Friday, February 1, 2013

transformed into love








~ Franz Peter Schubert
performed by Andrea Bocelli


Schubert at the piano - by Gustav Klimt


When I wished to sing of love,
 it turned to sorrow. 
And when I wished to sing of sorrow, 
it was transformed for me into love.

~ Schubert




Thursday, January 31, 2013

heaven kicks away the blankets and sheets




that because of the wine's pureness
and the crystal clarity of the glass
the color of glass and wine were confused.
All is glass - or, no, all is wine.
All is wine - or, no, all is glass.
When the sky is tainted
with the colors of the sun
heaven kicks away the blankets and sheets,
the shadows of nothingness.  Day and Night
make peace with each other:
thus have the world's affairs been ordered.



~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
from Divine Flashes
art by Lynda Lehmann


Tuesday, January 29, 2013

after the wedding





After the white balloons were swept away
on the wind that had swallowed
most of our vows, after the embraces
and tears, the flung rose petals,
after new friends and old friends and aunts
from all over, after you tossed
the bouquet, and the cries of the children
raised coyote cries on the rim,
after chicken grilled on juniper coals,
cold beer from the cattle trough
and hours of hot dancing to Beatles and Stones,
the last of us swaying arms on shoulders,
singing ourselves hoarse,
how good it is
to find you now beyond all
the loud joy, driving north in rain
and the lovely ease of our silence.




~ John Daniel
with thanks to writers almanac

three stanzas







1.

The knight and his lady
turned to stone but happy
on a flying coffin lid
outside time.

2.

Jesus held up a coin
with Tiberius in profile
a profile without love
power in circulation.

3.

A streaming sword
wipes out the memories.
Trumpet and sword belts
rust in the ground.




Tomas Tranströmer
from The Sorrow Gondola
translation by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl
photos of the tomb of Sir John and Lady Isobel de Sully
Sir John died in 1387 at the age of 106








Monday, January 28, 2013

gleninagh




The dark inside us is sistered outside
in night which dislikes the light of the face
and the colours the eye longs to embrace.

Night adores the mountain, wrapped to itself,
a giant heart beating beneath rock and grass
and a mind stilled inside one, sure thought.

Something has broken inside this Spring night,
unconsolably its rain teems unseen
onto Gleninagh Mountain's listening depth.

Next morning the light is cleansed to behold
the glad milk of thirty streams pulse and spurt
out of unknown pores in the mountain's hold.




~ John O'Donohue
from Echoes of Memory




Friday, January 25, 2013

you can smell it and that is all



To acquire the habit of reading 
is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.




His father was in Paris as a lawyer for the British Embassy. At eight years old, his mother died from tuberculosis. His father died of cancer two years later. He was sent back to England into the care of a cold and distant uncle, a vicar.  Miserable at his school. He said later: "I wasn't even likable as a boy. I was withdrawn and unhappy, and rejected most overtures of sympathy over my stuttering and shyness." He became a doctor and practiced in the London slums. He was particularly moved by the women he encountered in the hospital, where he delivered babies; and he was shocked by his fellow doctors' callous approach to the poor. He wrote: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; I saw the dark lines that despair drew on a face; I saw courage and steadfastness. I saw faith shine in the eyes of those who trusted in what I could only think was an illusion and I saw the gallantry that made a man greet the prognosis of death with an ironic joke because he was too proud to let those about him see the terror of his soul."


Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. 
There is really nothing to be said about it.
It is like the perfume of a rose: 
you can smell it and that is all.


~ Somerset Maugham



exposed





November's hunger strips the fields, its thin light
rifles the web and warmth of every nest,
allows the cold day to invade each secret,
absolves the ghosts of leaf that outlast autumn.

Now I can depend less and less on the grace
of spontaneity, talk quickly tires,
words become contrived as the eyes of others
notice my mind unravel in this sallow light.

Intense with silence my room waits for me,
the paintings and open books grown distant,
its window one huge eye on the tree outside;
in the mirror the glimpse of my face draws tears.




~ John O'Donohue
from Echoes of Memory
photo by Christine de Grancy





Wednesday, January 23, 2013

taking the hands





Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages . . .
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And in the deep valleys of the hand.



~ Robert Bly


why I write





I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. Any new metaphor is a telescope, a canoe in rapids, an MRI machine. And like that MRI machine, sometimes its looking is accompanied by an awful banging. To write can be frightening as well as magnetic. You don't know what will happen when you throw open your windows and doors.

To write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery.
Why write? You might as well ask a fish, why swim, ask an apple tree, why make apples? The eye wants to look, the ear wants to hear, the heart wants to feel more than it thought it could bear...

The writer, when she or he cannot write, is a person outside the gates of her own being. Not long ago, I stood like that for months, disbarred from myself. Then, one sentence arrived; another. And I? I was a woman in love. For that also is what writing is. Every sentence that comes for a writer when actually writing—however imperfect, however inadequate—every sentence is a love poem to this world and to our good luck at being here, alive, in it.



~ Jane Hirshfield
with thanks to national writing project




their lonely betters





As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.




~ W. H. Auden
from Collected Poems
with thanks to writers almanac




Monday, January 21, 2013

when I am not present to myself






When I am not present to myself, 
then I am only aware of that half of me, 
that mode of my being which turns outward to created things. 
 And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them. 
 Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull 
of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self toward God. 
 My will and my intelligence lose their command of the other faculties. 
 My senses, my imagination, my emotions, 
scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face of the earth. 
 Recollection brings them home. 
 It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit, 
and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love 
that reaches down into the mystery of God.



~ Thomas Merton
from No Man is an Island


Saturday, January 19, 2013

to swallow back his love



Paul Cézanne in his studio Les Lauves, 1904. Photo by Émile Bernard


The love (in Cezanne's art) is so thoroughly used
up in the action of making that there is no residue.
It may be that this using up of love in anonymous
work, which produces such pure things, was 
never achieved as completely as in the work of this
old man; his inner nature, having grown 
mistrustful and sullen, helped him to do it. He 
would certainly not have shown this love to 
another human being, had he been forced
to conceive such a love; but with this disposition, 
which, thanks to his reclusive eccentricity, was
fully ripened now, he turned to nature and knew 
how to swallow back his love for every apple
and put it to rest in the painted apple forever.
Can you imagine what that is like, and what
it's like to experience this through him?


~ Rilke on Cezanne













art by Paul Cezanne


Wednesday, January 16, 2013

soul of the world






Rumi 
version and reading by Coleman Barks 



summoned







And it was at that age... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.




~ Pablo Neruda
version by Anthony Kerrigan
from Selected Poems
with thanks to poetry chaikhana





Monday, January 14, 2013

no place





Where you come from is gone, 
where you thought you were going to was never there, 
and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. 

Where is there a place for you to be? 
No place. 
Nothing outside you can give you any place. 
In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

You needn't look at the sky because 
it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. 

You needn't search for any hole in the ground 
to look through into somewhere else. 

You can't go neither forwards nor backwards 
into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. 

In yourself right now is all the place you've got. 
If there was any Fall, look there, 
if there was any Redemption, look there, 
and if you expect any Judgment, look there, 

because they all three will have to be in your time 
and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?




~ Flannery O'Connor
from Wise Blood
art by georgia okeeffe
with thanks to whiskeyriver