Friday, April 26, 2013

hearing music at dawn





It is sweet to hear music when the night
Is just retreating from the smoky branches
And the sun's enemies are throwing down their gloves.

Music is always reminding us whom we love,
One or two notes dissolve the auditor's mind
So we are swimming once more in the old river.

We are all failed farmers learning to play whist.
We have a lot of hands to play before midnight.
Someone else will have to worry about time.

I'm always glad when I hear that an old hen
Has been seen crossing the road at dusk.
It means our old teacher is still all right.

We keep remembering Barborossa's life.
A little whiskey fits in well with our lives.
The time of the Depression is not really over.

Poems like this amount to some form of music.
We dance for two hours.  When we look up,
We see that all the musicians have disappeared.




~ Robert Bly
from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey



Monday, April 22, 2013

the key




Morning unlocks the lake
as a woman with many keys might
come to open a house
where others are sleeping.
Enjoying the quiet possession.
Wiping the shelves of the mountain
with a lemony rag until they catch.
It is not hers. Those who live
there will claim it with raised voices,
with the closet doors' casual banging.
But for now, a single rowboat
drifts on the silvery water.
The oars are banked, the one sound
drips from the blades and widens
toward the enormous, dark-held shore.
There, the house is dreaming:
a red barrette on a wooden dresser,
somehow important.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from The Lives of the Heart
art by Elizabeth Torak




Friday, April 19, 2013

supposed to be




It is hard to be as popular as we are supposed to be. 
The superego or interior judge has altered its requirements ...
For one who fails to become successful and well-loved, 
punishment is swift and thorough. 
Self-esteem receives a battering from the inside, 
everyone feels insignificant and unseen until, in desperation, 
we finally agree to go on a talk show and tell it all. 
Once that moment is over, 
and universal love has not poured over our heads 
following the program, we fall still farther.





~ Robert Bly
from The Sibling Society



water




I was born in a drouth year. That summer 
my mother waited in the house, enclosed 
in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind, 
for the men to come back in the evenings, 
bringing water from a distant spring. 
veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank. 
And all my life I have dreaded the return 
of that year, sure that it still is 
somewhere, like a dead enemy's soul. 
 Fear of dust in my mouth is always with me, 
and I am the faithful husband of the rain, 
I love the water of wells and springs 
and the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns. 
I am a dry man whose thirst is praise 
of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup. 
My sweetness is to wake in the night 
after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.

....

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.



~ Wendell Berry



Sunday, April 14, 2013

... while you're alive









~ Bill Moyers
 interview with Robert Bly



a delicious disease









~ Ibn Hazm
read by Robert Bly



Saturday, April 13, 2013

sight, taste, touch, hearing, stopped









~ St. John of the Cross
read by Robert Bly



Friday, April 12, 2013

the present




I wanted to give you something —
no stone, clay, bracelet,
no edible leaf could pass through.
Even a molecule's fragrance by then too large.
Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.
Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.
They remained air.
I offered memory on memory,
but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?
I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from Come, Thief



Friday, April 5, 2013

the light that’s blazing




A story is like water
that you heat for your bath.

It takes messages between the fire
and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!

Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself
like a salamander or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.

A feeling of fullness comes,
but it usually takes some bread
to bring it.

Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.

The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that’s blazing
inside your presence.

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.

Study them,
and enjoy being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.





~ Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks
from The Essential Rumi



Thursday, April 4, 2013

once, I





Once, I
was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow,
sleepy and nameless.

As-ifness strange to myself, but complete.

Light on the neck-nape
of time
as two wings of one starling,

or lovers so happy
neither needs think of the other.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from Poetry (April 2013)




Wednesday, April 3, 2013

a new loveliness





You cannot live without dying. 
You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. 
This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, 
wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness,
 there must be dying to everything of yesterday, 
otherwise you live mechanically, 
and a mechanical mind can never know what 
love is or what freedom is.




~ J. Krishnamurti
from Freedom from the Known
art by van gogh



an hour is not a house





An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.

My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from Poetry, April 2013




Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Hildegard von Bingen





Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. 
Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns 
ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. 
Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, 
and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, 
not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along.
Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God.




 - visionary, poet, composer, naturalist, healer, and theologian - 
founded convents; corresponded with secular and ecclesiastical leaders, 
as well as a vast range of people of lesser rank; and 
ventured forth as a monastic trouble-shooter, 
consultant exorcist, and visiting preacher. 

Even more remarkable for a woman of her time was the body of written work she produced. 
Its range - from natural history and medicine to cosmology, 
music, poetry, and theology - 
 possesses great beauty


.


extraordinary creativity was her accomplishment in music. 
In the poetry and melody of her songs, she reveals the full authority,
 intelligence and striking originality of her genius.




~ Hildegard von Bingen




Wednesday, March 27, 2013

multiplicity in properties




He who has lifted the veil sees multiplicity in properties, 
not in Essence; hence he knows that changes in properties 
cannot touch Essence, which owns a perfection subject to no mutability. 
Light merely seems to change as it shines through colored glass, but

light has no color.
Its rays shine through the glass
and only then 
do hues and tints appear.

Don't you understand?

Come then into my eyes
and...look!

and you will see

a sun shining
through a thousand bits of glass
beaming to plain sight through each
a ray of color
Why should any difference appear
between this one and that?
All light is one
but colors a thousandfold.




~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
from Divine Flashes



Saturday, March 23, 2013

the lips of insanity










~ Coleman Barks
~ Rumi