Tuesday, November 8, 2011

carmel point








The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads -
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly, It has all time, It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve.  Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. - As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident 
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.






~ Robinson Jeffers
art by Gordon Mortensen



Saturday, November 5, 2011

790








Nature — the Gentlest Mother is,
Impatient of no Child —
The feeblest — or the waywardest —
Her Admonition mild —

In Forest — and the Hill —
By Traveller — be heard —
Restraining Rampant Squirrel —
Or too impetuous Bird —

How fair Her Conversation —
A Summer Afternoon —
Her Household — Her Assembly —
And when the Sun go down —

Her Voice among the Aisles
Incite the timid prayer
Of the minutest Cricket —
The most unworthy Flower —

When all the Children sleep —
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light Her lamps —
Then bending from the Sky —

With infinite Affection —
And infiniter Care —
Her Golden finger on Her lip —
Wills Silence — Everywhere —






~ Emily Dickinson
with thanks to writers almanac



Friday, November 4, 2011

lost in the forest








Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig
and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:
myabe it was the voice of the rain crying, 
a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemed
deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig
sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance
climbed up though my conscious mind

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind
cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood -
and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.









~ Pablo Neruda

.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

a thought





Some thoughts
throw off 
a backward heat
as walls might,
at night, in summer.

It could happen 
this moment -

Some movement.

One word's almost
imperceptible shiver.

And what was
long cold
in your left palm,
long cold in your right palm,
might find itself
malleable, warmer.

An apricot
could be planted
in such a corner.





~ Jane Hirshfield
from Come, Thief





sadness and solitude




.




It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary – and toward this point our development will move, little by little – that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.




And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequaled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called it apparitions, the whole so-called “spirit world,” death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don’t think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous in security that drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.






~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Letters to a Young Poet 
The Eighth Letter
photo by Eliot Porter









Friday, October 28, 2011

not mine













All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine
And to know such pretending is disgraceful.
But what can I do? Suppose I suddenly screamed
And started to prophesy. No one would hear me. 
Their screens and microphones are not for that. 
Others like me wander the streets
And talk to themselves. Sleep on benches in parks,
Or on pavements in alleys. For there aren't enough prisons
To lock up all the poor. I smile and keep quiet. 
They won't get me now. 
To feast with the chosen—that I do well.





~ Czeslaw Milosz 
translated by Robert Hass 
photo by Christine de Grancy






meaning







.

When I die, I will see the lining of the world. 
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset. 
The true meaning, ready to be decoded. 
What never added up will add Up, 
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended. 
- And if there is no lining to the world? 
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, 
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day 
Make no sense following each other? 
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth? 
- Even if that is so, there will remain 
A word wakened by lips that perish, 
A tireless messenger who runs and runs 
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, 
And calls out, protests, screams.




~ Czeslaw Milosz


snow-mountain







.


All my life perplexed by truth and falsity, right and wrong;
Now amusing myself in the moonlight,
Laughing at the wind,
Listening to the songs of birds --
So many years spent idly contemplating
The immense white layer on the mountains;
This winter, all of a sudden,
I see it for the first time as a snow-mountain.





~ Dogen
english version by Steven Heine
from The Zen Poetry of Dogen
with thanks to poetry chaikhana
art by Chen Jun




ladder








A man tips back his chair, all evening.

Years later, the ladder of small indentations
still marks the floor. Walking across it, then stopping.

Rarely are what is spoken and what is meant the same.

Mostly the mouth says one thing, the thighs and knees
say another, the floor hears a third.

Yet within us,
objects and longings are not different.
They twist on the stem of the heart, like ripening grapes.







~ Jane Hirshfield 
from Given Sugar, Given Salt
with thanks to nexus


Wednesday, October 26, 2011

children of a full life





.




with special thanks to it's all dhamma




why do I write






I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. Any new metaphor is a telescope, a canoe in rapids, an MRI machine. And like that MRI machine, sometimes its looking is accompanied by an awful banging. To write can be frightening as well as magnetic. You don't know what will happen when you throw open your windows and doors.

Why write? You might as well ask a fish, why swim, ask an apple tree, why make apples? The eye wants to look, the ear wants to hear, the heart wants to feel more than it thought it could bear...

The writer, when she or he cannot write, is a person outside the gates of her own being. Not long ago, I stood like that for months, disbarred from myself. Then, one sentence arrived; another. And I? I was a woman in love. For that also is what writing is. Every sentence that comes for a writer when actually writing—however imperfect, however inadequate—every sentence is a love poem to this world and to our good luck at being here, alive, in it.



~ Jane Hirshfield





Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Che Fece... Il Gran Refiuto


.


For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
drags him down all his life.




~ Constantine P. Cavafy
from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems
translated by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard



the falling





.


You turn towards meteor showers in August,
wishing yourself like that:
bright and burning wholly out.
When feeling finally comes it is
that falling, matter breaking away
from air, the sound
of crickets moving through the grass like fire—
and the strangely twisted metal
in the field that a child finds:
residue, crown.
Then there’s the story of the Chinese sage,
in anger and despair, who cut his body away in pieces,
flung them into the lake.
Each one, becoming finned and whole, swims off.





~ Jane Hirshfield




a lie



self-portrait - 1901



Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth

Everyone wants to understand painting. 
Why don’t they try to understand the song of the birds?
 Why do they love a night, a flower, 
everything which surrounds man, 
without attempting to understand them? 
 
Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. 
Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; 
that he, too, is a minute element of the world
 to whom one should ascribe no more importance 
than so many things in nature which charm us 
but which we do not explain to ourselves.
 
 Those who attempt to explain a picture 
are on the wrong track most of the time.



~ Pablo Picasso
Boisgeloup, winter 1934





Sunday, October 23, 2011

a choice






"Give us a king."
 

Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king, 
He said,
"This is what the king who will reign over you will do:

He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses,
and they will run in front of his chariots.
Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties,
 and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest and still others to make weapons
 of war and equipment for his chariots. 

He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves 
and give them to his attendants.

He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it
 to his officials and attendants.
Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys
 he will take for his own use.

He will take a tenth of your flocks,
 and you yourselves will become his slaves.

When that day comes, you will cry out for relief 
from the king you have chosen,
and the Lord will not answer you in that day.

...


"No," they said, "We want a king over us.
Then we will be like all the other nations,
with a king to lead us and to go out before us
 and fight our battles."



~ 1 Samuel 8, 11-19
from the Holy Bible
new international version