Saturday, May 7, 2011

gethsemane





.
The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.

Jesus said, wait with me.  But the disciples slept.

The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet.
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.

Jesus said, wait with me.  And maybe the stars did, maybe 
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn't move,
maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a 
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.


.
~ Mary Oliver
from Thirst
art by Kristine Wyler


Friday, May 6, 2011

the gods are not large








But perhaps
the heart
does not want
to be understood.
Your shadow
falls on its pond
and the small fish
hurry away.
They have
their own lives
which they love.

And if to you
it is anger,
bewilderment,
grief,
to then
it is simply life:
their mouths
open and close,
their gills,
they are fed,
they breathe.

The gods
are not large
outside us.
They are the fish
going on
with their own
concerns.







~ Jane Hirshfield




in the museum of your last day







.

there is a coat on a coat hook in a hall. Work-gloves
in the pockets, pliers and bent nails.

There is a case of Quaker State for the Ford.
Two cans of spray paint in a crisp brown bag.

A mug on a book by the hi-fi.
A disk that starts on its own: Boccherini.

There is a dent in the soap the shape of your thumb.
A swirl in the glass when it fogs.

And a gray hair that twines
through the tines of a little black comb.

There is a watch laid smooth on a wallet.
And pairs of your shoes everywhere.

A phone no one answers. A note that says Friday.
Your voice on the tape talking softly.


.
~ Patrick Phillips
thanks to writers almanac




Thursday, May 5, 2011

the weather-cock

.



.
Said the weather-cock to the wind, "How tedious and monotonous you are!
Can you not blow any other way but in my face?
You disturb my God-given stability."

And the wind did not answer.  
It only laughed in space.


.
~ Kahlil Gibran
from Poems, Parables and Drawings
art by Barry Squire






unknown age





.
For all the features it hoards and displays
age seems to be without substance at any time

whether morning or evening it is a moment of air
held between the hands like a stunned bird

while I stand remembering light in the trees
of another century on a continent long submerged
with no way of telling whether the leaves at that time
felt memory as they were touching the day

and no knowledge of what happened to the reflections
on the pond's surface that never were seen again

the bird lies still while the light goes on flying

.
~ W.S. Merwin
from The Shadow of Sirius


Wednesday, May 4, 2011

the secret signature






.

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you've been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.




~  C. S. Lewis
excerpt from The Problem of Pain







Monday, May 2, 2011

I was thinking






Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

How many times the sunrise was
there, behind a mountain!

How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off
was already a golden body full of thunder!

This rose was poison.

That sword gave life.

I was thinking of a flowery meadow
at the end of a road,
and found myself in the slough.

I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.





~ Juan Ramon Jimenez
from The Winged Energy of Delight
translated by Robert Bly





Saturday, April 30, 2011

grasp you with my heart









Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;
slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
and without any feet can go to you;
and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
and grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
and if you set this brain of mine afire,
upon my blood I then will carry you.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Hours





the supple deer



.




.

The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don't know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer:

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.



.
~ Jane Hirshfield
from Come, Thief
to be published this summer

.

Friday, April 29, 2011

fragment from lost days




 
 
...Like birds that get used to walking
and grow heavier and heavier, as in falling:
the earth sucks out of their long claws
the brave memory of all
the great things that happen high up,
and makes them almost into leaves that cling
tightly to the ground, -
like plants which,
scarcely growing upward, creep into the earth,
sink lightly and softly and damply
into black clods and sicken there lifelessly, -
like mad children, - like a face
in a coffin, - like happy hands that 
grow hesitant, because in the full goblet
things are mirrored that are not near, -
like calls for help which in the evening wind
collide with many dark huge chimes, -
like house plants that have dried for days,
like streets that are ill-framed, - like bright curls
within which jewels have grown blind, -
like early morning in April
facing the hospital's many windows:
the sick press up against the hall's seam
and look: the grace of a new light 
makes all the streets seem vernal and wide;
they see only the bright majesty
that makes the houses young and laughing,
and don't know that all night long
a storm ripped the garments from the sky,
a storm of waters, where the world still freezes,
a storm which this very moment roars through the streets
and takes all burdens
off the shoulder of each thing, -




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
art by Dali




to sing





.

.

To sing is to begin a sentence
like "I want to get well.
I am not born for nothing
and neither are you:
Heaven never wept
over nothing."


~ Thomas Merton
from an untitled poem
thanks to whiskey river






Ithaka



.

.


As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don't be afraid of them: you'll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won't encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope your road is a long one. May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to learn and go on learning from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you're destined for. But don't hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you're old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you've gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. 


~ C.P. Cavafy
translated by Edmund Keeley


his birthday is today

Constantine Cavafy was born Konstantínos Pétrou Kaváfis in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, the ninth child of Constantinopolitan parents. His father died in 1870, leaving the family poor. Cavafy's mother moved her children to England, where the two eldest sons took over their father's business. Their inexperience caused the ruin of the family fortunes, so they returned to a life of genteel poverty in Alexandria. The seven years that Constantine Cavafy spent in England—from age nine to sixteen—were important to the shaping of his poetic sensibility: he became so comfortable with English that he wrote his first verse in his second language.

After a brief education in London and Alexandria, he moved with his mother to Constantinople, where they stayed with his grandfather and two brothers. Although living in great poverty and discomfort, Cavafy wrote his first poems during this period, and had his first love affairs with other men. After briefly working for the Alexandrian newspaper and the Egyptian Stock exchange, at the age of twenty-nine Cavafy took up an appointment as a special clerk in the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works—an appointment he held for the next thirty years. Much of his ambition during these years was devoted to writing poems and prose essays.


Thursday, April 28, 2011

ignorant of their ignorance





.
Ignorant of their ignorance, yet wise
In their own esteem, those deluded men
Proud of their vain learning go round and round
Like the blind led by the blind.  Far beyond
Their eyes, hypnotized by the world of sense,
Opens the way to immortality.
"I am my body; when my body dies,
I die." Living in this superstition,
They fall life after life under my sway.

It is but few who hear about the Self.
Fewer still dedicate their lives to its
Realization.  Wonderful is the one
Who speaks about the Self.  Rare are they
Who make it the supreme goal of their lives.

.
~ Katha Upanishad
death as teacher
translated by Eknath Easwaran



Wednesday, April 27, 2011

the divine faculty of the seer


.


.
We begin to die, not in our senses or extremities, but in our divine faculties.  
Our members may be sound, our sight and hearing perfect, 
but our genius and imagination betray signs of decay.  
You tell me that you are growing old and are troubled to see without glasses, 
but this is unimportant if the divine faculty of the seer shows no signs of decay.


.
~  Henry David Thoreau
from his journal, 1854
art by Roderick Maclver



'we must die because we have known them'




.

(Papyrus Prisse.  From the sayings of Ptah-hotep, manuscript from ca. 2000 B.C.)

.

'We must die because we have known them.'  Die
of their smile's unsayable flower.  Die
of their delicate hands.  Die
of woman.

Let the young man sing of them, praise
these death-bringers, when they move through his heart-space,
high overhead.  From his blossoming breast
let him sing to them:
unattainable!  Ah, how distant they are.
Over the peaks
of his feeling, they float and pour down 
sweetly transfigured night into the abandoned
valley of his arms.  The wind
of their rising rustles in the leaves of his body.  His brooks run
sparkling into the distance.

But the grown man
shudders and is silent.  The man who 
has wandered pathless at night
in the mountain-range of his feelings:
is silent.

As the old sailor is silent,
and the terrors that he has endured
play inside him as though in quivering cages.

.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Uncollected Poems