dispatches from the front

When told that grace is our original face

and the Beloved our true body

the "ripe buffoon" breaks through

and dances with those who reject their foolishness.

He is trying to help.  But only the wandering minstrel

and the dervishing chimney-sweep can be trusted.

Only mercy.  Only the god-drunken who are ruined

for life and can't help but love.

Only Dionysius and the lotus.

In the dark room he called out uncertainly,

"Bark twice if you are God!"

~ Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

ways you've never thought before

Think in ways you've never thought before

If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message

Larger than anything you've ever heard,

Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,

Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose

Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers

A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,

Think that he's about

To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,

Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,

Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

~ Robert Bly

the cloudy vase

Past time, I threw the flowers out,
washed out the cloudy vase.
How easily the old clearness
leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.




~ Jane Hirshfield

what is there beyond knowing

What is there beyond knowing that keeps
calling to me? I can't
turn in any direction
but it's there. I don't mean
the leaves' grip and shine or even the thrush's
silk song, but the far-off
fires, for example,
of the stars, heaven's slowly turning
theater of light, or the wind
playful with its breath;
or time that's always rushing forward,
or standing still
in the same -- what shall I say --
moment.
What I know
I could put into a pack
as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
on one shoulder,
important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained
and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly
to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.
But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing
in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.
If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet.
I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass
and the weeds.




~ Mary Oliver
from Swan - Poems and Prose Poems
with thanks to love is a place

languages

by Paul Stamets

with thanks to Chemin faisant

resemblance

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, 

is accountable by the high probability that we derived, 

originally, from a single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. 

 It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; 

 we still share genes around, and 

the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.

~ Lewis Thomas

from The Lives of a Cell

Feels self melt away

As air becomes the medium for light when the sun rises,

And as wax melts from the heat of fire,

So the soul drawn to that light is resplendent,

Feels self melt away,

Its will and actions no longer its own.

So clear is the imprint of God

That the soul, conquered, is conqueror;

Annihilated, it lives in triumph.

What happens to the drop of wine

That you pour into the sea?

Does it remain itself, unchanged?

It is as if it never existed.

So it is with the soul: Love drinks it in,

It is united with Truth,

Its old nature fades away,

It is no longer master of itself.

The soul wills and yet does not will:

Its will belongs to Another.

It has eyes only for this beauty;

It no longer seeks to possess, as was its wont -

It lacks the strength to possess such sweetness.

The base of this highest of peaks

Is founded on nichil,

Shaped into nothingness, made one with the Lord.

~ Jacopone da Todi

an excerpt from Let Annihilation and Charity Lead

Jacopone Benedetti, was born into a wealthy family in the central Italian town of Todi.  As a young man, he married and started a career as a notario, combining the skills of an accountant and a lawyer.  Legend has it that when a balcony collapsed at a wedding feast, killing his wife, he abandoned his career, gave away all his possessions, and become a wandering penitent.  He eventually joined the Franciscan Order, and discovered a gift for poetry.  He was imprisoned for five years for his opposition to the election of Pope Boniface VIII, and continued to write deeply personal and mystical poetry on prison.  He was released on the death of Boniface, and retired to a hermitage near Orvieto, where he died in 1306.

happy birthday Ella

the lost trapper

Each time the soprano and the tenor

Kneel and sing to each other,

Somewhere else on stage the baritone

Is about to die.

The Alaskan trapper finds

Blood on his arm, his radio

Dead, and new snow

Falling on the branches.

I don't know why the grasshopper

Doesn't try to wiggle

Out from the bird's claw,

But he doesn't move.

Just forget the idea that

Someone will come and save

You whenever cedars begin

Making that low sound.

~ Robert Bly 

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

I was sorry to hear, via David Sanders‘ “Poetry News” in Prairie Schooner that the poet has Alzheimer’s. His daughter, Mary Bly, told Minnesota Public Radio:

You know he’s very happy. So… not very happy but he’s happy. So I’m very grateful that he’s not experienced the personality changes that sometimes accompany that sort of loss. But it’s sad, it’s very very hard for someone whose life is made up of looking at a tree and turning it into a poem – so your whole life flows by you in words – to not be able to manipulate words is a terrible thing.

At Minnesota's "Poetry Out Loud" in 2009 (Photo: Creative Commons)

For a good part of my childhood my dad was working on short prose poetry. And he used to make us – the children had to do it along with him! Our dinners were often made up of impromptu poetry readings. So in a way this was my tribute year to him, too, because that’s the kind of writing he did when I was growing up. He worked very hard on very small sets of words.

…My stepmother was talking about watching a video of him – and he sparked with ideas all the time – and he hasn't lost his sense of humor so he said “I like that guy!” And then he said “I wish I knew him.” So it was very hard for my stepmother in that moment. But he’s both recognizing what’s happening – his sense of humor is not gone at all – and acknowledging that life has different phases.

I met up with Bly again decades later at Stanford in 2008, but by then I was different and older, and he seemed curiously (perhaps deceptively) the same, although his hair was pure silver, and he seemed more a grandfatherly figure to the students. He turned to the young poet wannabes and cackled conspiratorially, “You can’t tell this to your parents.” Of course, he was a parent by then, and so was I, so the comment seemed oddly nostalgic.

I spoke to him privately, during a break in the class, and told him of our meeting decades ago. For a moment our eyes met, and he seemed curiously vulnerable, aware of the mask he was wearing that had somehow grown to him, the name and fame he carried like a heavy backpack, and could no longer put down.

~ from book haven

the old man mad about drawing

hokusai - an animated sketchbook

~ tony white

with thanks to sharanam

the starfish

It is low tide. Fog. I have climbed down the cliffs

from Pierce Ranch to the tide pools. Now the ecstasy

of the low tide, kneeling down, alone. In six inches of

clear water I notice a purple starfish—with nineteen

arms! It is a delicate purple, the color of old carbon

paper, or an attic dress . . . at the webs between the

arms sometimes a more intense sunset red glows

through. The fingers are relaxed . . . some curled up at

the tips . . . with delicate rods . . . apparently globes

on top of each, as at World's Fairs, waving about. The

starfish slowly moves up the groin of the

rock . . . then back down . . . many of its arms rolled

up now, lazily, like a puppy on its back. One arm is

especially active and curved up over its own body as

if a dinosaur were looking behind him.

How slowly and evenly it moves! The starfish is a

glacier, going sixty miles a year! It moves over the pink

rock, by means I cannot see . . . and into marvelously

floating delicate brown weeds. It is about the size of

the bottom of a pail. When I reach into it, it tightens

and then slowly relaxes. . . . I take an arm and quickly

lift. The underside is a pale tan. . . . Gradually, as I

watch, thousands of tiny tubes begin rising from all

over the underside . . . hundreds in the mouth, hun-

dreds along the nineteen underarms . . . all looking. . .

feeling . . . like a man looking for a woman . . . tiny

heads blindly feeling for a rock and finding only air.

A purple rim runs along the underside of every arm,

with paler tubes. Probably its moving-feet.

I put him back in. He unfolds—I had forgotten

how purple he was—and slides down into his rock

groin, the snail-like feelers waving as if nothing had

happened, and nothing has.

~ Robert Bly

 from Selected Poems

photo by nick hobgood

with thanks to writers almanac

bring it back gently

If the heart wanders or is distracted, 

bring it back to the point quite gently and 

replace it tenderly in its Master’s presence. 

And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour 

but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord’s presence, 

though it went away every time you brought it back, 

your hour would be very well employed. 

~ Saint Francis de Sales

with thanks to blue mountain meditation

o lacrimosa

(trilogy for future music of Ernst Krenek)

I

Oh tear-filled figure who, like a sky held back,

grows heavy above the landscape of her sorrow.

And when she weeps, the gentle raindrops fall,

slanting upon the sand-bed of her heart.

O heavy with weeping. Scale to weigh all tears.

Who felt herself not sky, since she was shining

and sky exists only for clouds to form in.

How clear it is, how close, your land of sorrow,

beneath the stearn sky's oneness. Like a face

that lies there, slowly waking up and thinking

horizontally, into endless depths.

II

It is nothing but a breath, the void.

And that green fulfillment

of blossoming trees: a breath.

We, who are still the breathed-upon,

today still the breathed-upon, count

this slow breathing of earth,

whose hurry we are.

III

Ah, but the winters! The earth's mysterious

turning-within. Where around the dead

in the pure receding of sap,

boldness is gathered,

the boldness of future springtimes.

Where imagination occurs

beneath what is rigid; where all the green

worn thin by the vast summers

again turns into a new

insight and the mirror of intuition;

where the flowers' color

wholly forgets that lingering of our eyes.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Stephen Mitchell

art by francoise pothier

rescue the dead

Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf,

is to let rain fall nakedly upon your head,

is to respect fire,

is to study man’s eyes and his gestures

as he talks,

is to set bread upon the table

and a knife discreetly by,

is to pass through crowds

like a crowd of oneself.

Not to love is to live.

To love is to be led away

into a forest where the secret grave

is dug, singing, praising darkness

under the trees.

To live is to sign your name,

is to ignore the dead,

is to carry a wallet

and shake hands.

To love is to be a fish.

My boat wallows in the sea.

You who are free,

rescue the dead.

~ David Ignatow