the joy that shapes dance

.

.

Sound and gesture are contemporary,

identical and indistinguishable...

Linked to its own past,

the gesture fills up with music

and becomes rounded,

like the universe...

The beauty of gesture

renders time visible.

.

~ Catherine David

.

Stillness,

 is the canvas 

against which movement 

can become beautiful.

.

~ John O'Donohue

from The Invisible Embrace, Beauty

.

How it Happens

 

 

 

The sky said I am watching

to see what you

can make out of nothing

I was looking up and I said

I thought you

were supposed to be doing that

the sky said Many

are clinging to that

I am giving you a chance

I was looking up and I said

I am the only chance I have

then the sky did not answer

and here we are

with our names for the days

the vast days that do not listen to us

 

 

 

~ W. S. Merwin

.

The Gazelle

.

Enchanted thing: how can two chosen words

ever attain the harmony of pure rhyme

that pulses through you as your body stirs?

Out of your forehead branch and lyre climb,

.

and all your features pass in simile,through

the songs of love whose words, as light as rose-

petals, rest on the face of someone who 

has put his book away and shut his eyes:

.

to see you: tensed, as it each leg were a gun

loaded with leaps, but  not fired while your neck

holds your head still, listening: as when,

.

while swimming in some isolated place,

a girl hears leaves rustle, and turns to look:

the forest pool reflected in her face.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell

.

Dogs

.

.

Many times loneliness

is someone else

an absence

then when loneliness is no longer

someone else many times

it is someone else's dog

that you're keeping

then when the dog disappears

and the dog's absence

you are alone at last

and loneliness many times

is yourself

that absence

but at last it may be

that you are your own dog

hungry on the way

the one sound climbing a mountain

higher than time

.

~ W.S. Merwin

Writings To An Unfinished Accompaniment

thanks to http://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com/

.

Lights Out

.

The old grieving autumn goes on calling to its summer

the valley is calling to other valleys beyond the ridge

each star is roaring alone into darkness

there is not a sound in the whole night

.

~ W.S. Merwin

.

the deep innerness of all things

You are the future, 

the red sky before sunrise

over the fields of time.

You are the cock's crow when night is done,

you are the dew and the bells of matins,

maiden, stranger, mother, death.

You create yourself in ever-changing shapes

that rise from the stuff of our days -

unsung, unmourned, undescribed,

like a forest we never know.

You are the deep innerness of all things,

the last word that can never be spoken.

To each of us you reveal yourself differently:

to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,22

deep inside the flower

.

I know of a place not ruled by flatness 

Or constant risings depressions, 

 those alive are not afraid to die. 

There wild flowers come up through the leafy floor, 

 the fragrance of "I am he" floats on the wind. 

...There the love bee stays deep inside the flower 

and cares for no other thing.

~ Kabir

transparent

.

.

When all thoughts 

Are exhausted

I slip into the woods

And gather

A pile of shepherd's purse.

.

Like the little stream

Making its way

Through the mossy crevices

I, too, quietly

Turn clear and transparent.

.

~ Ryokan

photo by Jack Spencer

.

Stop struggling!

.

Since you saw this spring, why didn't

you become water?

Since you saw the Friend near, why do

you still have love for yourself?

Since you are in the shop of the sweet-seller,

why this bitter look?

Since you are swimming in the river of life,

why are you dry and miserable?

Don't be stubborn, do not flee from happiness.

You are imprisoned in a net from which

you can't escape,

Stop struggling! Stop struggling!

.

~  Rumi

translated by Muriel Maufroy

.

Thomas Merton on becoming the poet that you were meant to become (note to self)

Many poets are not poets 

for the same reason that 

many religious men are not saints: 

they never succeed in being themselves. 

They never get around to being the particular poet 

or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. 

They never become the man or the artist who is called 

for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. 

They waste their years in vain efforts 

to be some other poet, some other saint...

They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor 

to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

There is intense egoism in following everybody else. 

People are in a hurry to magnify themselves 

by imitating what is popular--

too lazy to think of anything better.

~ Thomas Merton

thanks to http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com/

the polished surface of our being

.

.

I have my dead, and I have let them go,

and was amazed to see them so contented,

so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,

so unlike their reputation.  Only you

return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock

against something, so that the sound reveals

your presence.  Oh don't take from me what I 

am slowly learning.  I'm sure you have gone astray

it you are moved to homesickness for anything 

in this dimension.  We transform these Things;

they aren't real, they are only the reflections 

upon the polished surface of our being.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

excerpt from "Requiem," written on the occasion of the death 

of his friend Paula Modersohn-Becker. This is a  portrait she painted of Rilke.

.

the gesture which small flowers make

.

.

For the sake of a single poem, 

you must see many cities, 

many people and things, 

you must understand animals, 

must feel how birds fly, 

and know the gesture which small flowers 

make when they open in the morning.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

.

Pyracantha and Plum

.

.

Last autumn's chastened berries still on one tree,

spring blossoms tender, hopeful, on another.

The view from this window

much as it was ten years ago, fifteen. 

Yet it seems this morning

a self-portrait both clearer and darker,

as if while I slept some Rembrandt or Brueghel

had walked through the garden, looking hard.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

.

between going and staying

Between going and staying the day wavers,

in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,

all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall

into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause

~ Octavio Paz

.

a letter to a young poet

.

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don't write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sound - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of , this turning within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to, the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

excerpt from a letter to a young poet

Paris, February 17, 1903

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