on friendship and love

Such a friendship has no model but itself, and can only be compared to itself. It was not one special consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand; it was some mysterious quintessence of all this mixture which possessed itself of my will,  and led it to plunge and lose itself in his, which possessed itself of his whole will, and led it, with a similar hunger and a like impulse, to plunge and lose itself in mine.  I may truly say lose, for it left us with nothing that was our own, nothing that was either his or mine.

~ Montaigne

from Essays of Michel de Montaigne

In any true love - a mother's for her child, a husband's for his wife, a friend's for a friend - there is an excess energy that always wants to be in motion.  Moreover, it seems to move not simply from one person to another but through them toward something else.  ("All I know now / is the more he loved me the more I loved the world" - Spencer Reece.) That is why we can be so baffled and overwhelmed by such love (and I don't mean merely when we fall in love; in fact, I'm talking more of other, more durable relationships): it wants to be more than it is; it cries out inside of us to make it more than it is.

~ Christian Wiman

from My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

we say

We say release, and radiance, and roses,

and echo upon everything that's known;

and yet, behind the world our names enclose is

the nameless: our true archetype and home.

The sun seems male, and earth is like a woman,

the field is humble, and the forest proud;

but over everything we say, inhuman,

moves the forever-undetermined god.

We grow up; but the world remains a child.

Star and flower, in silence, watch us go.

And sometimes we appear to be the final

exam they must succeed on. And they do.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Stephen Mitchell

photo by Carsten Meyerdierks

well of darkness

If each day falls

inside each night,

there exists a well

where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim

of the well of darkness

and fish for fallen light

with patience.

~ Pablo Neruda

from The Sea and the Bells

translated by William O'Daly

with thanks to Love is a Place

that crookedness is straightness itself

They asked al-Hallaj, "To which religious School do you belong?

he answered, "God's own."

He who limned 

a thousand worlds with paint-

you layabout! - do you expect

He'll use your color or mine?

Our paints and tints

are but opinions and fantasy,

He is colorless

and we must adopt His hue.

Look: a shadow lies crooked upon the ground because the very earth is laid rough; but no, 

that crookedness is straightness itself, for the perfection, the "straightness" of the eyebrow is in its 

sinuous curve.

Only because it is bent

is this piece of wood a bow.

Reality is a sphere: wherever you place your finger,

there is its dead center.

~ Fakhruddin Iraqi

from Divine Flashes

go deeper

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,

love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock

molten, yet dense and permanent.

Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.

And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.

Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.

For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths

out of sight, in the deep living heart.

But say, in the dark wild metal of your heart

is there a gem, which came into being between us?

is there a sapphire of mutual trust, a blue spark?

Is there a ruby of fused being, mine and yours, an inward glint?

If there is not, O then leave me, go away.

For I cannot be bullied back into the appearances of love,

any more than August can be bullied to look like March.

Love out of season, especially at the end of the season

is merely ridiculous.

If you insist on it, I insist on departure.

Have you no deep old heart of wild womanhood

self-forgetful, and gemmed with experience,

and swinging in a strange union of power

with the heart of the man you are supposed to have loved?

If you have not, go away.

If you can only sit with a mirror in your hand, an ageing woman

posing on and on as a lover,

in love with a self that now is shallow and withered,

your own self–that has passed like a last summer’s flower–

then go away–

I do not want a woman whom age cannot wither.

She is a made-up lie, a dyed immortelle

of infinite staleness.

~ D. H. Lawrence
from The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

february 29

An extra day -

Like the painting's fifth cow,

who looks out directly,

straight toward you,

from inside her black and white spots

An extra day -

Accidental, surely:

the made calendar stumbling over the real

as a drunk trips over a threshold

too low to see.

An extra day -

With a second cup of black coffee.

A friendly but businesslike phone call.

A mailed-back package.

Some extra work, but not too much -

just one day's worth, exactly.

An extra day -

Not unlike the space

between a door and its frame

when one room is lit and another is not,

and one changes into the other

as a woman exchanges a scarf.

An extra day -

Extraordinarily like any other.

And still

there is some generosity to it,

like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty

a person protests to fate

A person protests to fate:

"The things you have caused

me most to want

are those that furthest elude me."

Fate nods.

Fate is sympathetic.

To tie the shoes, button a shirt,

are triumphs

for only the very young,

the very old.

During the middle:

conjugating a river

mastering tango

training the cat to stay off the table

preserving a single moment longer than this one

continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before

and the penmanships love practices inside the body.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty

like the small hole by the path-side something lives in

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,

in me lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,

nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.

Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me

whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets - the narrow ones,

unlabeled on the self-map -

they follow stairs down music ears can't follow,

and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,

in hours uncounted by the self-clock,

they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.

There too have been the hard extinctions,

missing birds once feasted on and feasting.

There too must be machines

like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day,

A few escape, A mercy,

They leave behind

small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.

~ Jane Hirshfield 

from The Beauty

Fremont rock painting from San Raphael Swell

2000-1000 BC Caves Painting

in praise of being peripheral

Without philosophy,

tragedy,

history,

a gray squirrel

looks 

very busy.

Light as a soul

released

from a painting by Bosch,

its greens

and vermilions stripped off it.

He climbs a tree

that is equally ahistoric.

His heart works harder.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty

if someone asks

If someone asks

about the mind of this monk,

say it is no more than 

a passage of wind

in a vast sky.

~ Ryokan

from The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan

by Kazuaki Tanahashi

as one listens to the rain

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,

not attentive, not distracted,

light footsteps, thin drizzle,

water that is air, air that is time,

the day is still leaving,

the night has yet to arrive,

figurations of mist

at the turn of the corner,

figurations of time

at the bend in this pause,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

without listening, hear what I say

with eyes open inward, asleep

with all five senses awake,

it’s raining, light footsteps, a murmur of syllables,

air and water, words with no weight:

what we are and are,

the days and years, this moment,

weightless time and heavy sorrow,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

wet asphalt is shining,

steam rises and walks away,

night unfolds and looks at me,

you are you and your body of steam,

you and your face of night,

you and your hair, unhurried lightning,

you cross the street and enter my forehead,

footsteps of water across my eyes,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

the asphalt’s shining, you cross the street,

it is the mist, wandering in the night,

it is the night, asleep in your bed,

it is the surge of waves in your breath,

your fingers of water dampen my forehead,

your fingers of flame burn my eyes,

your fingers of air open eyelids of time,

a spring of visions and resurrections,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

the years go by, the moments return,

do you hear the footsteps in the next room?

not here, not there: you hear them

in another time that is now,

listen to the footsteps of time,

inventor of places with no weight, nowhere,

listen to the rain running over the terrace,

the night is now more night in the grove,

lightning has nestled among the leaves,

a restless garden adrift—go in,

your shadow covers this page.

~ Octavio Paz

from A Tree Within

Eliot Weinberger translation

clouds

I’d have to be really quick

to describe clouds -

a split second’s enough

for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:

they don’t repeat a single 

shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind, 

they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to? 

They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds, 

life rests on solid ground, 

practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds

even a stone seems like a brother, 

someone you can trust, 

while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,

and then die, one after another:

clouds simply don't care

what they're up to

down there.

And so their haughty fleet

cruises smoothly over your whole life

and mine, still incomplete.

They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone.

They don't have to be seen while sailing on. 

–Wisława Szymborska
from Monologue of a Dog

Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh translation

language without words

Sick of those who come with words, words but no language,

I make my way to the snow-covered island.

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages

stretch out in all directions.

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language,

language without words.

~ Tomas Tranströmer

translated by Robin Robertson

a message from space

Everything that happens is the message:

you read an event and be one and wait,

like breasting a wave, all the while knowing

by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish

aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,

crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,

dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up

eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into

sound before it begins, the breathing

so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills

where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied

stillness unfolding their careful words:

"Everything counts. The message is the world."

~ William Stafford

from The Worth of Local Things