Monday, January 7, 2013

circus animals





Bears are stomping in perfect time.
A lion jumps through flaming hoops.
A whip cracks and the music grinds.
A monkey rides a bike in a yellow suit.
A whip cracks and the animals turn their glance.
Dogs dance in carefully measured movements.
An elephant walks with a pitcher in perfect balance.

Myself, I'm quite embarrassed, I, a human.

People didn't enjoy themselves that day.
You wouldn't know it from the clapping hands
though one hand elongated by a whip
cast a striking shadow on the sand.



~Wislawa Szymborska
from miracle fair
translation by Joanna Trzeciak





Sunday, January 6, 2013

the end and the beginning




After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired 
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs, 
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years,
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about 
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
 sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here 
must make way for 
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.




~ Wislawa Szymborska
from miracle fair
translation by Joanna Trzeciak


the frogs after dark






I am so much in love with mournful music
That I don't bother to look for violinists.
The aging peepers satisfy me for hours.

The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet.
The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.
The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion.

Bears are often piled up close to each other.
In caves of bears, it's just one hump
After another, and there is no one to sort it out.

You and I have spent so many hours working.
We have paid dearly for the life we have.
It's all right if we do nothing tonight.

We've heard the fiddlers tuning their old fiddles,
And the singer urging the low notes to come.
We've heard her trying to keep the dawn from breaking.

There is some slowness in life that is right for us.
But we love to remember the way the soul leaps
Over and over into the lonely heavens.



~ Robert Bly
from Talking into the ear of a Donkey



Saturday, January 5, 2013

coursera






~ Daphne Koller
co-creator of Coursera

Friday, December 28, 2012

childhood






It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely - and why?

We're still reminded - : sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us. 




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
photo by kathleen connally


Thursday, December 27, 2012

every atom babbles the mystery






Love plays its lute behind the screen -
where is a lover to listen to its tune?

With every breath a new song,
each split second a new string plucked.

The world has spilled Love's secret -
when could music ever hold its tongue?

Every atom babbles the mystery -
Listen yourself, for I'm no tattletale!




~ Fakhruddin Iraqi
from Divine Flashes 
translation by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson
art by van gogh



Sunday, December 23, 2012

a christmas poem





Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where all agree
To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for horses;
All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place
As children, but we never heard the good stories.

Those stories only get told in the big tents, late
At night, when a trapper who has been caught
In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a man
With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of the fire.

As children we knew there was more to it—
Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve
Wasn't explained, nor why we were so often 
Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,
Why so much was lost. Those men and women
Who had died in wars started by others,
Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas tree
Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we
Have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er 
The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not
Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.


~ Robert Bly
from Morning Poems



Wednesday, December 19, 2012

two water-sellers





A man who lived by selling water found
He'd very little left; he looked around
And saw another water-seller there -
"Have you got any water you could spare?"
He asked.  "No, fool, I certainly have not,"
The other snapped; "make do with what you've got!"
"Oh, give me some," the man began to plead;
"I'm sick of what I have; it's yours I need."
When Adam's heart grew tired of all he knew,
He yearned for wheat, a substance strange and new -
He gave up all he owned for one small grain,
And naked suffered love's relentless pain;
He disappeared in love's intensity -
The old and new were gone and so was he;
He was annihilated, lost, made naught -
Nothingness swallowed all his hands had sought.
To turn from what we are, to yearn and die
Is not for us to choose or to deny."




~ Farid Attar
from The Conference of Birds
art by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez


Tuesday, December 18, 2012

change?







If something has an essence -
How can it ever change
Into anything else?

A thing doesn't change into something else -
Youth does not age,
Age does not age.

If something changed into something else -
Milk would be butter
Or butter would not be milk.

Were there a trace of something,
There would be a trace of emptiness.
Were there no trace of anything,
There would be no trace of emptiness.

Buddhas say emptiness
Is relinquishing opinions.
Believers in emptiness
Are incurable. 






~ Nagarjuna
from Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime
translated by Stephen Batchelor 
art by klimt






Saturday, December 15, 2012

the answer




Then what is the answer?—Not to be deluded by dreams. 
To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, 
and their tyrants come, many times before. 
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose 
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential. 
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not 
wish for evil; and not be duped 
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will 
not be fulfilled. 
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear 
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand 
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and 
his history...for contemplation or in fact... 
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, 
the greatest beauty is 
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, 
the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man 
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, 
or drown in despair when his days darken.




~ Robinson Jeffers
with thanks to http://themarkonthewall.blogspot.com/





Friday, December 14, 2012

on grief and loss










~ Dr. Geoff Warburton




by looking tirelessly





By looking tirelessly, I became quite empty 
and with that emptiness all came back to me except the mind. 
I find I have lost the mind irretrievably. 
I am neither conscious nor unconscious, 
I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions.
Distinctions are created by the mind and apply to the mind only. 
I am pure Consciousness itself, unbroken awareness of all that is. 
I am in a more real state than yours. 
I am undistracted by the distinctions and separations which constitute a person. 

As long as the body lasts, it has its needs like any other, 
but my mental process has come to an end. 
My thinking, like my digestion, is unconscious and purposeful. 
I am not a person in your sense of the word, 
though I may appear a person to you. 

I am that infinite ocean of consciousness in which all happens. 
I am also beyond all existence and cognition, pure bliss of being. 
There is nothing I feel separate from, hence I am all. 
No thing is me, so I am nothing. 

Life will escape, the body will die, but it will not affect me in the least. 
Beyond space and time I am, uncaused, uncausing, yet the very matrix of existence.





~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
with thanks to http://ashramof1.tumblr.com/
photo by Bea Garth



handy guide





Avoid adjectives of scale.
Dandelion broth instead of duck soup.
Don’t even think you've seen a meadow, ever.
The minor adjustments in our equations
still indicate the universe is insane,
when it laughs a silk dress comes out its mouth
but we never put it on. Put it on.
Cry often and while asleep.
If it’s raw, forge it in fire.
That’s not a mountain, that’s crumble.
If it’s fire, swallow.
The heart of a scarecrow isn't geometrical.
That’s not a diamond, it’s salt.
That’s not the sky but it’s not your fault.
My dragon may be your neurotoxin.
Your electrocardiogram may be my fortune cookie.
Once an angel has made an annunciation,
it’s impossible to tell him he has the wrong address.
Moonlight has its own befuddlements.
The rest of us can wear the wolf mask if we want
or look like reflections wandered off.
Eventually armor, eventually sunk.
You wanted love and expected what?
A parachute? Morphine? A gold sticker star?
The moment you were born—
you have to trust others because you weren't there.
Ditto death.
The strongest gift I was ever given
was made of twigs.
It didn't matter which way it broke.





~ Dean Young
from Poetry, Nov. 2011
art by van gogh



Wednesday, December 5, 2012

like two negative numbers multiplied by rain





Lie down, you are horizontal.
Stand up, you are not.

I wanted my fate to be human.

Like a perfume
that does not choose the direction it travels,
that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.

Yes, No, Or
—a day, a life, slips through them,
taking off the third skin,
taking off the fourth.

And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple,
an animal question, scuffing.

Old shoes, old roads—
the questions keep being new ones.
Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain
into oranges and olives.



~ Jane Hirshfield
from September 2012 issue of Poetry magazine




Monday, December 3, 2012

known and unknown, intensity, surprise, and disorder





I think I’m allergic to fixed ritual, when it comes to poetry—writing, for me, both needs and constellates big doses of freedom. I do have one habit: somewhere along the way, I developed a liking for writing on the back of torn-in-half sheets of already-used paper. There’s always a little stack by the bed. Even before that, it was always loose paper, not notebooks. My one requirement for writing has always been solitude, and I think it is somehow connected to a sense of privacy from childhood. I've always wanted the freedom to throw things away. A notebook feels to me like a little society, not a scattering of hermits. For me, it’s too self-aware of its own formal purpose, like a graveyard: a good place for the finished, not for conception. This feeling about notebooks is also somehow a metonym for my whole relationship to the act of writing. Creativity comes from some mixture of known and unknown, intensity, surprise, and disorder. The disorderliness makes the intensity permeable to the surprise.



~ Jane Hirshfield
 from Attention, Solitude, and First Books: 
Jane Hirshfield in Conversation