Friday, October 1, 2010

remembering






Rather the flying bird, leaving no trace
Than the going beast
Marking the earth with his track.

The bird flies by and forgets
(As is only right). The beast
Where he no longer is
(And is therefore no use)
Marks that he was there before
(Which is also no use).

For to remember is to betray
Nature, since the nature of yesterday
Is not nature.
What has been, is nothing.
Remembering
Is failure to see.

Move on, bird, move on, teach me
To move on.




Fernando Pessoa
translation by Thomas Merton
.

Envy: An Assay


.
.
A mother sings to her infant,
Most beautiful in all the world, and you stand helpless.
Wind outside the window,
looking in with shackled ankles, wrists.
Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.
Yet you, too, had a mother. Had two sisters.
A photo shows the bone structure's slow shifting:
your face, small, blurred with something almost sorrow,
peers between them.
.
~ Jane Hirshfield
from After
.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

to exist clearly


.
.
Last evening a city man
Was talking in the hotel door
To everyone, including me.
.
He talked of justice, of the struggle to obtain
Justice, of the workers
Suffering: of unending work
Of hungry men, of rich men turning
Their backs to it all.
.
Then, looking at me, he saw me with tears
In my eyes.  He smiled, happy,
Thinking I felt the same hatred he felt
And the compassion
He claimed to feel.
.
(But I was hardly listening to him.
What do I care about people
And what they suffer, or suppose they suffer?
Let them be like me - they will not suffer.
All the ill in the world comes from people interfering
With one another:
Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.
Our soul, heaven and earth, these are enough:
To want more is to lose these and be wretched.)
.
What I was thinking when this friend of man
Spoke (and this moved me to weep)
Was that the far murmur of cowbells
In the evening air
Was nothing like small chapel bells
Where flowers and brooks might have heard Mass
Along with simple souls
Simple as mine.
.
(Praise be to God I am not good and have
The natural selfishness of flowers
And rivers, going on their way
Concerned only, and not knowing it,
To flower and go.
This is the only mission in the world:
This - to exist clearly
And to know how
Without thinking about it.)
.
The man fell silent,
He viewed the setting sun.
But what have sunsets to do
With haters and lovers?
.
~ Thomas Merton
from the Portuguese of Fernando Pessoa
#8, of twelve poems from The Keeper of Flocks
.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

life partakes of the freshness


.
.
Our zest for the river did not wane...
We went on in much the same way, in surroundings which had become familiar, 
with not even a flood to make the year memorable.
.  
Ruts, however, are worn only in traveled ways on land: 
a river life partakes of the freshness of the river itself.  
.
Each rise and fall affords a new outlook 
and gives to a well-known shore the feel of one 
at which you have just landed for the first time...
.
~ Harlan Hubbard
from Shantyboat Journal
edited by Don Wallis
.

the current



.
For a long time some of us
lie in the marshes like dark coats
forgetting that we are water
.
dust gathers all day on our closed lids
weeds grow up through us
.
but the eels keep trying to tell us 
writing over and over in our mud
our heavenly names
.
and through us a thin cold current
never sleeps
.
its glassy feet move on until they find stones
.
then cloud fish call to it again
your heart is safe with us
.
bright fish flock to it again touch it
with their mouths say yes
have vanished
.
yes and black flukes wave to it
from the Lethe of whales
.
~ W.S. Merwin
from Migration, The Carrier of Ladders 1970
.

.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Hesitation: An Assay


.
.
Sometimes only a slowing
so momentary it can scarcely be seen -
as if a dog
chasing something large and swift and important,
were distracted by the white tremor of an overhead moth.
.
Other times a full lifetime tentative, lost.
.
The line of the roof in a child's crayoned drawing
can show a hesitation almost fatal.
The rain
comes to it hard or less hard,
knowing nothing of hesitations's rake-toothed debate
.
And the two lovers
now concealed around the corner?
They fool no one, not even themselves,
pausing in their own shadows outside a locked door.
.
If pleasure requires prolonging, then these lovers.
.
Yet slowness alone is not to be confused
with the scent of the plum tree just before it opens.
.
~ Jane Hirshfield
from After


.

our own limits transgressed





We need the tonic of wildness, 
to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, 
and hear the booming of the snipe; 
to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder 
and more solitary fowl builds her nest, 
and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.  

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, 
we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, 
that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed 
by us because it is unfathomable. 

We can never have enough of nature.  
We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, 
vast and titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, 
the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, 
the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, 
and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
  


~ Thoreau
from Walden, "Spring," 1854
photo above by Kathleen Connally
.




Sunday, September 26, 2010

True freedom




.
.
True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such
a way as if you had completely chosen whatever
you feel or experience at this moment.
This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering.
Is suffering really necessary? Yes and no.
If you had not suffered as you have, 
there would be no depth to you as a human being, 
no humility, no compassion.
You would not be reading this now. 
Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, 
and then comes a point when it has served its purpose.
Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.
.
~ Eckhart Tolle
.

Friday, September 24, 2010

I am fishing with the one who made the river


.
.
When I go out on the water at night, and as I bait hooks, watch Cassiopeia, rising in the eastern sky, draw up her fishingline, Perseus with the misty Pleiads as bait and bright Venus caught, and then all grow dim in the faint beginning light of dawn, then I feel that I am fishing with the one who made the river and set her flowing.  I feel its length and sinuous flowing, fed by swift streams in the wooded eastern mountains; and somewhere, through a country unknown to me except by hearsay, past the mouths of new rivers and towns known only by name, it will at last enter an ocean and lose its identity, as I will too, at the end of my devious flowing.
.
~ Harlan Hubbard
from Shantyboat Journal
edited by Don Wallis

dog still barking at midnight


.
.
It has come to this:
three ants, seemingly separate, seemingly aimless,
wandering on a shelf.
.
They've appeared and disappeared for days between jars and bottles.
Luckless, they move without pausing.
.
A single breath-puff could send any one to the floor.
How distant they must be from the nest -
yet none consults with another,
none turns to the others for reassurance or warmth.
.
In their cold bodies: calcium, carbons, a trace of nickel.
.
Inexhaustible solitude, how did you come so far
to waver on the slim antennae of these my sisters?
.
~ Jane Hirshfield
.

the promise


.
.
Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.
Mysteriously, they left.
As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,
who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.
It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,
only a stepping back from the petty.
I gazed at the range of blue mountains,
I drank from the stream.  Tossed in a small stone from the bank.
Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted.
Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted.
There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger.
The dogs tail wagged a little in his dream.
.
~ Jane Hirshfield
from After
photo by shreve stockton
.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

That Time of Year thou mayst in me Behold





.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold 
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day 
As after sunset fadeth in the west, 
Which by and by black night doth take away, 
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. 
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire 
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, 
As the death-bed whereon it must expire, 
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. 
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, 
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
.
~ William Shakespeare
sonnet LXXIII

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

woman in red coat





.
Some questions cannot be answered.
They become familiar weights in the hand,
round stones pulled from the pocket,
unyielding and cool.
Your fingers travel their surfaces,
lose themselves finally
in the braille of the durable world.
Look out of any window, it's the same --
the yellow leaves, the wintering light.
A truck passes, piled deep in cut wood.
A woman, in a red wool coat,
sees you watching and quickly looks away.
.
~ Jane Hirshfield 
from Of Gravity and Angels
.


Let life happen





.
For one human being to love another; 
that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, 
the ultimate, the last test and proof, 
the work for which all other work is but preparation. 
.
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: 
that each protects the solitude of the other. 
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: 
the more they give, the more they possess.
.
There are no classes in life for beginners; 
right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
.
Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; 
the more strongly you cultivate this belief, 
the more will reality and the world go forth from it. 
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; 
blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; 
for the Creator, there is no poverty.
.
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting 
to see us once beautiful and brave. 
Perhaps everything terrible 
is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. 
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, 
for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
.
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. 
Let life happen to you. 
Believe me: life is in the right, always.
.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
.


just now



.
In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks
.
~ W.S. Merwin
from The Pupil
.
.