half life

We walk through half our life

as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open

our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are

we watch the ghost of us drift

from room to room

through friends and lovers

never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean

or meaning half we say

we dream ourselves

from birth to birth

seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks

and the heart can not abide

a moment longer

as the rest of us awakens,

summoned from the dream,

not half caring for anything but love.

- Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

kinship

~ Homeboy Industries

perishable

The nimble ovenbird, the dignity of pears,

The simplicity of oars, the imperishable

Engines inside slim fir seeds, all of these

Make clear how much we want the impermanent

To be permanent.  We want the hermit wren

To keep her eggs even during the storm.

But that's impossible. We are perishable;

Friends, we are salty, impermanent kingdoms.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

 

in time a man disappears

In time a man disappears

from his lifelong fields, from 

the streams he has walked beside,

from the woods where he sat and waited.

Thinking of this, he seems to 

miss himself in those places

as if always he has been there.

But first he must disappear,

and this he foresees with hope,

with thanks.  Let others come.

.

~ Wendell Berry

from Leavings

.

small beauties

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a dinky
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time,
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the Vulcan blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp, 

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have - as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world. 

 

 

 

--Sharon Olds

 'Little Things' from The Gold Cell