Sunday, December 18, 2011

morning bird songs






I wake up my car;
pollen covers the windshield.
I put my dark glasses on.
The bird songs all turn dark.

Meanwhile someone is buying a paper
at the railroad station
not far from a big freight car
reddened all over with rust.
It shimmers in the sun.

The whole universe is full.

A cool corridor cuts through the spring warmth;
a man comes hurrying past
describing how someone right up in the main office
has been telling lies about him.

Trough a backdoor in the landscape
the magpie arrives,
black and white, bird of the death-goddess.
A blackbird flies back and forth
until the whole scene becomes a charcoal drawing,
except for the white clothes on the line:
a Palestrina choir.

The whole universe is full!

Fantastic to feel how my poem is growing
while I myself am shrinking.

It's getting bigger, it's taking my place,
it's pressing against me.
It has shoved me out of the nest.
The poem is finished.




~ Tomas Transtromer
from The Unfinished Heaven
translated by robert bly




a love song














The little river twittering in the twilight,
The wan, wondering look of the pale sky,
This is almost bliss.


And everything shut up and gone to sleep,
All the troubles and anxieties and pain
Gone under the twilight.


Only the twilight now, and the soft "Sh!" of the river
That will last forever.


And at last I know my love for you is here;
I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight,
It is large, so large, I could not see it before,
Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions,
Troubles, anxieties and pains.


You are the call and I am the answer,
You are the wish, and I the fullfilment,
You are the night, and I the day.
What else - it is perfect enough.
It is perfectly complete,
You and I,
What more--?


Strange, how we suffer in spite of this.








~ DH Lawrence
from Look! We Have Come Through!
photo by kate thompson






Saturday, December 17, 2011

without time?






Like a singer, for example; to him the voice is the greatest security, 
and when that fails he is ready to commit suicide. 
 
What is really exciting and true is to find out for oneself a way of life
 that is highly sensitive and supremely intelligent; and this is not possible
 if there is fear, anxiety, greed, envy, the building of images 
or the living in religious isolation. That isolation is what all religions
 have supplied: the believer is definitely on the threshold of suicide.
 
 Because he has put all his faith in a belief, when that belief is questioned
 he is afraid and is ready to take on another belief, another image, 
commit another religious suicide. So, can a man live without any image, 
without any pattern, without any time-sense? I don’t mean living 
in such a way as not to care what happens tomorrow or what happened yesterday,
 That is not living. There are those who say, “Take the present and make the best of it;
 that is also an act of despair. Really one should not ask whether or not it is right
 to commit suicide; one should ask what brings about the state of mind
 that has no hope – though hope is the wrong word because hope implies a future;
 one should ask rather, how does a life come about that is without time?
 
 To live without time is really to have this sense of great love, because love
 is not of time, love is not something that was or will be; to explore this and live
 with it is the real question. Whether to commit suicide or not is the question 
of a man who is already partially dead. Hope is the most dreadful thing.
 Wasn't it Dante who said, “Leave hope behind when you enter the Inferno?"
 To him, paradise was hope, that's horrible.





~ J. Krishnamurti
from The Urgency of Change
art by Katsushika Hokusai





Tuesday, December 13, 2011

again and again






Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke 




Monday, December 12, 2011

the couple






They turn the lights off, and its white globe glows
an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet
in a glass of darkness.  Then a rising.
The hotel walls shoot up into heaven's darkness.

Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep, 
but their most secret thoughts begin to meet
like two colors that meet and run together
on the wet paper in a schoolboy's painting.

It is dark and silent.  The city however has come nearer
tonight.  With its windows turned off. Houses have come.
They stand packed and waiting very near,
a mob of people with blank faces.




~ Tomas Transtromer
translated by robert bly
from The Half-Finished Heaven
art by picasso


the tangerine-eater






Oh what foresight!  This rabbit of the fruit-world!  Imagine: 
 thirty-seven little pits in a single specimen, ready to fall every-which-way
 and create offspring.  We had to correct that.  She could have populated
 the whole earth - this little headstrong Tangerine, wearing a dress
 too big for herself, as if she intended to keep on growing.
  In short: badly dressed; more concerned with reproduction 
than with style.  Show her the pomegranate, in her armor of Cordova leather: 
 she is bursting with future, holds herself back, condescends... 
And, letting us catch just a glimpse of her possible progeny, 
she smothers them in a dark-red cradle.  She thinks earth
 is too evasive to sign a pact of abundance.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Uncollected Poems,
four sketches
photo by bill thompson III



gratulerer med dagen Edvard






I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – 
suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, 
feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – 
there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – 
my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – 
and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.



~ Edvard Munch 
from his diary Jan. 22, 1892



He paints, or rather regards, things in a way that is different from that of other artists. He sees only the essential, and that, naturally, is all he paints. For this reason Munch's pictures are as a rule "not complete", as people are so delighted to discover for themselves. Oh, yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is complete once the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and this is precisely the advantage Munch has over painters of the other generation, that he really knows how to show us what he has felt, and what has gripped him, and to this he subordinates everything else.


~ Christian Krohg
a friend of Munch

Munch 1933



Sunday, December 11, 2011

an ecstasy






There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, 
and beyond which life cannot rise. 
And such is the paradox of living, 
this ecstasy comes when one is most alive,
and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. 





~ Jack London 
from The Call of the Wild
photo by Shreve Stockton



Saturday, December 10, 2011

the ordinary and the wild





Unnameable Heart

The cricket who
kept me company three days
has fallen silent,
I don't know where.

There are so many
lives of which I know nothing.
Even my own. It moves now
through my fingers toward yours
and I know nothing
I can say that will name its heart.

A boat drifts far out
on the river below the mountains,
and below it
the fish, the great fish
that the one in the boat has come for,
swims in the shadows.

Perhaps the cricket is there, inside the fish.
Stranger things have happened.
I have looked everywhere else
for my lost companion.

From here, the shadow looks small,
but to the fish it is huge.
Range after range of mountains,
and still the old painters
found a place
where two could walk together, side by side.




~ Jane Hirshfield



gifts









The things we really need come to us only as gifts, 
and in order to receive them as gifts, 
we have to be open. 

In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, 
in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, 
our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed destiny. 

We have to be able to relax the psychic 
and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, 
vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know of ourselves



~ Thomas Merton
sketch by catherine doherty



On this day in 1941 Thomas Merton arrived at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani 
and on this day in 1968 he died in Thailand while participating in a conference of Benedictine and Trappist monks. In the 27 years between those two events he wrote a succession of books which have touched many lives.


the whole of love






We learned the whole of love,
The alphabet, the words,
A chapter, then the mighty book--
Then revelation closed.

But in each other's eyes
An ignorance beheld
Diviner than the childhood's,
And each to each a child.

Attempted to expound
What neither understood.
Alas, that wisdom is so large
And truth so manifold!




~ Emily Dickinson

breithlá sona, Emily



night








I
If I think of a horse wandering about sleeplessly
All night on this short grass covered with moonlight,
I feel a joy, as if I had thought
Of a pirate ship ploughing through dark flowers.

II
The box elders around us are full of joy,
Obeying what is beneath them.
The lilacs are sleeping, and the plants are sleeping;
Even the wood made into a casket is asleep.

III
The butterfly is carrying loam on his wings;
The toad is bearing tiny bits of granite in his skin.
The leaves at the crown of the tree are asleep
Like the dark bits of earth at its root.

IV
Alive, we are like a sleek black water beetle.
Skating across still water in any direction
We choose, and soon to be swallowed
Suddenly from beneath.








~ Robert Bly
photo by david edwards









Friday, December 9, 2011

one's not half two









one's not half two.  It's two are halves of one:
which halves reintegrating,shall occur
no death and any quantity;but than
all numerable mosts the actual more

minds ignorant of stern miraculous
this everytruth-beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;
or,sold the reason,they  undream a dream)

one is the song which friends and angels sing:
all murdering lies by mortals told make two.
Let liars wilt,repaying life they're loaned;
we(by a gift called dying born)must grow

deep in dark least ourselves remembering
love only rides his year.
                                    All lose, whole find







~ e.e.cummings
photo by Shreve Stockton
.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

complete letting go







Perhaps you have never experienced that state of mind 
in which there is total abandonment of everything, 
a complete letting go. 

And you cannot abandon everything without deep passion, can you? 
You cannot abandon everything intellectually or emotionally. 
There is total abandonment, surely, only when there is intense passion. 

Don't be alarmed by that word because a man who is not passionate, 
who is not intense, 
can never understand or feel the quality of beauty. 

The mind that holds something in reserve,
the mind that has a vested interest, the mind that clings to position,
power, prestige, the mind that is respectable, which is a horror;
such a mind can never abandon itself.





J. Krishnamurti
from  The Book of Life
art by rodin

auguste rodin



"Farfallettina"







Shaking all over, she arrives near the lamp, and her dizziness grants her one last vague reprieve before she goes up in flames.  She has fallen into the green tablecloth, and upon that advantageous background she stretches out for a moment (for a unit of her own time which we have no way of measuring) the profusion of her inconceivable splendor.  She looks like a miniature lady who is having a heart attack on the way to the theater.  She will never arrive.  Besides, where is there a theater for such fragile spectators?.... Her wings, with their tiny golden threads, are moving like a double fan in front of no face; and between them is this thin body, a bilboquet onto which two eyes like emerald balls have fallen back....

It is in you, my dear, that God has exhausted himself.  He tosses you into the fire so that he can recover a bit of strength.  ( Like a little boy breaking into his piggy bank.)




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
taken from Four Sketches, Uncollected Poems
translation by Stephen Mitchell