Streets in Shanghai

 

1

The white butterfly in the park is being read by many.
I love that cabbage-moth as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself!

At dawn the running crowds set our quiet planet in motion.
Then the park fills with people. To each one, eight faces polished like jade, for all
situations, to avoid making mistakes.
To each one, there's also the invisible face reflecting "something you don't talk about."
Something that appears in tired moments and is as rank as a gulp of viper schnapps with its long scaly aftertaste.

The carp in the pond move continuously, swimming while they sleep, setting an example for the faithful: always in motion.



2

It's midday. Laundry flutters in the gray sea-wind high over the cyclists
who arrive in dense schools. Notice the labrinths on each side!

I'm surrounded by written characters that I can't interpret, I'm illiterate through and through.
But I've paid what I owe and have receipts for everything.
I've accumulated so many illegible receipts.
I'm an old tree with withered leaves that hang on and can't fall to the ground.

And a gust from the sea gets all these receipts rustling.



3

At dawn the trampling hordes set our quiet planet in motion.
We're all aboard the street, and it's as crammed as the deck of a ferry.

Where are we headed? Are there enough teacups? We should consider ourselves lucky
to have made it aboard this street!
It's a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia.

Hovering behind each of us who walks here is a cross that wants to catch up with us,
pass us, unite with us.
Something that wants to sneak up on us from behind, put its hands over our eyes and
whisper "Guess who!"

We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don't
know about.

 

 

 

~ Tomas Transtromer 

 from Bright Scythe, 

translated by Patty Crane

with thanks to whiskey river

 

 

 

 

late ripeness

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,

I felt a door opening in me and I entered 

the clarity of early morning. 

One after another my former lives were departing, 

like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas 

assigned to my brush came closer, 

ready now to be described better than they were before. 

I was not separated from people, 

grief and pity joined us. 

We forget — I kept saying — that we are all children of the King. 

For where we come from there is no division 

into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be. 

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part 

of the gift we received for our long journey. 

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago - 

a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror 

of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel 

staving its hull against a reef — they dwell in us, 

waiting for a fulfillment. 

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, 

as are all men and women living at the same time, 

whether they are aware of it or not. 

~Czeslaw Milosz

from Collected Poems, 1931-1987

art by van gogh

effortlessly

Effortlessly,

Love flows from God to man,

Like a bird

Who rivers the air

Without moving her wings.

Thus we move in His world

One in body and soul,

Though outwardly separate in form.

As the Source strikes the note,

Humanity sings -

The Holy Spirit is our harpist,

And all the strings

Which are touched in Love

Must sound.

~ Mechtild of Magdeburg
(1210-1282)

unnameable heart

The cricket who

kept me company three days

has fallen silent

I don't know where.

There are so many

lives of which I know nothing.

Even my own.  It moves now

through my fingers toward yours

and I know nothing

I can say that will name its heart.

A boat drifts far out

on the river below the mountains,

and below it

the fish, the great fish

that the one in the boat has come for,

swims in the shadow.

Perhaps the cricket is there, inside the fish.

Stranger things have happened.

I have looked everywhere else

for my lost companion.

From here the shadow looks small,

but to the fish it is huge.

Range after range of mountains,

and still the old painters

found a place

where two could walk together, side by side.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Lives of the Heart

how

How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I gently
lift it up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark,
in some quiet, unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.

And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest of songs.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from New Poems - 1907 

Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1897. He was 22, she was 36.
 Their love story lasted until 1901 and turned into a friendship 
that only ended with Rilke’s death in 1926. 

Your being has been the door that allowed me to reach fresh air for the first time.

the ubiquity of the divine presence

Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon 

but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency 

are coming to an end. 

Our divided, schizophrenic worldview,

with no mythology adequate to coordinate our conscious and unconscious — 

that is what is coming to an end. 

The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, 

the idea that there is a single religious group 

that is in sole possession of the truth — 

that is the world as we know it that must pass away. 

What is the kingdom? 

It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence 

in our neighbors, 

in our enemies, 

in all of us. 

~ Joseph Campbell 

[APOCALYPSE: from the Greek word 'apokalyptein', meaning "uncover, disclose, reveal". From apo- "from" + kalyptein "to cover, conceal"

For you, my friend, every day is an apocalypse. Every hour, every minute, every moment, the old is falling away, the known is burning itself up, and the new, the never-before-seen, is revealing itself, in all its freshness. Truly, every moment is the end of a world, the end of dreams, and the birth of the new. Seen in the light of truth, life is a constant apocalypse, a constant awakening to what is, yet the separate self, with its fear of the loss of the status quo and its clinging to form and belief, pushes 'apocalypse' into time, and even fixes it to a specific date. And when that date passes, the mechanism creates a new date. It has to. This has always been the case. It is the seeker in action. To the illusory self, the end of the world will always be 'nigh'. It's how it keeps its own illusion going. It loves the drama of it.

And all the while, this timeless, ever-present apocalypse has always been with us, sweetly singing its song of newness and unshakeable truth. Have a great Friday, no matter what happens. 

~ Jeff Foster

a succession of stillnesses

.

An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travelers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.

~ Russell Hoban
from The Medusa Frequency

the primacy and wonder of the dark

There is a touching innocence in the mystery of the human self.  

Even after thousands of years of experience and reflection, 

we still remain a mystery to ourselves...

there is something deeply unpredictable and unfathomable.

... Even when you approach your self tenderly 

with the candle of receptive and reverential seeing, 

all you achieve is a glimpse.  

There is something in the sacred darkness of the mind 

that does not trust the facility and quickness of light.

Darkness resists the name.  

Darkness knows the regions which the name 

can never reach or hold or dream.

  The dark must smile at the proud pretense of words 

to hold networks of identity and meaning, 

but the dark knows only too well the fragile surface on which words stand.  

Darkness keeps its secrets.

 

Light is diverse and plural: 

sunlight, moonlight, dusk, dawn, and twilight.  

The dark has only one name.  

There is something deep in us 

which implicitly recognizes the primacy and wonder of the dark.  

Perhaps this is why we instinctively insist on avoiding and ignoring its mysteries.

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

photo by Kathleen Connally

start with the little things

Start with little things.

Love the earth like a mole,
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands --

Like spades, but pink and loving; they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.

Fields are to touch;
each day nuzzle your way.

Tomorrow the world.


—William Stafford
from The Way It Is
with thanks to Love is a Place

the heart's counting knows only one

In Sung China, 

two monks friends for sixty years

watch the geese pass.

Where are they going?

one tested the other, who couldn't say.

That moment's silence continues.

No one will study their friendship

in the koan-books of insight.

No one will remember their names.

I think of them sometimes,

standing, perplexed by sadness,

goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.

Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains,

but not yet.

As the barely audible

geese are not yet swallowed;

as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Lives of the Heart

artist unknown from the Yuan Dynasty

hostess to my morethanme

the trick of finding what you didn't lose
(existing's tricky:but to live's a gift)
the teachable imposture of always
arriving at the place you never left

(and i refer to thinking)rests upon
a dismal misconception;namely that
some neither ape nor angel called a man
is measured by his quote eye cue unquote.

Much better than which, every woman who's
(despite the ultramachinations of
some loveless infraworld)a woman knows;
and certain men quite possibly may have

shall we say guessed?"
"we shall" quoth gifted she:
and played the hostess to my morethanme



~e.e.cummings
from Selected Poems

.

my beauty in you

I see my beauty in you. I become
a mirror that cannot close its eyes

to your longing. My eyes wet with
yours in the early light. My mind

every moment giving birth, always
conceiving, always in the ninth

month, always the come-point. How

do I stand this? We become these

words we say, a wailing sound moving

out into the air. These thousands of

worlds that rise from nowhere, how

does your face contain them? I'm

a fly in your honey, then closer, a

moth caught in flame's allure, then

empty sky stretched out in homage.

 ~ Jelaluddin Rumi

.

because loved, a pure beast came to be

This is the non-existent animal.
Not knowing that, they loved it, loved its ways,
its neck, its posture, loved its quiet gaze
down to the light within it, loved it all.

True, it was not. But, because loved, a pure
beast came to be. A space was kept, conceded.
And in that space, left blank for it, secure,
it gently raised its head and hardly needed

to be. They fed it on no kind of corn,
but always only with the right to be.
And on the beast such power this could confer,

its brow put forth new growth. A single horn.
White, it sought out a virgin's company -
and was inside the mirror and in her.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 4

 

 

 

 

 

 

listen

listen

hiding in this cage

of visible matter

is the invisible

lifebird

pay attention

to her

she is singing

your song

~ Kabir

Sushil Rao translation

I am a boat

I am a boat

without wind.

You were the wind.

Was that the direction I wanted to go?

Who cares about directions

with a wind like that!

translation by Robert Bly

It’s the dream we carry in secret

that something miraculous will happen,

that it must happen –

that time will open

that the heart will open

that doors will open

that the mountains will open

that springs will gush –

that the dream will open,

that one morning we will glide into

some little harbour we didn't know was there.

translation by Robin Fulton

.

~ Olav H. Hauge

(18 August 1908 – 23 May 1994)

a Norwegian, Mr. Hauge worked as a gardener in his own orchard