Saturday, July 28, 2012

testament




And now to the Abyss I pass
Of that unfathomable grass...


1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don't call it death --
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots.  And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler, that too will be so.
Traveler to where?  Say you don't know.




2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit's whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say


Any thing too final.  Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh.  Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure


Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves.  Why settle
For some know-it-all's despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle


Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.


I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought's unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!




3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don't muck up my face


With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.


Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.


Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day's round
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.




4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.


He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worth men,


Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,


Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule


To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After


Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here.  Let all of you


Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.






~ Wendell Berry




Friday, July 27, 2012

parched




The parched know -

real thirst 
draws rainwater
from an empty sky.




~ Ivan Granger
from Real Thirst


Monday, July 16, 2012

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



Wednesday, July 4, 2012

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





Thursday, June 28, 2012

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



Thursday, May 31, 2012

languages









by Paul Stamets
with thanks to Chemin faisant


Thursday, May 17, 2012



Wednesday, May 16, 2012

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





Saturday, May 12, 2012

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.




Wednesday, April 25, 2012

happy birthday Ella







Thursday, April 19, 2012

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



Wednesday, April 18, 2012

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




Tuesday, April 17, 2012

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