darkness, of whom I am born

 

 

You, darkness, of whom I am born -

 

I love you more than the flame

that limits the world

to the circle it illumines 

and excludes all the rest

 

But the dark embraces everything:

shapes and shadows, creatures and me,

people, nations - just as they are.

 

It lets me imagine

a great presence stirring beside me.

 

I believe in the night.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Monastic Life, I,11

 

 

 

 

between the material world and the world of feeling

Between the material world and the world of feeling there must be a border - on one side, the person grieves and the cells of the body grieve also; the molecules also; the atoms.  Of this there are many proofs.  On the other, the iron will of the earth goes on.  The torture-broken femur continues to heal even in the last hour, perhaps beyond; the wool coat left behind does not morn the loss of its master.  And yet Cavafy wrote, "In me now everything is turned into feeling - furniture, streets."  And Saba found in a bleating goat his own and all beings' sorrow, and this morning the voice of that long-dead goat - which is only, after all, a few black-inked words - cries and cries in my ears.  Rilke, too, believed the object longs to awaken in us.  But I long for the calm acceptance of a bentwood chair and envy the blue-green curve of a vase's shoulder, which holds whatever is placed within it - the living flower or the dead - with an equally tender balance, and know no difference between them.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

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the world is a musical instrument

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To be calm, to be serene! There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch.  So is it with us.  Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves.  All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps.  Such clarity! obtained by such pure means!  by simple living, by honesty of purpose.  We live and rejoice.  I awoke into a music which no one by me heard.  Whom shall I thank for it?  The luxury of wisdom! the luxury of virtue!  Are there any intemperate in these things?  I feel my Maker blessing me.  To the sane man the world is a musical instrument.  The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure.

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~ Thoreau

journal entry, June 22, 1851

photo by Kathleen Connally

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Rebus

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You work with what you are given,

the red clay of grief,

the black clay of stubbornness going on after. 

Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,

clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, 

each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table. 

There are honeys so bitter

no one would willingly choose to take them.

The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity, 

honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,

bottom of river, my own consumed life—

when will I learn to read it

plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire? 

Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, 

we become our choices.

Each yes, each one continues,

this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness. 

The anvil leans into its silence. 

The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt
art by Vic Muniz

Jasper, Feldspar, Quartzite

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Jasper, feldspar, quartzite, agate, granite, sandstone, slate.

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Some can be rounded, some not.

Some can be flaked, some not.

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A person too, hold her lines of possible fracture.

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Snow falls over the cities and mountains.

Cries of the late geese pass through it,

forsythia blossoms far inside their buds.

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Each pebble, each planet, gives off a recordable singing.

I have heard them.

Monastic the strangeness.

.

Perhaps, through, that is the only destination -

beauty & strangeness.

Whose notes abandon the instruments that make them.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

art by Karla Nolan

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the same ancient smile

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Poor flowers in geometric beds

Of formal gardens:

They seem to dread the police...

And yet so fair, they flower in the same way,

With the same ancient smile

They had for the gaze of the first man

When he saw they were out

For the first time, and lightly touched them

Wondering if they spoke!

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~ Thomas Merton

from The Keeper of the Flocks

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Once: An Assay

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Once wakes up in the morning, brews coffee, 

goes outside in its bathrobe to bring the paper from the street.

Once notices the day is possible rain.

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At the same time, Once is lightly climbing a tree, a tall sycamore

slanting over a late-summer stream.

A single yellow leaf at once floats down.

.

A water snake flows one way, the leaf the other.

Once goes with both. 

Then coils in a spring-latched doorknob,

while also swinging its large head around

to scratch the itch that troubles one coarse-haired hip.

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Once knows again exists

but this is theoretical knowledge.

Thus Once is ceaselessly tender, though without large passion.

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Once doesn't know any better and so loves this world,

in which babies starve, after long enough,

in silence.

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Is Once heartless?

- You may well ask,

who pass your life inside its large, dry hand.

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Once turns its face toward the question:

a horse-shaped clock of bright blue plastic, with red tail.

The dream its whinny wakes you from is also Once's.

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This sneeze, this pain, this rage or weeping: one moment only.

Leaving, Once takes in its pocket your slightest sigh.

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Just try to breathe it again, Once murmurs, You'll see.

.

If you protest, it is Once's own and only protest.

If you agree, it is Once that for its instant accedes.

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This Mobius is hard to understand but easy to manufacture.

A single strip of paper, turned once, and it's yours.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

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thank you

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I thank you, deep power

that works me ever more lightly

in ways I can't make out.

The day's labor grows simple now,

and like a holy face

held in my dark hands.

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Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Poverty and Death, I,62

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fresh always with new tears

A slow singer, but loading each phrase

With history’s overtones, love, joy

And grief learned by his dark tribe

In other orchards and passed on

Instinctively as they are now,

But fresh always with new tears.

~ R.S. Thomas

 “A Blackbird Singing”

art by Sandra Merwin

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

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Envy: An Assay

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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.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

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to exist clearly

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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.

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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.)

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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?

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~ Thomas Merton

from the Portuguese of Fernando Pessoa

#8, of twelve poems from The Keeper of Flocks

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life partakes of the freshness

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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...

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~ Harlan Hubbard

from Shantyboat Journal

edited by Don Wallis

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the current

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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

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~ W.S. Merwin

from Migration, The Carrier of Ladders 1970

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Hesitation: An Assay

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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

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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.

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If pleasure requires prolonging, then these lovers.

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Yet slowness alone is not to be confused

with the scent of the plum tree just before it opens.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from After


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