Monday, January 9, 2012

the eel in the cave







Our veins are open to shadow, and our fingertips
Porous to murder. It's only the inattention
Of the prosecutors that lets us go to lunch.

Reading my old letters I notice a secret will.
It's as if another person had planned my life.
Even in the dark, someone is hitching the horses.

That doesn't mean I have done things well.
I have found so many ways to disgrace
Myself, and throw a dark cloth over my head.

Why is it our fault if we fall into desire?
The eel poking his head from his undersea cave
Entices the tiny soul falling out of Heaven.

So many invisible angels work to keep
Us from drowning; so many hands reach
Down to pull the swimmer from the water.

Even though the District Attorney keeps me
Well in mind, grace allows me sometimes
To slip into the Alhambra by night.



~ Robert Bly
from The Night Abraham Called to the Stars: Poems




Saturday, January 7, 2012

a dream





Once there was a poor and generous old man from Ballaghaderreen who has a dream.  In it he is told to make a journey at the end of which he will find a pot of gold.  In this case the old man has to leave Balla and travel a good way to Dublin and there, when he crosses one of the bridges over the River Liffy, he will find a pub, and there he will find his treasure.  The old man follows the dream map and when he sees the pub that was in his dream he looks around but there's no place he can dig for a hidden treasure,
so he stands beside the door and waits.  He waits all day and at nightfall the publican comes out and asks,
What are you standing here for all day long?
I had a dream that told me to come here.
A dream?  I think you must be a daft old man to follow dreams.  I, myself, had a dream a month ago and it told me to go to some poor old sod's cottage on the crossroads from French Park to Ballaghaderreen and if I did, I would find a pot of gold in his front yard.  Do you think I would go traipsing all over the countryside because of a dream?  It's cold.  You should go home.
Indeed I should and will, said the old man.
And when he got home he dug in his front yard and found the treasure and wasn't he himself and all the others the better for it.  And if he hasn't given it all away we might share a bit with them.




~ Irish Folk Tale
summarized here by Gioia Timpanelli
photo above by erin at photographs from a white space






Gioia Timpanelli






Friday, January 6, 2012

water lily







My whole life is mine, but whoever says so
will deprive me, for it is infinite.
The ripple of water, the shade of the sky
are mine; it is still the same, my life.

No desire opens me: I am full,
I never close myself with refusal-
in the rhythm of my daily soul
I do not desire-I am moved;

by being moved I exert my empire,
making the dreams of night real:
into my body at the bottom of the water
I attract the beyonds of mirrors... 





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by A. Poulin, Jr. 
from The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
art by monet




in a time of losses





We don't want to alarm the heron who's
Guarding the cranberry bog from frost.
But so many hares have been eaten by weasels;
The losses go on night after night.
Foxes slip through the bushes at dusk.
So much we care for has been carried off.
The airs and ars we hear in this poem
Belong to the hare who cries out in the night.








~ Robert Bly
from Talking into the ear of a Donkey


be still and still moving into another intensity






Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.





~ T.S. Eliot
from The Four Quartets, No. 2, East Coker
art by van gogh


Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota





Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, 
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. 
Down the ravine behind the empty house, 
The cowbells follow one another 
Into the distances of the afternoon. 
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines, 
The droppings of last year’s horses 
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. 
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.




~  James Wright
from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose



a blessing





Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness 
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs. 
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. 
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me 
And nuzzled my left hand. 
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.




~ James Wright
 from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose




Wednesday, January 4, 2012

the bridegroom





The bridegroom wanted to reach the Norwegian Church.
But the roads were made impassable by huge snows.
We are each the bridegroom longing for existence.

Marriage brings the moth close to the candle flame.
With their frail wings, men and women
Are constantly flying into the fire of existence.

Some say that each drop of ground water in Kansas
Knows about the ocean. How can this be?
Every drop of water longs like us for existence.

Abu Said fasted in the desert for twenty years.
Later when he came back, his dragon friend
Wept. "Your suffering gave me a hint of existence."

When the pianist's fingers strike all the notes
In the Tenth Prelude, it's clear Bach's soul has been
Leaping about like a hare in the field of existence.

Robert, you're close to joy but not quite there.
You are a hunchback standing in an Italian
Square, looking in at the festival of existence.




~ Robert Bly
from My Sentence Was A Thousand Years of Joy



april and silence





Spring lies abandoned
A ditch the color of dark violet
moves alongside me
giving no images back.

The only thing that shines
are some yellow flowers.

I am carried inside
my own shadow like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
hovers just out of reach
like the family silver
at the pawnbroker's.



~ Tomas Transtromer
translation by Robert Bly
from The Half-Finished Heaven






Bly's Commentary:

Tranströmer wrote this poem just before his stroke. Since then, he couldn't talk for 15 years. His mind is still alert. He communicates with his wife by writing. Could you sense the power of those last lines of his poem?— "hovers just out of reach / like the family silver / at the pawnbroker's." That's some image few American writers could invoke that Tranströmer does all the time.







Tuesday, January 3, 2012

the country of marriage







I.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs of birds opening around you as you walk. You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said that bound me to you, some mere promise or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death? A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood still and said nothing. And then there rose in me, like the earth’s empowering brew rising in root and branch, the words of a dream of you I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer who feels the solace of his native land under his feet again and moving in his blood. I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss that lay before me, but only the level ground.

III.

Sometimes our life reminds me of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing and in that opening a house, an orchard and garden, comfortable shades, and flowers red and yellow in the sun, a pattern made in the light for the light to return to. The forest is mostly dark, its ways to be made anew day after day, the dark richer than the light and more blessed, provided we stay brave enough to keep on going in.

IV.

How many times have I come to you out of my head with joy, if ever a man was, for to approach you I have given up the light and all directions. I come to you lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace in you, when I arrive at last.

V.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange of my love and work for yours, so much for so much of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are–that puts us in the dark. We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? You are the known way leading always to the unknown, and you are the known place to which the unknown is always leading me back. More blessed in you than I know, I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing not belittled by my saying that I possess it. Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light enough to live, and then accepts the dark, passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I have fallen tine and again from the great strength of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

VI.

What I am learning to give you is my death to set you free of me, and me from myself into the dark and the new light. Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty. We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

VII.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark, containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning. I give you the life I have let live for the love of you: a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road, the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life that we have planted in the ground, as I have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself again and again, and satisfy–and this poem, no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.





~ Wendell Berry
from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
art by van gogh



the window





I am not -
open or closed -
what you expected, o heart.

Or would you 
without me have thought
to throw open
the flooding and roar,
to step through the lion's gold pelt?

Have thought that
the passionate glass is the body?
And this life, the one life you wanted?

Wanted, 
meaning neither lacked,
nor desired.
but something else.
Something closer
to how, when the two owl-lovers
begin their night singing
and all the black length of the woods
is held in those arms,
not one stone, not one leaf goes uncalling.

If I had been what you thought,
o heart,
how could the clear glass
flow as it does with mountains,
with jewel-colored, perishing fish?
Flashing and falling,
the black-bright rain of beings and things -
Some recognizable, yours, but others -
too fleeting or large - that cannot be spoken.

Though the one world touches the other
in every part, o heart,
in silence,
like new lovers taking their fill in the crowded dark.



~ Jane Hirshfield 
from The October Palace
art by picasso



Monday, January 2, 2012

forever Oneness






Forever Oneness,
who sings to us in silence,
who teaches us through each other.
Guide my steps with strength and wisdom.
May I see the lessons as I walk,
honor the Purpose of all things.
Help me touch with respect,
always speak from behind my eyes. 
Let me observe, not judge.
May I cause no harm,
and leave music and beauty after my visit.
When I return to forever
may the circle be closed
and the spiral be broader.







~  Bee Lake, 
(an aboriginal woman)





emerges from us







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.






~ Rainer Maria Rilke
 from Letters to a Young Poet
translated by Stephen Mitchell
art by picasso



Carl Jung speaks about death







with thanks to it's all dhamma


Sunday, January 1, 2012

through massive rock







It feels as though I make my own way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.

I am so deep inside it
I can't see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.

Since I still don't know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small,
If it's you, though—

press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand
and you, the fullness of my cry.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Poverty and Death III, 1
photo by eliot porter