for the anniversary of my death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what 

  ~ W.S. Merwin

 from The Second Four Books of Poems

 art by Hughie O'Donoghue

parts of a tune

One old man keeps humming the same few notes

of some song he thought he had forgotten 

back in the days when as he knows there was 

no word for life in the language

and if they wanted to say eyes or heart

they would hold up a leaf and he remembers

the big tree where it rose from the dry ground

and the way the birds carried water in their voice

they were all the color of their fear of the dark

and as he sits there humming he remembers

some of the words they come back to him now

he smiles hearing them come and go

~ W.S. Merwin

from The Shadow of Sirius

now it is clear

Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine
no roots are mine
that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest
and the forest will know it
we will both know it

and that birds vanish because of something
that I remember
flying through me as though I were a great wind
as the stones settle into the ground
the trees into themselves
staring as though I were a great wind
which is what I pray for

it is clear to me that I cannot return
but that some of us will meet once more
even here
like our own statues
and some of us still later without names
and some of us will burn with the speed
of endless departures

and be found and lost no more 

 

  ~ W.S. Merwin

from The Carrier of Ladders

 

stretch out

Leave the familiar for a while.

Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season

Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.

Make a new water-mark on your excitement

And love.

Like a blooming night flower,

Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness

And giving

Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence

Lie beside an equator

In your heart.

Greet Yourself

In your thousand other forms

As you mount the hidden tide and travel

Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven

Are sitting around a fire

Chatting

While stitching themselves together

Into the Great Circle inside of

You. 

~ Hafiz

deep listening

What is the deep listening? Sama is
a greeting from the secret ones inside

the heart, a letter. The branches of
your intelligence grow new leaves in

the wind of this listening. The body
reaches a peace. Rooster sound comes,

reminding you of your love for dawn.
The reed flute and the singer's lips:

the knack of how spirit breathes into
us becomes as simple and ordinary as

eating and drinking. The dead rise with
the pleasure of listening. If someone

can't hear a trumpet melody, sprinkle
dirt on his head and declare him dead.

Listen, and feel the beauty of your
separation, the unsayable absence.

There's a moon inside every human being.
Learn to be companions with it. Give

more of your life to this listening. As
brightness is to time, so you are to

the one who talks to the deep ear in
your chest. I should sell my tongue

and buy a thousand ears when that
one steps near and begins to speak.




—Rumi
from The Glance
Coleman Barks version
 art Australian Aboriginal 

against certainty

There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.

Each time I think "this," it answers "that."

Answers hard, in the heart-grammar's strictness.

If I then say "that," it too is taken away.

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

When the cat waits in the path-hedge,

no cell of her body is not waiting.

This is how she is able so completely to disappear.

I would like to enter the silence portion as she does.

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,

one shadow fully at ease inside another.

~ Jane Hirshfield
from After

aimless love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door –
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

 

 

 

 

~ Billy Collins

from Aimless Love - New and Selected Poems

 

 

 

humility and compassion

Can true humility and compassion exist in our words and eyes

unless we know we too are capable of

any act?

~ Saint Francis of Assisi

translated by Daniel Ladinsky

stealing sugar from the castle

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.

We are like those birds in the India mountains.

I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head

Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.

Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,

Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.

Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love

To read about those who caught one glimpse

Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.

Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear

The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see

Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.

My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

~ Robert Bly

the going

Exultation is the going

Of an inland soul to sea,

Past the houses - past the headlands -

Into deep Eternity -

Bred as we, among the mountains,

Can the sailor understand

The divine intoxication 

Of the first league out from land?

~ Emily Dickinson 

from Emily Dickenson - Complete Poems

 

while I am Emily

Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory -

Both in one package lain

And lifted back again -

Be Sue - while I am Emily -

Be next - what you have ever been - Infinity -

***

Parting is one of the exactions

of a Mortal Life.

It is bleak - like Dying

but occurs more times.

To escape the former,

some invite the last.

The Giant in the Human Heart

was never met outside.

~ Emily Dickinson

from New poems of Emily Dickinson

art by Fabrizio Cassetta

.

.

beneath all passing shows

The pilgrim sees no form but His and knows

That He subsists beneath all passing shows --

The pilgrim comes from Him whom he can see,

Lives in Him, with Him, and beyond all three.

Be lost in Unity's inclusive span,

Or you are human but not yet a man.

Whoever lives, the wicked and the blessed,

Contains a hidden sun within his breast --

Its light must dawn though dogged by long delay;

The clouds that veil it must be torn away --

Whoever reaches to his hidden sun

Surpasses good and bad and knows the One.

The good and bad are here while you are here;

Surpass yourself and they will disappear.

~ Farid ud-Din Attar (1120? - 1220?)

from The Conference of the Birds

English version by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

bright but hidden

Bright but hidden, the Self dwells in the heart.

Everything that moves, breathes, opens, and closes

Lives in the Self.  He is the source of love

And may be known through love but not through

thought.

He is the goal of life.  Attain this goal!

The shining Self dwells hidden in the heart.

Everything in the cosmos, great and small,

Lives in the Self.  He is the source of life,

Truth beyond the transience of this world.

He is the goal of life.  Attain this goal!

~ The Mundaka Upanishad

Modes of knowing

translation by Eknath Easwaran

hidden inside the seed

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no-one has shaken,
inside “love” there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.
how hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word “reason” you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out.

 ~ Kabir

 from Ecstatic Poems, by Kabir

(Dove that ventured outside)

.

Dove that ventured outside,     flying far from the dovecote:

housed and protected again,     one with the day, the night,

knows what serenity is,     for she has felt her wings

pass through all distance and fear     in the course of her wanderings.

The doves that remained at home,     never exposed to loss,

innocent and secure,     cannot know tenderness;

only the won-back heart      can ever be satisfied: free,

through all is has given up,     to rejoice in its mastery.

Being arches itself     over the vast abyss.

Ah the ball that we dared,     that we hurled into infinite space,

doesn't it fill our hands     differently with its return:

heavier by the weight     of where it has been.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Stephen Mitchell

from: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke