there is none.

We think of centering as only a continual narrowing

of focus until we touch the pearl

but in practice it is often a continual expansion

of focus until we become the ocean.

Our center is vast space, boundless awareness

indistinguishable from unconditional love.

Of course I play the fool when I dare allow

consciousness to describe itself!  Isn't that the birth

of the ego, the "I am this" that closed behind us

when we entered the body?

~ Stephen Levine

ripen

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. 

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps 

the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, 

the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which

 all other work is merely preparation. 

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, 

are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. 

With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, 

anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. 

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, 

for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened 

and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. 

Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person 

(for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?),

 it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, 

to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; 

it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him 

and calls him to vast distances. 

Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves 

("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people 

use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and 

every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, 

for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, 

is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letter to a Young Poet, #7

art by picasso

comes naturally to an end

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.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from Freedom from the Known

art by van gogh

hearing music at dawn

It is sweet to hear music when the night

Is just retreating from the smoky branches

And the sun's enemies are throwing down their gloves.

Music is always reminding us whom we love,

One or two notes dissolve the auditor's mind

So we are swimming once more in the old river.

We are all failed farmers learning to play whist.

We have a lot of hands to play before midnight.

Someone else will have to worry about time.

I'm always glad when I hear that an old hen

Has been seen crossing the road at dusk.

It means our old teacher is still all right.

We keep remembering Barborossa's life.

A little whiskey fits in well with our lives.

The time of the Depression is not really over.

Poems like this amount to some form of music.

We dance for two hours.  When we look up,

We see that all the musicians have disappeared.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

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