I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming and must live it through.
While the creatures of the world beneath still do not move 
     in their sleep:
The doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full of silence,
The windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

I already know the storm, and I am as troubled as he sea,
And spread myself out, and fall into myself
And throw myself out am absolutely alone
In the great storm.

You, God, who live next door—

If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking—
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you’re all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there’s no one 
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I’m right here.

As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily,

it would hardly make a sound.

She sat at tea just like the others. First
I merely had a notion that this guest
Held up her cup not quite like all the rest.
And once she gave a smile. It almost hurt.

When they arose at last, with talk and laughter,
And ambled slowly and as chance dictated
Through many rooms, their voices animated,
I saw her seek the noise and follow after.

Held in like one who in a little bit
Would have to sing where many people listened;
Her lighted eyes which spoke of gladness, glistened
With outward luster, as a pond is lit.

She followed slowly, and it took much trying.
As though some obstacle still barred her stride;
And yet as if she on the farther side
Might not be walking any more, but flying.

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.

Little by little, wean yourself.

This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes, and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
The beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
In the dark with eyes closed.

                                            Listen to the answer.

There is no “other world.”
I only know what I’ve experienced.
You must be hallucinating.

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush 
that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wanted to be seen
with a passable woman.

But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn't care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that's all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all their usual changes.

If my face is to be weather beaten as well,
it's little enough lost 
for a year among the lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me 
indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

Who was it that took away my voice?
The black wound he left in my throat
Can’t even cry.

March is at work under the snow
And the birds of my throat are dead,
Their gardens turning into dictionaries.

I beg my lips to sing.
I beg the lips of the snowfall,
Of the cliff and the bush to sing.

Between my lips, the round shape
Of the air in my mouth.
Because I can say nothing.

I’ll try anything
For the trees in the snow.
I breathe. I swing my arms. I lie.

From this sudden silence,
Like death, that loved
The names of all words,
You raise me now in song.

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes close
to the ruined, dirty houses'
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

So it came time
         For me to cede myself
And I chose
The wind
        To be delivered to

The wind was glad
        And said it needed all
The body
It could get
        To show its motions with

And wanted to know
         Willingly as I hoped it would
If it could do
Something in return
         To show its gratitude

When the tree of my bones
         Rises from the skin I said
Come and whirlwinding
Stroll my dust
         Around the plain

So I can see
        How ocotillo does
And how saguaro-wren is
And when you fall
         With evening

Fall with me here
        Where we can watch
The closing up of day
And think how morning breaks

An unknown Sung Dynasty Nun.

Searching for spring all day I never saw it,
straw sandals treading everywhere
among the clouds, along the bank.

Coming home, I laughed, catching
the plum blossoms’ scent:
spring at each branch tip, already perfect.

Small bass guard their nest. Next
To our house, the cardinals in their 
Crabapple feed two open mouths.
Parents and offspring, we flex
And swing in this future’s coming,
Mirror we look into only darkly.
My youngest is boarding an airplane
To a New York he’s never seen.
Raised in such slumberous innocence
Of Bible schools and lemonade,
I adjust poorly to this thirst for
Fame, this electronic buzz prizing
Brilliance and murderers. Oh son,
Know that the psyche has its own
Fame, whether known or not, that
Soul can flame like feathers of a bird.
Grow into your own plumage, brightly,
So that any tree is a marvelous city.
I wave from here this Indian Eno,
Whose lonely name I make known.

Will, lost in a sea of trouble,
Rise, save yourself from the whirlpool
Of the enemies of willing.
Courage exposes ambushes.
Steadfastness destroys enemies.
Keep your victories hidden.
Do not sulk over defeat.
Accept good. Bend before evil.
Learn the rhythm which binds all men.

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
The shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn that I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.

The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave  
slides over your head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter 
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world….The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way…people look at reality, then you can change it.

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. He showed
his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,
preserving it forever: the river, the trees,
the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat
behind which he stood with his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be. But he
would not be in it. He would never be in it.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle 
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may know
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.

First I went down to the street
by means of the stairs,
just imagine it,
by means of the stairs.


Then people known to people unknown
passed me by and I passed them by.
Regret
that you did not see
how people walk,
regret!

I entered a complete store:
lamps of glass were glowing.
I saw somebody—he sat down—
and what did I hear? what did I hear?
rustling of bags and human talk.

And indeed,
indeed,
I returned.

Land lies in water; if is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
--the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
--What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians are the map-makers’ colors.
Land lies in water; if is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
--the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
--What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians are the map-makers’ colors.

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
she cuts some bread and says to the child,

It’s time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac.

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears 
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house

(For Robert Lowell)

This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it’s hard
To tell them from the stars—
planets, that is—the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it’s still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up 
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until 
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls’ nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

And then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!—a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her 
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
The National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
 studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--“Long Pig,” the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.

Suddenly, from inside
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo’s voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all surprised;
even then I knew she was 
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
My voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover 
of the National Geographic
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn’t look any higher—
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
And those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How—I didn’t know any
Word for it—how “unlikely”…
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn’t?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

(for James Wright)

There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can’t remember
The name of their dog when the wake up, and 
       people
Who love God but can’t remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It’s
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle 
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,
And greatness has a defender, and even in death
      you’re safe.

I never intended to have this life, believe me–
It just happened. You know how dogs turn up
At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain.

It’s good if you can accept your life–you’ll notice
Your face has become deranged trying to adjust
To it. Your face thought your life would look

Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten.
That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.
Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.

Sparrows in winter, if you’ve ever held one, all feathers,
Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee.
You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you.

But you can’t quite get back to the winter sparrow.
Your life is a dog. He’s been hungry for miles,
Doesn’t particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.

There was a boy who never got enough.
You know what I mean. Something
In him longed to find the big
Mother, and he leaped into the sea.

It took a while, but a whale
Agreed to swallow him.
He knew it was wrong, but once
Past the baleen, it was too late.

It’s OK. There’s a curved library
Inside, and those high
Ladders. People take requests.
It’s like the British Museum.

But one has to build a fire.
Maybe it was the romance 
Novels he burned. Smoke curls
Up the gorge. She coughs.

And that’s it. The boy swims to shore;
It’s a fishing town in Alaska.
He finds a telephone booth.
And calls his father. “Let’s talk.”

According to the Sufi’s, God said to the Prophet Mohammad, “I am a hidden treasure, and I want to be known.” In his yearning to be loved and experienced, God set in motion an evolutionary pattern that reached its pinnacle in the human capacity for spiritual awakening. God, or Truth, in other words, is seeking to awaken itself through you, to see itself everywhere through your eyes and taste itself everywhere through your lips. “That which you are seeking is always seeking you” wrote an anonymous sage.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran Theologian executed by the Nazis.

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to seek a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time, it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

Of all works I prefer
Those used and worn.
Copper vessels with dents and with flattened rims
Knives and forks whose wooden hands
Many hands have grooved: such shapes
Seemed the noblest to me. So too the flagstones around
Old houses, trodden by many feet and ground down,
With clumps of grass in the cracks, these too
Are happy works.

Absorbed into the use of the many
Frequently changed, they improve their appearance, growing enjoyable
Because often enjoyed.
Even the remnants of broken sculptures
With lopped-off hands I love. They also
Lived with me. If they were dropped at least they must have been carried.
If men knocked them over they cannot have stood too high up.
Buildings half dilapidated
Revert to the look of buildings not yet completed
Generously designed: their fine proportions
Can already be guessed; yet they still make demands
On our understanding. At the same time
They have served already, indeed have been left behind. All this
Makes me glad.

In those days, in a place where dentists thrive
(their daughters order fancy clothes from London;
their painted forceps hold aloft on signposts
a common and abstracted Wisdom Tooth),
there I—whose mouth held ruins more abject
than any Parthenon—a spy, a spearhead
for some fifth column of a rotting culture
(my cover was a lit. professorship),
was living at a college near the most
renowned of the fresh-water lakes; the function
to which I’d been appointed was to wear out
the patience of the ingenuous local youth.

Whatever I wrote then was incomplete:
my lines expired in strings of dots. Collapsing,
I dropped, still fully dressed, upon my bed.
At night I stared up at the darkened ceiling
until I saw a shooting star, which then, conforming to the laws of
      self-combustion,
would flash—before I’d even made a wish—
across my cheek and down onto my pillow.

I’m happiest when most away
I can bear my soul from its home of clay
On a windy night when the moon is bright
And my eye can wander through worlds of light.

When I am not and none beside
Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky
But only spirit wandering wide
Through infinite immensity

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want to peek in the back
Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weeds grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers but I say it’s fine
How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.
And I’d like to be a bad woman, too.
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

Carried her unprotesting out the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can’t hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid’s contrition nor the bolts before.
Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,
She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,
Back to the bars she knew and the repose
In love-rooms and the things in people’s eyes.
Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss.
Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks
Of pregnancy, guitars, and bridgework, walks
In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge
Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.

                                 After the murder,
                                 After the burial


Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing:
            the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
            drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
            And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
           through a red prairie.

(The pool players, seven at the Golden Shovel)

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Lead me not into temptation:
I can find the way myself.

The first goal is to see the thing itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
               No symbolism, please.

The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
                In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
                 Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

The cat sits on the back of the sofa looking
out the window through the softly falling snow
at the last bit of gray light.

I can’t say the sun is going down.
We haven’t seen the sun for two months.
Who cares?
I am sitting in the blue chair listening to this stillness.
The only sound: the occasional gurgle of tea
coming out of the pot and into the cup.

How can this be?
Such calm, such peace, such solitude
in this world of woe.

Two hundred years ago
Issa heard
the morning birds
singing sutras
to this suffering world.

I heard them too,
this morning, 
which must mean

since we will always have 
a suffering world
we must always 
have a song.

Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.

So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren’t saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it

And did you get what
      you wanted out of life even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
      beloved on the earth.

A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck
of the house. From there I could see and hear the water,
and everything that’s happened to me all these years.
It was hot and still. The tide was out.
No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing
a cobweb touched my forehead.
It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned
and went inside. There was no wind. The sea was
dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade.
Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath
touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.
Before long, before anyone realizes,
I’ll be gone from here.

And if you can’t shape your life the way you want,
at least try as much as you can
not to degrade it
by too much contact with the world,
by too much activity and talk.

Try not to degrade it by dragging it along,
Taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social events and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

Happiness is somebody to love,
Something to do
And something to hope for.

We are all a paradoxical bundle of rich potential that consists of both neurosis and wisdom.  

Washed by the rain, dust and grime are laid;
Skirting the river, the road’s course is flat.
The moon has risen on the last remnants of night;
The travellers’ speed profits by the early cold.
In the great silence I whisper a faint song:
In the black darkness are bred somber thoughts.
On the lotus-bank hovers a dewy breeze;
Through the rice furrows trickles a singing stream.
At the noise of our bells a sleeping dog stirs;
At the sight of our torches a roosting bird wakes.
Dawn glimmers through the shapes of misty trees…
For ten miles, till day at least breaks.

At night, in my dreams, I stoutly climbed a mountain,
Going out alone with my staff of holly-wood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys—
In my dream-journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as strong as in my young days.
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be, as between body and soul,
That the body may languish, while the soul is still strong?
Soul and body—both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking—both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and night are divided in equal parts—
Between the two, I get as much as I lose.

We had ridden long and were still far from the inn;
My eyes grew dim; for a moment I fell asleep.
Under my right arm the whip still dangled;
In my left hand the reins for an instant slackened.
Suddenly I woke and turned to question my groom.
“We have gone a hundred paces since you fell asleep.”
Body and spirit for a while had changed place;
Swift and slow had turned to their contraries.
For these few steps that my horse had carried me
Had taken in my dream countless aeons of time!
True indeed is that saying of Wise Men
“A hundred years are but a moment of sleep.”

While you walk the water’s edge,
turning over concepts
I can’t envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change,
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent 
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
                                             It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty—
driftwood and shipwreck, last night’s
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
or touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.
                                      The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it’s hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass—
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almaden and Gallo, lapis
by way of (no getting around it,
I’m afraid) Phillips’
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare 
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
of no known origin.
                             The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel,
along with the treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed
astonishments of Chartres,
which even now are readying 
for being turned over and over as gravely
and gradually as an intellect
engaged in the hazardous
redefinition of structures
no one has yet looked at.

i seemed to be drawn
to the center of myself
leaving the edges of me
in the hands of my wife
and I saw with the most amazing
clarity
so that I had not eyes but 
sight.
and, through rising and turning
through my skin,
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss 
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back     may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places, these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and 
spin him like a top!

among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names,

nobody mentioned slaves 
and yet the curious tools
shine with your fingerprints.
nobody mentioned slaves
but somebody did his work
who had no guide, no stone,
who moulders under rock.

tell me your names,
tell me your bashful names
and i will testify.

the inventory lists ten slaves
but only men were recognized.

among the rocks
at walnut grove
some of these honored dead
were dark
some of these dark
were slaves
some of these slaves
were women
some of them did this 
honored work.
tell me your names
foremothers, brothers,
tell me your dishonored names.
here lies
here lies
here lies
here lies
hear

well girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.

now it is done,
and i feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn’t she
beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?

a personal note (re: visitations)

always pyrotechnics;
stars spinning into phalluses
of light, serpents promising
sweetness, their forked tongues
thick and erect, patriarchs of bird
exposing themselves in the air.
this skin is sick with loneliness.
You want what a man wants,
next time come as a man
or don’t come.

and the gulf enters the sea and so forth,
none of them emptying anything.
all of them carrying yesterday
forever on their white tipped backs,
all of them dragging forward tomorrow.
it is the great circulation
of the earth’s body, like the blood
of the gods, this river in which the past
is always flowing. every water
is the same water coming round.
everyday someone is standing on the edge
of this river staring into time,
whispering mistakenly:
only here, only now.

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over the mountain of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the 
      universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.





All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside the generous pocket of his silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.

After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck,
and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats
with the possible company of my death,
this sprawling miscellany of people—
carry-on bags and paperbacks—

That could be gathered in a flash
into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.
Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain

we would all ascent together,
holding hands like a ring of sky divers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common spot

for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillarless Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss our ashes into the sunny air.

It’s just that the way that man has his briefcase
so carefully arranged,
the way that girl is cooling her tea,
and the flow of the comb that woman

passes through her daughter’s hair…
and when you consider the altitude,
the secret parts of the engines,
and all the hard water and the deep canyons below…

Well, I just think it would be good if one of us
maybe stood up and said a few words,
or, so as not to involve the police,
at least quietly wrote something down.

I have stopped here on the rue des Ecoles
just off the boulevard St-Germain
to look over the shoulder of a man
in a flannel shirt and a straw hat
who has set up an easel and a canvas chair
on the sidewalk in order to paint from a droll angle
a side-view of the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

But where are you, reader,
who have not paused in your walk 
to look over my shoulder
to see what I am jotting in this notebook?

Alone in this city,
I sometimes wonder what you look like,
if you are wearing a flannel shirt
or a wraparound blue skirt held together by a pin.

But every time I turn around 
you have fled through a crease in the air
to a quiet room where the shutters are closed
against the heat of the afternoon,
where there is only the sound of your breathing
and every so often, the turning of a page.

The first one to rise on a Sunday morning,
I enter the white bathroom
trying not to think of Christ or Wallace Stevens.

It’s before dawn and the road is quiet,
even the birds are silent in the heat.
and standing on the tile floor,

I open a little nut of time
and nod to the cold water faucet,
with its chilled beaded surface

for cooling my wrists and cleansing my face,
and I offer some thanks
to the electricity swirling in the lightbulbs

for showing me the toothbrush and the bottle of
       aspirin.
I went to grammar school for Jesus
and to graduate school for Wallace Stevens.

But right now, I want to consider
only the water and the light,
always ready to flow and spark at my touch.

Is there no end to it
the way they keep popping up in magazines
then congregate in the drafty orphanage of a book?

You would think the elm would speak up,
but like the dawn it only inspires—then more of them
       appear.
Not even the government can put a stop to it.

Just this morning, one approached me like a possum,
snout twitching, impossible to ignore.
Another looked out of the water at me like an otter.

How can anyone dismiss them
when they dangle from the eaves of houses
and throw themselves in our paths?

Perhaps I am being harsh, even ridiculous.
It could have been the day at the zoo
that put me this way—all the children by the cages—

as if only my poems had the right to exist
and people would come down from the hills
in the evening to view them in rooms of white marble.

So I will take the advice of the mentors
and put this in a drawer for a week
maybe even a year or two and then have a calmer
     look at it—

but for now I am going to take a walk
through this nearly silent neighborhood
that is my winter resting place, my hibernaculum,

and get my mind off the poems of others
even as they peer down from the trees
or bark at my passing in the guise of local dogs.

If I lived across the street from myself
and I was sitting in the dark
on the edge of the bed
at five o’clock in the morning,

I might be wondering what the light
was doing on in my study at this hour,
yet here I am at my desk
in the study wondering the very same thing.

I know I did not have to rise so early
to cut open with a penknife
the bundles of papers at a newsstand
as the man across the street might be thinking.


Clearly, I am not a farmer or a milkman.
And I am not the man across the street
who sits in the dark because sleep 
is his mother and he is one of her many orphans.

Maybe I am awake just to listen 
to the faint, high-pitched ringing 
of tungsten in the single lightbulb
which sounds like the rustling of trees.

Or is it my job simply to sit as still
as the glass of water on the night table
of the man across the street,
as still as the photograph of my wife in a frame?

But there’s the first bird to deliver his call,
and there’s the reason I am up—
to catch the three-note song of that bird
and now to wait with him for some reply.

This love for the petty things,
part natural from the slow eye of childhood,
part a literary affectation,

this attention to the morning flower
and later in the day to a fly
strolling along the rim of a wineglass—

are we just avoiding the one true destiny,
when we do that? averting our eyes from
Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker’s coat?

The leafless branches against the sky
will not save anyone from the infinity of death,
nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.

So why bother with the checkerboard lighthouse?
Why waste time on the sparrow,
or the wildflowers along the roadside


when we should all be alone in our rooms 
throwing ourselves against the wall of life
and the opposite wall of death.

the door locked behind us
as we hurl ourselves at the question of meaning,
and the enigma of our origins?

What good is the firefly,
the droplet running along the green leaf,
or even the bar of soap spinning around the bathtub

When ultimately we are meant to be
banging away on the mystery
as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?

banging away on nothingness itself,
some with their foreheads,
others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of
      poetry.

"The worst thing about death must be the first night."  Juan Ramon Jimenez


Before I opened you, Jimenez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,

a darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
how impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,
whose employment it is to guard the rose.

It occurred to me around dusk
after I had lit three candles
and was pouring myself a glass of wine
that I had not uttered a word to a soul all day.

Alone in the house,
I was busy pushing the wheel in a mill of paper
or staring down a dark well of ink—
no callers at the door, no ring of the telephone.

But as the path lights came on,
I did recall having words with a turtle
on my morning walk, a sudden greeting
that sent him off his log splashing into the lake.

I had also spoken to the goldfish
as I tossed a handful of pellets into their pond,
and I had a short chat with the dog,
who cocked her head this way and that


as I explained that dinner was hours away
and that she should lie down by the door.
I also talked to myself as I was typing
and later on while I looked around for my boots.

So I had barely set foot on the path
that leads to the great villa of silence
where men and women pace while counting beads.
In fact, I had only a single afternoon

of total silence to show for myself,
a spring day in a cell in Big Sur,
twenty or so monks also silent in their nearby cells—
a community of Cameldolites,

an order so stringent, my guide told me,
that they make the Benedictines,
whom they had broken away from in the 11th century,
look like a bunch of Hell’s Angels.

Out of a lifetime of running my mouth
and leaning on the horn of the ego,
only a single afternoon of being truly quiet
on a high cliff with the Pacific spread out below,

But as I listened to the birdsong
by the window that day, I could feel my droplet
of silence swelling on the faucet
then dropping into the zinc basin of their serenity.

Yet since then—
nothing but the racket of self-advertisement,
the clamor of noisy restaurants,
the classroom proclamations,

the little king of the voice having its say,
and today the pride of writing this down,
which must be the reason my pen
has turned its back on me to hide its face in its hands.

is not really the title of a movie
but if it was I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer 
would ask on holiday from what?

Maybe it was the fast-moving clouds
or the spring flowers quivering among the dead leaves,
but I knew this was one day I was born to seize—

not just another card in the deck of the year,
but March 19th itself,
looking as clear and fresh as the ten of diamonds.

Living life to the fullest is the only way,
I thought as I sat by a tall window
and tapped my pencil on the dome of a glass
     paperweight.

To drain the cup of life to the dregs
was a piece of irresistible advice,
I averted as I checked someone’s dates

in the Dictionary of National Biography
and later, as I scribbled a few words
on the back of a picture postcard.

Crashing through the iron gates of life
is what it is all about,
I decided as I lay down on the carpet,

locked my hands behind my head,
and considered how unique this day was
and how different I was from the men

of hari-kari for whom it is disgraceful
to end up lying on your back.
Better, they think, to be found facedown

in blood-soaked shirt
than to be discovered with lifeless eyes
fixed on the elegant teak ceiling above you,

and now I can almost hear the silence
of the temple bells and the lighter silence
of the birds hiding in the darkness of a hedge.

It was in between seasons,
after the thin twitter of late autumn
but before the icy authority of winter,

and I took in the scene from a porch,
a tableau of silo and weathervane
and a crowd of ferns on the edge of the woods—

nothing worth writing about really,
but it is too late to stop now
that the ferns and the silo have been mentioned.

I drank my warm coffee
and took note of the disused tractor
and the lopsided sign to the cheese factory.


Not one of those mornings
that makes you want to seize the day,
not even enough glory in it to make you want

to grasp every other day,
yet after staring for a while
at the plowed-under fields and the sky,

I turned back to the order of the kitchen
determined to seize firmly 
the second Wednesday of every month that lay ahead.

It was getting late in the year,
the sky had been low and overcast for days,
and I was drinking tea in a glassy room
with a woman without children,
a gate through which no one had entered the world.

She was turning the pages of a large book
on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea,
a book of colorful paintings—
a landscape, a portrait, a still life,
a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the
       table.

Men had entered the gate, but no boy or girl
had ever come out, I was thinking oddly
as she stopped at a page of clouds
aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold.
This one is my favorite, she said,

even though it was only a detail, a corner
of a larger painting which she had never seen.
Nor did she want to see the countryside below
or the portrayal of some myth
in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete.

This was enough, this fraction of the whole,
just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough
now that the light was growing dim,
as was she enough, perfectly herself
somewhere in the enormous mural of the world.

I remember late one night in Paris
speaking at length to a dog in English
about the future of American culture.

No wonder she kept cocking her head
as I went on about “summer movies”
and the intolerable poetry of my compatriots.

I was standing and she was sitting
on a dim street in front of a butcher shop,
and come to think of it, she could have been waiting

for the early morning return of the lambs
and the bleeding sides of beef
to their hooks in the window.

For my part, I had mixed my drinks,
trading in the tulip of wine
for the sharp nettles of whiskey.

Why else would I be wasting my time 
and hers trying to explain “corn dog,”
“white walls,” and “the March of Dimes”?

She showed such patience for a dog
without breeding while I went on—
in a whisper now after shouts from a window—

about “helmet laws” and “tag sale”
wishing I only had my camera
so I could carry a picture of her home with me.

On the loopy way back to my hotel—
after some long and formal goodbyes—
I kept thinking how I would have loved

to hang her picture over the mantel
where my maternal grandmother
now looks down from her height as always,


silently complaining about the choice of the frame.
Then before dinner each evening
I could stand before the image of that very dog,

a glass of wine in hand,
submitting all of my troubles and petitions
to the court of her dark-brown, adoring eyes.

"The ancient Greeks...used to chain their statues to prevent them from fleeing."  
Michael Kimmelman

It might have been the darkening sky
that sent them running in all directions
that afternoon as the air turned a pale yellow,

but were they not used to standing out
in the squares of our city
in every kind of imaginable weather?

Maybe they were frightened by a headline
on a newspaper that was blowing by
or was it the children in their martial arts uniforms?

Did they finally learn about the humans
they stood for as they pointed a sword at a cloud?
Did they know something we did not?

Whatever the cause, no one will forget
the sight of all the white marble figures
leaping from their pedestals and rushing away.

In the parks, the guitarists fell silent.
The vendor froze under his umbrella.
A dog tried to hide in his owner’s shadow.

Even the chess players under the trees
looked up from their boards
long enough to see the bronze generals

Dismount and run off, leaving their horses
to peer down at the circling pigeons
who were stealing a few more crumbs from the poor.

The legendary Cang Jie was said to have invented writing after observing the tracks of birds.


A light snow last night,
and now the earth falls open to a fresh page.

A high wind is breaking up the clouds.
Children wait for the yellow bus in a huddle,

and under the feeder, some birds
are busy writing short stories,

poems, and letters to their mothers.
A crow is working on an editorial.

That chickadee is etching a list,
and a robin walks back and forth

composing the opening to her autobiography.
All so prolific this morning,

these expressive little creatures,
and each with an alphabet of only two letters.

A far cry from me watching
in silence behind a window wondering

what just frightened them into flight—
a dog’s bark, a hawk overhead?

or had they simply finished
saying whatever it was they had to say?

I am glad I resisted the temptation,
if it was a temptation when I was young,
to write a poem about an old man 
eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.

I would have gotten it all wrong
thinking the poor bastard, not a friend in the world
and with only a book for a companion.
He’ll probably pay the bill out of a change purse.

So glad I waited all these decades
to record how hot and sour the hot and sour soup is
here at Chang’s this afternoon
and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass.

And my book—Jose Saramago’s Blindness
as it turns out—is so absorbing that I look up
from its escalating horrors only
when I am stunned by one of his arresting sentences.

And I should mention the light
which falls through the big windows this time of day
italicizing everything it touches—
the plates and teapots, the immaculate tablecloths,

as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress
in the white blouse and short black skirt,
the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice
and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the
        corner.

It was after dinner,
you were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked.

And I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.

All of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated 
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of your shoulders

that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.

Then all the moments of the past 
began to line up behind that moment
and all the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from the millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.

Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice


might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

In the club car that morning I had my notebook
open on my lap and my pen uncapped,
looking every inch the writer
right down to the little writer’s frown on my face,

but there was nothing to write about
except life and death
and the low warning sound of the train whistle.



I did not want to write about the scenery
that was flashing past, cows spread over a pasture,
hay rolled up meticulously—
things you see once and will never see again.

But I kept my pen moving by drawing
over and over again
the face of a motorcyclist in profile—

for no reason I can think of—
a biker with sunglasses and a weak chin,
leaning forward, helmetless,
his long thin hair trailing behind him in the wind.

I also drew many lines to indicate speed,
to show the air becoming visible
as it broke over the biker’s face

the way it was breaking over the face 
of the locomotive that was pulling me
toward Omaha and whatever lay beyond Omaha
for me and all the other stops to make

before the time would arrive to stop for good.
We must always look at things
from the point of view of eternity,

the college theologians used to insist,
from which, I imagine, we would all
appear to have speed lines trailing behind us
as we rush along the road of the world,

as we rush down the long tunnel of time—
the biker, of course, drunk on the wind,
but also the man reading by a fire,

speed lines coming off his shoulders and his book,
and the woman standing on a beach
studying the curve of horizon,
even the child asleep on a summer night,

speed lines flying from the posters of her bed,
from the white tips of the pillowcases,
and from the edges of her perfectly motionless body.

This morning as low clouds 
skidded over the spires of the city

I found next to a bench
in a park an ivory chess piece—

The white knight as it turned out—
and in the pigeon-ruffling wind

I wondered where all the others were,
lined up somewhere

on their red and black squares,
many of them feeling uneasy

about the saltshaker
that was taking his place,

and all of them secretly longing
for the moment

when the white horse
would reappear out of nowhere

and advance toward the board
with his distinctive motion,

stepping forward, then sideways
before advancing again—

the same move I was making him do
over and over in the sunny field of my palm.

I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak and the yellow feather,

Singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

The morning sun is so pale
I could be looking at a ghost
in the shape of a window
a tall, rectangular spirit
peering down at me now in my bed,
about to demand that I avenge
the murder of my father.

But this light is only the first line
in the five-act play of this day—
the only day in existence—
or the opening chord of its long song,
or think of what is permeating
these thin bedroom curtains

as the beginning of a lecture
I must listen to until dark,
a curious student in a V-neck sweater,
angled into the wooden chair of his life,
ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,
quiet as a goldfish in winter,
serious as a compass at sea,
eager to absorb whatever lesson

this damp, overcast Tuesday
has to teach me,
here in the spacious classroom of the world
with its long walls of glass,
its heavy, low-hung ceiling.
  

is where the Elk River falls
from a rocky and considerable height,
turning pale with trepidation at the lip
(it seemed from where I stood below)
before it is unbuckled from itself
and plummets, shredded, through the air
into the shadows of a frigid pool,
so calm around the edges, a place
for water to recover from the shock
of falling apart and coming back together
before it picks up its song again,
goes sliding around the massive rocks
and past some islands overgrown with weeds
then flattens out and slips around a bend
and continues on its winding course,
according to this camper’s guide,
then joins the Clearwater at its northern fork,
which must in time find the sea
where this and every other stream 
mistakes the monster for itself,
sings its name one final time
then feels the sudden sting of salt.

The spirits of children are remote and wise,
They must go free
Like fishes in the sea
Or starlings in the skies,
Whilst you remain
The shore where casually they come again.
But when there falls the stalking shade of fear,
You must be suddenly near,
You, the unstable, must become a tree
In whose unending heights of flowering green
Hangs every fruit that grows, with silver bells;
Where heart-distracting magic birds are seen
And all the things a fairy-story tells;
Though still you should possess
Roots that go deep in ordinary earth,
And strong consoling bark
To love and to caress.

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his 
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

Underneath the tree on some
soft grass I sat. I

watched two happy woodpeckers be dis-
turbed by my presence. And
why not. I thought to

myself, why
not.

This was a day when nothing happened,
the children went off to school
without a murmur, remembering
their books, lunches, gloves.
All morning, the baby and I built block stacks
in the squares of light on the floor.
and lunch blended into naptime,
I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,
one of those jobs that never gets done,
then sat in a circle of sunlight
and drank ginger tea,
watched the birds at the feeder
jostle over lunch’s little scraps.
A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,
preened and flashed his jeweled head.
Now a chicken roasts in the pan,
and the children return,
the murmur of their stories dappling the air.
I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.
We listen together for your wheels on the drive.
Grace before bread.
 And at the table, actual conversation,
no bickering or pokes.
And then, the drift into homework.
The baby goes to his cars, drives them
along the sofa’s ridges and hills.
Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,
tasting of coffee and cream.
The chicken’s diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard cold knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.

O be swift—
we have always known you wanted us.

We fled inland with our flocks,
we pastured them in hollows,
cut off from the wind
and the salt track of the marsh.

We worshipped inland—
we stepped past wood-flowers,
we forgot your tang,
we brushed wood-grass.

We wandered from pine-hills
through oak and scrub-oak tangles,
we broke hyssop and bramble,
we caught flower and new bramble-fruit
in our hair: we laughed
as each branch whipped back,
we tore our feet in half-buried rocks
and knotted roots and acorn-cups.

We forgot—we worshipped,
we parted green from green,
we sought further thickets,
we dipped our ankles
through leaf-mold and earth,
and wood and wood-bank enchanted us—

and the feel of the clefts in the bark,
and the slope between tree and tree—
and a slender path strung field to field
and wood to wood
and hill to hill 
and the forest after it.

We forgot for a moment;
tree-resin, tree-bark
sweat of a torn branch
were sweet to the taste.

We were enchanted with the fields,
the tufts of coarse grass—
in the shorter grass—
we loved all this.

But now, our boat climbs—hesitates—
     drops—
climbs—hesitates—crawls back—
climbs—hesitates—
O, be swift—
we have always known you wanted us.

All shall be well
and all shall be well
and all manner of things
shall be well.

Your life experience is a vehicle for coming to God.  

The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.   

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her moth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

As soon as you wake they come blundering in
    like puppies or importunate children;
What was a landscape emerging from mist
    becomes at once a disordered garden.

And the mess they trail with them! Embarrassments,
    anger, lust, fear—in fact the whole pig-pen;
And who’ll clean it up? No hope for sleep now—
    just heave yourself out, make the tea, and give in.

From "The Gift of Fear"

Anxiety kills more Americans each year than the dangers we fear (through high blood pressure, heart disease, depression, and a myriad of other stress related ailments).

This is your invitation to the Ninth-Grade Play
At Jackson Park Middle School
8:00 P.M., November 17, 1947.
Macbeth, authored by Shakespeare
And directed by Mr. Grossman and Mrs. Silvio
With scenery from Miss Ferguson’s art class.

A lot of effort has gone into it.
Dozens of students have chosen to stay after school
Week after week with their teachers
Just to prepare for this one evening,
A gift to lift you a moment beyond the usual.
Even if you’ve moved away, you’ll want to return.
Jackson Park, in case you’ve forgotten, stands
At the end of Jackson Street at the top of the hill.

Doubtless you recall that Macbeth is about ambition.
This is the play for you if you’ve been tempted
To claw your way to the top. If you haven’t been,
It should make you feel grateful.
Just allow time to get lost before arriving.
So many roads are ready to take you forward
Into the empty world to come, misty with promises.
So few will lead you back to what you’ve missed.

Just get an early start.
Call in sick to the office this once.
Postpone your vacation a day or two.
Prepare to find the road neglected,
The street signs rusted, the school dark,
The doors locked, the windows broken, 
This is where the challenge comes in.
Do you suppose our country would have been settled
If the pioneers had worried about being lonely?

Somewhere the students are speaking the lines
You can’t remember. Somewhere, days before that,
This invitation went out, this one you’re reading
On your knees in the attic, the contents of a trunk
Piled beside you. Forget about your passport.
You don’t need to go to Paris just yet.
Europe will seem even more beautiful
Once you complete the journey you begin today.

I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.




Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.

Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
And, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.

Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,

In the shape of his death still living.
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy—
But now my propped up father

Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father—
Look! He is grinning; he is not

Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring.
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world



That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement,

High, still higher, still waving,
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
Drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.

Exultation is the going
Of an island soul to sea,
Past the houses—past the headlands—
Into deep eternity.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House supports itself
And cease to recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter—
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life—
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness—then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Whence the Meanings, are—

None may teach it—Any—
‘Tis the Seal Despair—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—
When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows—hold their breath—
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death—

I stepped from plank to plank,
A slow and cautious way;
The stars about my head I felt,
About my feet the sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch.
This gave me that precarious gait
Some call experience.

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth—

The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—

And when they all were seated,
A service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My Mind was going numb—

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space—began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here—

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And finished knowing—then—

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chilliest land---
And on the strangest Sea==
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grave and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Dd the wind use to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few.
……and whenever there is stillness there is a still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from town.

All day I have been closed up
inside rooms, speaking of trivial
matters. Now at last I have come out
into the night, myself a center

of darkness.
Beneath the clouds the low sky glows
with scattered light. I can hardly think
this is happening. Here in this bright absence

of day. I feel myself opening out
with contentment.
All around me the soft rain is whispering
of thousands of feet of air

invisible above us.

(Zen Master)

If you go out and confirm the ten thousand things, this is delusion; if you let the ten thousand things come and confirm you, this is enlightenment.

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits—
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.

Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to 
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,
lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us.
The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last
under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars.





Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time
our love like a knife between us
defining the boundaries that we can never cross
nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,
cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths
and the dark wound closed in behind us.

Forget depth bombs, death, and promises we made,
gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward,
the rooms where we had come together bombd.

But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel
your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt
over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now,
you pass with ease into the destructive world.
There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails,
falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore
and within the indestructible night I am alone.

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree
out of blue sky   the wind
sings loudest surrounding me.

And solitude,    a wild solitude
‘s reveald,    fearfully,    high   I’d climb
into the shaking uncertainties,

part out of longing, part   daring my self,
part to see that
widening of the world,   part

to find my own, my secret
hiding sense and place, where from afar
all voices and scenes come back

--the barking of a dog,   autumnal burnings,
far calls,   close calls--   the boy I was
calls out to me
here the man where I am   “Look!

I’ve been where you
most fear to be.”

Because altruists are the least sexy
      people on earth, unable
to say “I want” without embarrassment,

we need to take from them everything
       they give,
then ask for more,

this is how to excite them, and because
      it’s exciting to see them the least bit excited

once again we’ll be doing something
      for ourselves,
who have no problem taking pleasure,

always desirous and so pleased to be
       pleased, we who above all
can be trusted to keep the balance.

Every creative act reveals God and expands his being.
I know that may be hard to comprehend.
All creatures are doing their best to help God in his birth of Himself.

(from Little Gidding)

     We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Except for the point, the still point
there would be no dance,
And there is only the dance.

What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
during which we knew them. And they have
    changed since then….

We must
       Also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could,
some blunders and absurdities
no doubt have crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely
and with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with 
your old nonsense.

This day is all that is 
good and fair.
It is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on yesterdays.

So you come into the kitchen one morning
(the only room with cat-flap access)
and you find the larger cat, covered in blood, on a chair
and patches of blood on the chair and the floor.
His left foreleg is limp, he can’t move it
from the wrist, as it were. A car, a tom-cat?
A dog, or even a suburban fox?
Pathetic, when you stroke him he still gives a very faint purr.

He limps about, on drugs. Two weeks, the damaged nerve is
       healing.
Our Alleluias go up. Because we’re there and see it
It’s like the end of a famine in Ethiopia—
more real, for us! The genuine rejoicing
that shakes a people at the end of a war—
crowds drinking, singing, splashing in the fountains!

….to begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us….let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death….we do not know where death awaits us so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who learns how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. 

The dog trots freely in the street
and sees reality
and the things he sees
are bigger than himself
and the things her sees 
are his reality
Drunks in doorways
Moons on trees
The dog trots freely thru the street
and the things he sees
are smaller than himself
Fish on newsprint
Ants in holes
Chickens in Chinatown windows
their heads a block away
The dog trots freely in the street
and the things he smells
smell something like himself
The dog trots freely in the street
past puddles and babies
cats and cigars
poolrooms and policemen
He doesn’t hate cops
He merely has no use for them
and he goes past them
and past the dead cows hung up whole
in front of the San Francisco Meat Market
He would rather eat a tender cow
than a tough policeman
though either might do
and he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory
and past Coit’s Tower
and past Congressman Doyle of the Unamerican Committee
He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower
but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle
although what he hears is very discouraging
very depressing
very absurd
to a sad young dog like himself
to a serious dog like himself
But he has his own free world to live in
His own fleas to eat
He will not be muzzled
Congressman Doyle is just another
fire hydrant
to him
The dog trots freely in the street
and has his own dog’s life to live
and to think about
and to reflect upon
touching and tasting and testing everything
investigating everything
without benefit of perjury
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with
a real live
                barking
                            democratic dog
engaged in real
                        free enterprise
with something to say
                                   about ontology
something to say
                           about reality
                                               and how to see it
                                                                      and how to hear it
with his head cocked sideways
                                             at streetcorners
as if he is just about to have
                                          his picture taken
                                                                   for Victor Records
listening for
                   His Master’s Voice
and looking
                   like a living questionmark
                                                   into the
                                                 great gramophone
                                               of puzzling existence
with its wondrous hollow horn
         which always seems
       just about to spout forth
                                        some Victorious answer
                                              to everything

When he got up that morning everything was different:
He enjoyed the bright spring day
But he did not realize it exactly, he just enjoyed it.

And walking down the street to the railroad station
Past magnolia trees with dying flowers like old socks
It was a long time since he had breathed so simply.

Tears filled his eyes and it felt good
But he held them back
Because men didn’t walk around crying in that town.

Waiting on the platform at the station
The fear came over him of something terrible about to happen:
The train was late and he recited the alphabet to keep hold.

And in its time it came screeching in
And as it went on making its usual stops,
People coming and going, telephone poles passing,

He hid his head behind a newspaper
No longer able to hold back the sobs, and willed his eyes
To follow the rational weavings of the seat fabric.

He didn’t do anything violent as he had imagined.
He cried for a long time, but when he finally quieted down
A place in him that had been closed like a fist was open,

And at the end of the ride he stood up and got off that train:
And through the streets and in all the places he lived in later on
He walked, himself at last, a man among men,
With such radiance that everyone looked up and wondered.

He was walking a frozen road
in his pocket iron keys were jingling
and with his pointed shoe absent-mindedly
he kicked the cylinder 
of an old can
which for a few seconds rolled its cold emptiness
wobbled for a while and stopped
under a sky studded with stars.

It’s not always easy
to face the animal
even if it looks at you
without fear or hate
it does so fixedly
and seems to disdain
the subtle secret it carries
it seems better to feel
the obviousness of the world
that noisily day and night
drills and damages
the silence of the soul.

Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berrybush
in sun, and I am one.

Such merriment and such sobriety—
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk—
was this not always my true style?

Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four 
birds. Can you mistake us?

To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together—for this I have abandoned
all my other lives.

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

The men and beasts of the zodiac
Have marched over us once more.
Green wine bottles and red lobster shells,
Both emptied, litter the table.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot?” Each
Sits listening to his own thoughts,
And the sound of cars starting outside.
The birds in the eaves are restless,
Because of the noise and light. Soon now
In the winter dawn I will face
My fortieth year. Borne headlong
Towards the long shadows of sunset
By the headstrong, stubborn moments,
Life whirls past like drunken wildfire.

Sunset glitters on the beads
Of the curtains. Spring flowers
Bloom in the valley. The gardens
Along the river are filled
With perfume. Smoke of cooking
Fires drifts over the slow barges.
Sparrows hop and tumble in 
The branches. Whirling insects
Swarm in the air. Who discovered
That one cup of thick wine
Will dispel a thousand cares?

The Roman Catholic bells of Princeton, New Jersey,
wake me from rousing dreams into a resounding hangover.
Sweet Jesus, my life is hateful to me.
Seven a.m. and time to walk the dog on a leash.

Ice on the sidewalk and in the gutters,
and the wind comes down our one-way street
like a deuce-and-a-half, a six-by, a semi,
huge with a cold load of growls.

There’s not one leaf left to bear witness,
with twitch and scuttle, rattle and rasp,
against the blatant roaring of the wrongway wind.
Only my nose running and my face frozen

into a kind of a grin which has nothing to do
with the ice and the wind or death and December,
but joy pure and simple when my black and tan puppy,
for the first time ever, lifts his hind leg to pee.

Subject and object are like sandalwood and
its fragrance. Samsara and nirvana are like ice
and water. Appearances and emptiness are like
clouds and the sky. Thoughts and the nature of
the mind are like waves and the ocean.

When circumstances bring our emotions to a sharp point, at that point both confusion and wakefulness emerge from the same ground. If we are willing to practice in that groundless ground, that too is smiling at our fear. In the Kagyu tradition, this is also called practicing in the place where rock meets bone…..I learned recently that it refers to crushing bone for soup with a heavy rock mallet. That sense of crushing or breaking through our confusion or hesitation is also an expression of opening everything up, letting everything go, exposing the innermost marrow of the situation. It is about our ultimate vulnerability.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work...It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take a while. It's normal to take a while. You've just gotta fight your way through.

So long as you haven’t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm waters of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you.
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love making
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced 
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

There is a hush now while the hills rise up
and God is going to sleep. He trusts the ship
of Heaven to take over and proceed beautifully
as he lies dreaming in the lap of the world.
He knows the owls will guard the sweetness
of the soul in their massive keep of silence,
looking out with eyes open or closed over 
the length of Tomales Bay that the herons
conform to, whitely broad in flight, white
and slim in standing. God, who thinks about
poetry all the time, breathes happily as He
repeats to Himself: There are fish in the net,
lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.

So many want to be lifted by song and dancing,
and this morning it is easy to understand.
I write in the sound of chirping birds hidden
in the almond trees, the almonds still green
and thriving in the foliage. Up the street,
a man is hammering to make a new house as doves
continue their cooing forever. Bees humming
and high above that a brilliant clear sky.
The roses are blooming and I smell the sweetness.
Everything desirable is here already in abundance.
And the sea. The dark thing is hardly visible
in the leaves, under the sheen. We sleep easily.
So I bring no sad stories to warn the heart.
All the flowers are adult this year. The good
world gives and the white doves praise all of it.

Through summer air
The ascending gull
Dominates the expanse, the sea, the world
Under the blue, under clouds
Like the whitest wool-tufts.
And supreme, regal,
It soars.

All of space is a wave transfixed.

White and black feathers
Slow the ascent,
Suddenly slipping on the air,
On the vast light.

It buoys up the whiteness of the void.

And suspended, its wings abandon themselves
To clarity, to the transparent depths
Where flight, with stilled wings,
Subsists,
Gives itself entirely to its own delight, its falling,
And plunges into its own passing—
A pure instant of life.

Don’t surrender your loneliness
       So quickly
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
       As few human
Or even divine ingredients can

Something missing in my heart tonight
        Has made my eyes so soft,
           My voice
               So tender,

My need of God
          Absolutely
                Clear.

We climbed out of timber,
bending on the steep meadow
to look for berries,
then still in the reddening sunlight
went on up the windy shoulder.

A shadow followed us up the mountain
like a black moon rising.
Minute by minute the autumn lamps
on the slope burned out.

Around us the air and the rocks
whispered of night…

A great cloud blew from the north,
and the mountain vanished
in the rain and stormlit darkness.

On Easter morning all over America
the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.

We’re not supposed to have “peasants”
but there are tens of millions of them
frying potatoes on Easter morning,
cheap and delicious with catsup.

If Jesus were here this morning he might
be eating fried potatoes with my friend
who has a ’51 Dodge and a ’72 Pontiac.

When his kids ask why they don’t have
a new car he says, “these cars were new once
and now they are experienced.”

He can fix anything and when rich folks
call to get a toilet repaired he pauses
extra hours so that they can further
learn what we’re made of.

I told him that in Mexico the poor say
that when there’s lightning the rich
think that God is taking their picture.
He laughed.

Like peasants everywhere in the history
of the world ours can’t figure out why
they’re getting poorer. Their sons join
the army to get work being shot at.

Your ideals are invisible clouds
so try not to suffocate the poor,
the peasants, with your sympathies.
They know that you’re staring at them.

Boys kicking a ball on a vast square beneath an obelisk
and the apocalyptic sky at sunset to the rear
Why the sudden menace in this view
as if someone wished to turn it all to red dust
The sun already knows And the sky knows it too
And the water in the river knows
Music bursts from the loudspeakers like wild laughter
Only a star high above us
Stands lost in thought with a finger to its lips

The child brought blue clay from the creek
and the woman made two figures: a lady and a deer.
At that season deer came down from the mountain
and fed quietly in the redwood canyons.
The woman and the child regarded the figure of the lady,
the crude roundnesses, the grace, the coloring like shadow.
They were not sure where she came from,
except the child’s fetching and the woman’s hands
and the lead-blue clay of the creek
where the deer sometimes showed themselves at sundown.

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

I’m inside the advancing light,
my hands are hungry, the world beautiful.

My eyes can’t get enough of the trees—
they’re so hopeful, so green.

A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I’m at the window of the prison infirmary.

I can’t smell the medicines—
carnations must be blooming somewhere.

It’s like this:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.

Holy Spirit,
Giving life to all life,
Moving all creatures,
Root of all things,
Washing them clean,
Wiping out their mistakes,
Healing their wounds,
You are our true life,
Luminous, wonderful,
Awakening the heart
From its ancient sleep.

She was just a schoolteacher then
Walking away from the town
                                              in the late afternoon sunset,
A young woman in love
                                       with a treeless place,
The scattered windmills and pounding winds
Of the whole prairie sliding toward dusk,
Something unfenced and wild
                                             about the world without roads,
Miles and miles of land
                                     rolling like waves into nowhere,
The light settling down in the open country.
 
She had nothing to do but walk away
From the churches and banks, the college buildings
Of knowledge, the filling stations
                                                     of the habitable world,
And then she was alone
                                        with what she believed—
The shuddering iridescence of heat lightning,
Cattle moving like black lace in the distance,
Wildflowers growing out of bleached skulls,
The searing oranges and yellows of the evening star
Rising in daylight,
                               commanding the empty spaces.

A note waterfalls steadily 
through us,
just below hearing.

Or this early light
streaming through dusty glass:
what enters, enters like that,
unstoppable gift.

And yet there is also the other,
the breath-space held between any call
and its answer–

In the querying
first scuff of footstep,
the wood owls’ repeating,
the two-counting heart:

A little sabbath,
minnow whose brightness silvers past time.

The rest-note,
unwritten,
hinged between worlds,
that precedes change and allows it.

I want to give myself 
utterly
as this maple
that burned and burned
for three days without stinting
and then in two more
dropped off every leaf;
as this lake that,
no matter what comes
to its green-blue depths,
both takes and returns it.
In the still heart,
that refuses nothing,
the world is twice-born–
two earths wheeling,
two heavens,
two egrets reaching
down into subtraction;
even the fish
for an instant doubled,
before it is gone.
I want the fish
I want the losing it all
when it rains and I want
the returning transparence.
I want the place
by the edge-flowers where
the shallow sand is deceptive,
where whatever
steps in must plunge,
and I want that plunging.
I want the ones
who come in secret to drink
only in early darkness,
and I want the ones
who are swallowed.
I want the way
this water sees without eyes,
hears without ears,
shivers without will or fear
at the gentlest touch.
I want the way it
accepts the cold moonlight
and lets it pass
the way it lets 
all of it pass
without judgment or comment.
There is a lake,
Lalla Ded sang, no larger
than one seed of mustard,
that all things return to.
O heart, if you
will not, cannot, give me the lake,
then give me the song.

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
But also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.

And however sharply
you are tested—
this sorrow, that great love—
it too will leave on that clean knife.

If the flies did not hurry themselves to the window
they’d still die somewhere.

Other creatures choose the other dimension:
                                                                       to slip
into a thicket, swim into the shaded, undercut
part of the stream.

                               My dog would make her tennis ball
disappear into just such a hollow,
pushing it under the water with both paws.
Then dig for it furiously, wildly, until it popped up again.

A game or theology, I couldn’t tell.

The flies might well prefer the dawn-ribboned mouth of a trout,
its crisp and speed,
                                    if they could get there,
though they are not in truth that kind of fly
and preference is not given often in these matters.

A border collie’s preference is to do anything entirely,
with the whole attention. This Simone Weil called prayer.
And almost always, her prayers were successful—
                                                                              the tennis ball
could be summoned again to the surface.

When a friend’s new pound dog, diagnosed distempered,
doctored for weeks, crawled under the porch to die, my friend crawled after,
pulled her out, said “No!”,

as if to live were just a simple matter of training.
                                                The coy-dog, startled, obeyed.
Now trots out to greet my car when I come to visit.

Only a firefly’s evening blinking outside the window,
this miraculous story, but everyone hurries to believe it.

A hawk flies through it, carrying
a still-twisting snake twice the length of its body.

Radiation, smoke, mosquitoes, the music of Mahler fly through it. 

Sky doesn’t age or remember,
carries neither grudges nor hope.
Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased
as the not quite imaginable first.

From the fate of thunderstorms, hailstorms, fog,
sky learns no lesson,
leaping through any window as soon as it’s raised.

In speech, furious, or tender,
it’s still of passing sky the words are formed.  
Whatever sky proposes is out in the open.

Clear even when not,
sky offers no model, no mirror—cloudy or bright—
to the ordinary heart: which is secretive,
rackety, domestic, harboring a wild uninterest in sky’s disinterest.

And so we look right past sky, by it, through it,
to what also is moody and alters—
erosive mountains, eclipsable moons, stars distant but death bound.  

In the yard next door,
a pocket of fog like a small herd of bison 
swallows azaleas, koi pond, the red-and-gold koi.

To be undivided must mean not knowing you are.

The fog grazes here, then there,
all morning browsing the shallows,
leaving no footprint between my fate and the mountain’s.                                    

A good argument, etymology instructs,
is many-jointed. 
By this measure,
the most expressive of beings must be the giraffe.

Yet the speaking tongue is supple,
untroubled by bone.

What would it be
 to take up no position,
to lie on this earth at rest, relieved of proof or change?

Scent of thyme or grass
amid the scent of many herbs and grasses.

Grief unresisted as granite darkened by rain.

Continuous praises most glad, placed against nothing.

But thought is hinge and swerve, is winch,
is folding.

“Reflection,”
we call the mountain in the lake,
whose existence resides in neither stone nor water.

What is usual is not what is always.
as sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back.

footsteps resume their clipped edges,
birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear.

Where were they? By what route did they return?

A woman mute for years
forms one perfect sentence before she dies.
The bitter young man tires;
the aged one sitting now in his body is tender,
his face carries no regret for his choices.

What is usual is not what is always, the day says again.
It is all it can offer.

Not ungraspable hope, not the consolation of stories.
Only the reminder that there is exception.

The air this morning,
Blowing between fog and drizzle,

Is like a white dog in the snow
Who scents a white bear in the snow
Who is not there.

Deeper than seeing,
Deeper than hearing,
They stand and glare, one at the other.

So many listen lost, in every weather.

The mind has mountains,
Hopkins wrote, against his sadness.

The dog held the bear at bay, that day.

If drawn as a cartoon figure,
you would be leaning always forward, feet blurred
with the multiple lines that convey both momentum and hurry.

Your god is surely Hermes:
messenger inventor,
who likes to watch the traveler passing the crossroads
in any direction.
Your nemesis? The calm existence of things as they are.

When I speak as here,
in the second person, you are quietly present.
You are present in presents as well, which are given to.

Being means and not end, you are mostly modest,
obedient as railroad track to what comes or does not.

Yet your work requires
both transience and transformation:
night changes to day, snow to rain, the shoulder of the living pig to meat.

When attached to verbs, you sometimes change them
to adjectives, adverbs, nouns,
a trick I imagine
would bring enormous pleasure,
were you capable of pleasure. You are not.

You live below the ground of humor, hubris, grievance, grief.
Whatever has been given you,
you carry, indifferent as a planet to your own fate.

Yet it is you,
polite retainer of time and place, who bring us to ours,
who do not leave the house of the body
from the moment of birth until your low-voiced murmur, “dust to dust.”

And so we say, “today,” “tomorrow.”
but from yesterday, like us, you have vanished.

Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.
Mysteriously, they left.
As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,
who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.
It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,
only a stepping back from the petty.
I gazed at the range of blue mountains,
I drank from the stream. Tossed in a small stone from the bank.
Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted.
Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted.
There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger.
The dog’s tail wagged a little in his dream.

So far the house still is standing.
So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster
still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life.
An almost readable language.
Like the radio heard while travelling in a foreign country—
you know that something important has happened but not what.

A person is full of sorrow
the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
We say, “Hand me the sack,”
but we get the weight.
Heavier if left out in the rain.
To think that the sand or stones are the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
The mule is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.
The self is not the miner nor builder nor driver.
What would it be to take the bride
and leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thin-ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,
its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?

What can I do with these thoughts,
given me as a dog is given her flock?
Or perhaps it is the reverse—
my life the unruly sheep, being herded.
At night,
all lie down on the mountain grasses,
while mirror sheep, a mirror guard-dog
follow one another through rock outcrops,
across narrow streams. They drink and graze by starlight.
This morning, waking to unaccustomed calmness,
I write these words to stay in that silent, unfevered existence,
to delay the other words that are waiting.

MAPLE

          The lake scarlets
          the same instant as the maple.
          Let others try to say this is not passion.

LIGHTHOUSE

          Its vision sweeps its one path
          like an aged monk raking a garden,
          his question long ago answered or moved on.
          Far off, night-grazing horses,
          breath scented with oat grass and fennel,
          step through it, disappear, step through it, disappear.

EVOLUTION & GLASS

          For days a fly travelled loudly
          From window to window,
          Until at last it landed on one I could open.
          It left without thanks or glancing back,
          Believing only—quite correctly—in its own persistence.

INSOMNIA, LISTENING

          Three times in one night
          A small animal crosses the length of the ceiling.
          Each time it goes all the way one way,
          All the way back, without hesitation or pause.

          Envy that sureness.

          It is like being cut-flowers, between the field and the vase.

         “Where is your home?” the interviewer asked him.

         “Here.”

         “No, no” the interviewer said, thinking it a problem of translation,
         “when you are where you actually live?”

         Now it was his turn to think, Perhaps the translation?

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 strickness.

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.

In a room with five people, six griefs.

Some you will hear of, some not.

Let the room hold them, their fears, their anger.

Let there be walls and windows, a ceiling.

A door through which time

changer of everything

can enter.

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong, 
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

A woman tells me
the story of a small wild bird,
beautiful on her window sill, dead three days.
How her daughter came suddenly running,
“It’s moving, Mommy, he’s alive.”
And when she went, it was.
The emerald wing-feathers stirred, the throat
seemed to beat again with pulse.
Closer then, she saw how the true life lifted
under the wings. Turned her face
so her daughter would not see, though she would see.

In times of change, the learners will inherit the Earth while those attached to their old certainties will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Standing next to my old friend I sense
    that his soldiers have retreated.
And mine? They’re resting their guns
    on their shoulders
talking quietly.  I’m hungry, one says.
Cheeseburger, says another,
and they all decide to go and find some dinner.



But the next day, negotiating the too
    narrow aisles of
The Health and Harmony Food Store
    --when I say, Excuse me,
to the woman and her cart of organic 
     chicken and green grapes
she pulls the cart not quite far back 
     enough for me to pass,
and a small mob in me begins picking 
    up the fruit to throw.

So many kingdoms,
and in each kingdom, so many people:
    the disinherited son, the corrupt
    counselor,
the courtesan, the fool.
    And so many gods—arguing among themselves,
over toast, through the lunch salad
and on into the long hours of the
    mild spring afternoon—I’m the god.
No, I’m the god. No, I’m the god.

I can hardly hear myself over their 
    muttering.
How can I discipline my army? They’re
    exhausted and want more money.
How can I disarm when my enemy
    seems so intent?

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
it’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living, I remember you.

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
Storm-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
      Not For Sale

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
       Dark like me—
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening…
A tall, slim tree..
Night coming tenderly
       Black like me.

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action, however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.

It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.

….what consciousness is, we know not; and how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp, or as any other ultimate fact of nature.

I wish I knew the beauty 
of leaves falling
To whom are we beautiful
As we go?

The Armenian language is the home
and haven where the wanderer can own
roof and wall and nourishment.
He can enter to find love and pride,
locking the hyena and the storm outside.
For centuries its architects have toiled 
to give its ceilings height.
How many peasants working
day and night have kept
its cupboards full, lamps lit, ovens hot.
Always rejuvenated, always old, it lasts
century to century on the path
where every Armenian can find it when he’s lost
in the wilderness of his future, or his past.

From the bough
floating down river,
insect song.

Let the young rain of tears come.
Let the calm hands of grief come.
It’s not as evil as you think.

Colors are words’ little sisters. They can’t become soldiers.
I’ve loved them secretly for a long time.
They have to stay home and hang up the sheer curtains
in our ordinary bedroom, kitchen and alcove.

I’m very close to young Crimson, and brown Sienna
but even closer to thoughtful Cobalt with her distant eyes and
         untrampled spirit.
We walk in dew.
The night sky and the southern oceans
are her possessions
and a tear-shaped pendant on her forehead:
the pearls of Cassiopeia.
We walk in dew on late nights.

But the others.
Meet them on a June morning at four o’clock
when they come rushing toward you, 
on your way to a morning swim in the green cove’s spray.
Then you can sunbathe with them on the smooth rocks.
         --Which one will you make yours?

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until...the watch is taken from the wrist.

It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships.

(quoted in Sarah Wilson's First, We Make the Beast Beautiful)

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box 
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon, what I’ve become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I’d wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water—
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know…Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,

My husband away at work—I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:

I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old.

And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I’m anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it.
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing.
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite.
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

The ocean has not been so quiet for a long while; five night-
       herons
Fly shorelong voiceless in the hush of the air
Over the calm of an ebb that almost mirrors their wings
The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down
From the weed-clad rock, but the distant cloud-wall rises. The ebb
      whispers.
Great cloud-shadows float in the opal water.
Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams, and the
      evening
Star suddenly glides like a flying torch.
As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind
The screen of the world for another audience.

So much she caused she cannot now account for
As she stands watching day return, the cool
Walls of the house moving towards the sun.
She puts some flowers in a vase and thinks
     “There is not much I can arrange
In here and now, but flowers are suppliant

As children never were. And love is now
A flicker of memory, my body is
My own entirely. When I lie at night
I gather nothing now into my arms,
      No child or man, and where I live
Is what remains when men and children go.”

Yet she owns more than residue of lives
That she has marked and altered. See how she
Warns time from too much touching her possessions
By keeping flowers fed, by polishing
     Her fine old silver. Gratefully
She sees her own glance printed on grandchildren.

Drawing the curtains back and opening windows
Every morning now, she feels her years
Grow less and less. Time puts no burden on
Her now she does not need to measure it.
    It is acceptance she arranges
And her own life she places in the vase.

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on;
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

As told by Carlos Castenada:

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes
everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.

What is not brought to consciousness is brought to us as fate.

Perhaps I myself am the enemy who must be loved.

               The alp at the end of the street
               ---Stevens' notebooks

The alp at the end of the street
Occurs in the dreams of the town.
Over burgher and shopkeeper,
Massive, he broods,
A snowy-headed father
Upon whose knees his children
No longer climb;
Or is reflected
In the cool, unruffled lakes of
Their minds, at evening.
After their day in the shops,
As shadow only, shapeless
As a wind that has stopped blowing.

Grandeur, it seems,
Comes down to this in the end—
A street of shops
With white shutters
Open for business

Lord let me suffer much
and then die

Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear

Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before

Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it

So that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love

Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain

And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee’s head

Contemporary spirituality is a closed belief system. The possibility of error is never considered because one’s feelings are always right. They usually fail to deal with evil. It encourages disastrous self-absorption allowing people to believe they are part of a spiritual elite. “Like extremist; political movements they shine with moral vanity.”

We started home, my son and I.
Twilight already. The young moon 
stood in the western sky and beside it
a single star. I showed them to my son
and explained how the moon should be greeted
and that this star is the moon’s servant.
As we neared home, he said
that the moon is far, as far
as that place where we went.
I told him the moon is much, much farther
and reckoned: if one were to walk
ten kilometers each day, it would take
almost a hundred years to reach the moon.
But this was not what he wanted to hear.
The road was already almost dry.
The river was spread on the marsh; ducks and other waterfowl
crowed the beginning of night. The snow’s crust
crackled underfoot—it must 
have been freezing again. All the houses’ windows
were dark. Only in our kitchen
a light shone. Beside our chimney, the shining moon,
and beside the moon, a single star.

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

Several things dovetailed in my mind, & it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

The first part of the spiritual journey should properly be called psychological rather than spiritual because it involves peeling away the myths and illusions that have misinformed us.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is a daring adventure or it is nothing.

Two caught on film who hurtle
from the eighty-second floor,
choosing between a fireball
and to jump holding hands,

aren’t us. I wake beside you,
stretch, scratch, taste the air,
the incredible joy of coffee
and the morning light.

Alive, we open eyelids
on our pitiful share of time,
we bubbles rising and bursting
in a boiling pot.

It was late August when we left, I gave away my plants, all but a few.
The huge van, idling at the curb all morning, was suddenly gone.

We got into the car. Friends handed us the cats through half-closed
windows. We backed out to the street, the trailer behind, dumb and
stubborn.

We talked little, listening to a Tiger double header on the car radio.
Dust and cat hair floated in the light. I ate a cheese sandwich I didn’t want.

During the second game, the signal faded until it was too faint to hear.
I felt like a hand without an arm. We drove all night and part of the
next morning.

The barn bears the weight
of the first heavy snow
without complaint.

White breath of cows
rises in the tie-up, a man
wearing a frayed winter jacket
reaches for his milking stool
in the dark.

The cows have gone into the ground,
and the man,
his wife beside him now.

A nuthatch droops
to the ground, feeding,
on sunflower seed and bits of bread
I scattered in the snow.

The cats doze near the stove.
They lift their heads
as the plow goes down the road,
making the house 
tremble as it passes.

How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line
with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!

THE CIRCLE AND THE GRASS
By Jane Kenyon
    1
Last night the wind came into the yard,
and wrenched the biggest branch
from the box elder, and threw it down
--no, that was not what it wanted---
and kept going.

    2
Eighty years ago, someone
planted the sapling,
midway between porch and fence,
and later that day,
looked down from the bedroom
on the highest branch.

The woman who stood at the window
could only imagine shade,
and the sound of leaves moving overhead,
like so many whispered conversations.

    3
I keep busy in the house,
but I hear the high drone
of the saw, and the drop in pitch
as chain cuts into bark.

I clean with the vacuum
so I won’t have to listen,
finally the man goes for lunch,
leaving the house quiet
as a face paralyzed by strokes.

     4
All afternoon I hear the blunt
shudder of limbs striking the ground.
The tree drops its arms
like someone abandoning a conviction:
--perhaps I have been wrong all this time—

When it’s over, there is nothing left
but a pale circle on the grass,
dark in the center, like an eye

It’s quiet here. The cats
sprawl, each
in a favored place.
The geranium leans this way
to see if I’m writing about her:
head all petals,, brown
stalk, and those green fans.
So you see,
I am writing about you.

I turn on the radio. Wrong.
Let’s not have any noise
in this room, except
the sound of a voice reading a poem.
The cats request
The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke.

The house settles down on its haunches
for a doze.
I know you are with me, plants,
and cats—and even so, I’m frightened,
sitting in the middle of perfect
possibility.

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the crickets take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.


Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.

Sap withdraws from the upper reaches
of maples; the squirrel digs deeper
and deeper in the moss
to bury the acorns that fall
all around, distracting him.

I’m out here in the dusk,
tired from teaching and a little drunk,
where the wild asters, last blossoms
of the season, straggle uphill.
Frost flowers, I’ve heard them called.
The white ones have yellow centers
at first: later they darken
to a rosy copper. They’re mostly done.
Then the blue ones come on. It’s blue
all around me now, though the color
has gone with the sun.

My sarcasm wounded a student today.
Afterward I heard him running down the stairs.

There is no one at home but me—
and I’m not at home; I’m up here on the hill,
looking at the dark windows below.
Let them be dark. Some large bird
calls down-mountain—a cry
astonishingly loud, distressing….

I was cruel to him: it is a bitter thing.
The air is damp and cold,

and by now I am a little hungry….
The squirrel is high in the oak,
gone to his nest, and night has silenced
the last loud rupture of the calm.  

Now all the doors and windows
are open, and we move so easily
through the rooms. Cats roll
on the sunny rugs, and a clumsy wasp
climbs the pane, pausing
to rub a leg over her head.

All around physical life reconvenes.
The molecules of our bodies must love
to exist: they whirl in circles
and seem to begrudge us nothing.
Heat, Horatio, heat makes them
put this antic disposition on!

This year’s brown spider
sways over the door as I come
and go. A single poppy shouts
from the far field, and the crow,
beyond alarm, goes right on
pulling up corn.

The boats like huge bright birds
sail back when someone calls them:
the small campers struggle out
and climb the hill to lunch.
I see the last dawdler
disappear in a ridge of trees.

The whole valley sighs
in the haze and heat of noon. Far out
a fish astonishes the air, falls back
into its element. From the marshy cove
the bullfrog offers thoughts
on the proper limits of ambition.




An hour passes. Piano music
comes floating over the water, falters,
begins again, falters….
only work will make it right.

Some small thing I can’t quite see
clatters down through the leafy dome.
Now it is high summer: the solstice:
longed-for, possessed, luxurious, and sad.

There is a moment in middle age
when you grow bored, angered
by your middling mind,
afraid.

That day the sun 
burns hot and bright,
making you more desolate.

It happens subtly, as when a pear
spoils from the inside out,
and you may not be aware
until things have gone too far.

From Psalm 139
“O Lord, thou hast searched me…”

Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
    Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
    if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou are there.

If I take the wings of the morning,
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there shall thy hand lead me,
    and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me;
    even the night shall be light about me.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee;
     but the night shineth as the day:
     the darkness and the light are both alike to thee….

"If many remedies are prescribed for an illness,
You may be certain that the illness has no cure."
A.P. Chekhov from The Cherry Orchard

1  From the nursery

When I was born, you waited
behind a pile of linen in the nursery,
and when we were alone, you lay down
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on
everything under the sun and moon
made me sad—even the yellow
wooden beads that slid and spun
along a spindle on my crib.

You taught me to exist without gratitude.
You ruined my manners towards God:
“We’re here simply to wait for death;
the pleasures of earth are overrated.”

I only appeared to belong to my mother,
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases.
I was already yours—the anti-urge,
the mutilator of souls.

2  Bottles

Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin,
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax,
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft.
The coated ones smell sweet or have
no smell; the powdery ones smell
like the chemistry lab at school
that made me hold my breath.



3  Suggestion from a Friend

You wouldn’t be so depressed
if you really believed in God.

4  Often

Often I go to bed as soon after dinner
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away 
from the massive pain in sleep’s 
frail wicker coracle.

5  Once There Was Light

Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great 
river of light that undulates through time.

I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors—those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few

moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist.

Like a crow who smells hot blood
you came flying to pull me out
of the glowing stream.
“I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear
ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.

6  In and Out

The dog searches until he finds me 
upstairs, lies down with a clatter
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing
saves my life—in and out, in
and out; a pause, a long sigh….

7  Pardon

A piece of burned meat
wears my clothes, speaks
in my voice, dispatches obligations
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying
to be stouthearted, tired 
beyond measure.

We move on to the monoamine 
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night
I feel as if I had drunk six cups
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder
and bitterness of someone pardoned
for a crime she did not commit
I come back to marriage and friends,
to pink-fringed hollyhocks; come back
to my desk, books, and chair.

8  Credo

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work
but I believe only in this moment
of well-being. Unholy ghost,
you are certain to come again.

Coarse, mean, you’ll put your feet
on the coffee table, lean back,
and turn me into someone who can’t
take the trouble to speak; someone
who can’t sleep, or who does nothing
but sleep; can’t read, or call
for an appointment for help.

There is nothing I can do against your coming.
When I awake, I am still with thee.






9  Wood Thrush

High on Nardil and June light
I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
notes of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.

For a long time
I keep the guidebooks out on the table.
In the morning, drinking coffee, I see the spines:
St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Vienna.
Choices pondered but not finally taken.
Behind them—sometimes behind thick fog—the mountain.
If you lived higher up on the mountain,
I find myself thinking, what you would see is
More of everything else, but not the mountain.

We try a new drug, a new combination
of drugs, and suddenly
I fall into my life again.

Like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.

I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas.

I remember the house and barn,
the rake, the blue cups and plates,
the Russian novels I loved so much,

and the black silk nightgown
that he once thrust
into the toe of my Christmas stocking.

All night snow came upon us
with unwavering intent—
small flakes not meandering
but driving thickly down. We woke
to see the yard, the car and road
heaped unrecognizably.

The neighbors’ ewes are lambing
in this stormy weather. Three 
lambs born yesterday, three more 
expected…
                  Felix the ram looked
proprietary in his separate pen
while fatherhood accrued to him.
The panting ewes regarded me
with yellow-green, small-
pupiled eyes.

I have a friend who is pregnant—
plans gone awry—and not altogether
pleased. I don’t say she should
be pleased. We are creation’s
property, its particles, its clay
as we fall into this life,
agree or disagree.

The quicksilver song
of the wood thrush spills
downhill from ancient maples
at the end of the sun’s single most
altruistic day. The woods grow dusky
while the bird’s song brightens.






Reading to get sleepy…Rabbit
Angstrom knows himself so well,
why isn’t he a better man?
I turn out the light, and rejoice
in the sound of high summer, and in air
on bare shoulders—dolce, dolce—
no blanket, or even a sheet.
A faint glow remains over the lake.

Now come wordless contemplations
on love and death, worry about
money, and the resolve to have the vet
clean the dog’s teeth, though
he’ll have to anesthetize him.

An easy rain begins, drips off
the edge of the roof onto the tin
watering can A vast irritation rises…
I turn and turn, try one pillow,
two, think of people who have no beds.

A car hisses by on wet macadam.
Then another. The room turns
gray by insensible degrees. The thrush
begins again its outpouring of silver
to rich and poor alike, to the just
and the unjust.

The dog’s wet nose appears
on the pillow, pressing lightly,
decorously. He needs to go out.
All right, cleverhead, let’s declare
a new day.
                  Washing up, I say
to the face in the mirror,
“You’re still here! How you bored me
all night, and now I’ll have
to entertain you all day…”

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

I walked alone in the chill of dawn
while my mind leapt, as the teachers

of detachment say, like a drunken
monkey. Then a gray shape, an owl,

passed overhead. An owl is not
like a crow. A crow makes convivial

chuckings as it flies,
but the owl flew well beyond me

before I heard it coming, and when it
settled, the bough did not sway.

And once, for no special reason,
I rode in the back of the pickup,
leaning against the cab.
Everything familiar was receding
fast—the mountain,
the motel, Huldah Currier’s 
house, and the two stately maples…

Mr. Perkins was having a barn sale,
and cars from New Jersey and Ohio
were parked along the sandy shoulder
of Route 4. Whatever I saw
I had already passed…
(This must be what life is like
at the moment of leaving it.)

Above the boat,
bellies
of wild geese.

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.

Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.

It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder’s ache
A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was 
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity they sank down
into the mud; they faded down
into it and lay still; and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line—
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it’s best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person’s reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you’re not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
        Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide 
        another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another—one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath
        may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein 
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The
        obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother’s bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter’s bag one finds oneself confronted by
      the mother’s
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love or
       the same love
As when “I love you” suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when “I’m full of doubts”
Hides “I’m certain about something and it is that”
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the 
       Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading A
       Sentimental Journey look around
When you finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May hide another, as when you’re asleep there, and
one song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the
        foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you’d preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one.
       It can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

Several quotes from "Conscious Business"

I realized that the people oppressing me had absolutely no concern whatsoever for my well-being. I realized that the only way I could improve my situation was to take responsibility to protect myself. I stopped expecting the rulers, who only had ill will toward me, to change, I decided to do what I could, given that they wouldn’t.

External facts are not stimuli—they are information.

If you are the one suffering, you are the one with the problem. And that means that you are the one who had better take corrective action. If you expect the ones who made the decision that suited their needs to solve your problem, I wish you luck.

Discipline is the capacity to maintain awareness and choose consciously in the face of instinctual pressures….as an individual, you need discipline beause you are genetically programmed to respond instinctually to immediate risks or opportunities in the environment.

A good life subordinates success to integrity.

My black face fades,
Hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters of smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats 
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names.
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

Excerpts from "Bringing Home the Dharma"

Distractions are the natural movement of the mind, which is often like muddy or turbulent water. Each time an enticing image or an interesting memory floats by, it is our habit to react, to get entangled, or to get lost. When painful images or feelings arise, it is our habit to contract, to avoid them, or unknowingly distract ourselves. We can feel the power of these habits of desire and distraction, of fear and reaction. In many of us these forces are so great that after a few unfamiliar moments of calm, our mind rebels. We repeatedly encounter restlessness, busyness, plans, unfelt feelings, and these all interrupt our focus again and again. The heart of meditation practice is working with these distractions, steadying our canoe so to speak, letting the waves wobble us and pass by, coming back again and again to this moment in a quiet and collected way.

The steady power of our concentration shows each part of our life to be in change and flux, like a river, even as we feel it.

But where have we actually gone? It is only that a mood or thought or doubt has swept through our mind. As soon as we recognize this, we can let go and settle back again in the next moment. We can always begin again.


Always remember that in training a puppy we want to end up with the puppy as our friend. In the same way, we must practice seeing our mind and body as “friend”. Even its wanderings can be included in our meditation with a friendly interest and curiosity. Right away we can notice how it moves. The mind produces waves. Our breath is a wave, and the sensations of our body are a wave. We don’t have to fight the waves. We can simply acknowledge, “Surf’s up.” “Here’s a wave of memories from when I was three years old.”
“Here’s a wave of planning the future.” Then its time to reconnect with the wave of the breath….
Our task is to train the puppy to become our life long friend.

This evening, the sturdy Levis
I wore every day for over a year
& which seemed to the end in perfect condition,
suddenly tore.
How or why I don’t know,
but there it was–a big rip at the crotch.
A month ago my friend Nick
walked off a racquetball court,
showered
got into his street clothes,
& halfway home collapsed & died.
Take heed you who read this
& drop to your knees now & again
like the poet Christopher Smart
& kiss the earth & be joyful
& make much of your time
& be kindly to everyone,
even to those who do not deserve it.
For although you may not believe it will happen,
you too will one day be gone.
I, whose Levis ripped at the crotch
for no reason,
assure you that such is the case.
Pass it on.

Cosmetics do no good:
no shadow rouge, mascara, lipstick—
nothing helps.
However artfully I comb my hair,
embellishing my throat & wrist with jewels,
it is no use—there is no
semblance of the beautiful young girl
I was
& long for still.
My loveliness is past.
& no one could be more aware than I am
that coquettishness at this age
only renders me ridiculous.
I know it. Nonetheless,
I primp myself before the glass
like an infatuated schoolgirl
fussing over every detail,
practicing whatever subtlety
may please him.
I cannot help myself
The God of Passion has his will of me
& I am tossed about
between humiliation & desire,
rectitude & lust,
disintegration & renewal,
ruin & salvation.

who’d been steadfast as small change all his life
forgave the one who bounced back like a bad check
the moment his father told him he ought to.
After all, that’s what being good means.
In fact, it was he who hosted the party,
bought the crepes & champagne,
uncorked every bottle. With each drink
another toast to his brother: ex-swindler, hit-man
& rapist. By the end of the night
the entire village was blithering drunk
in an orgy of hugs & forgiveness,
while he himself
whose one wish was to be loved as profusely,
slipped in & out of their houses,
stuffing into a satchel their brooches & rings
& bracelets & candelabra.
Then lit out at dawn with a light heart
for a port city he knew only by reputation:
ladies in lipstick hanging out of each window,
& every third door a saloon.

Poor moth, I can't help you.
I can only turn out the light.

Into my empty head there come
a cotton beach, a dock wherefrom

I set out, oily and nude
through mist, in chilly solitude.

There was no line, no roof or floor
to tell the water from the air.

Night fog thick as terry cloth
closed me in its fuzzy growth.

I hung the bathrobe on two pegs
I took the lake between my legs.

Invaded and invader, I 
went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame.
in their green zone they sang my name

And in rhythm of the swim
I hummed a two-four time slow hymn.

I hummed “Abide With Me.” The beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, trailing from my mouth.

My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea
in which I sang “Abide With Me.”

Home for a visit, you brought me
a circle of hammered brass
reworked from an engine part
into this curio
to be struck with a wad of cotton
pasted onto a stick.
Third World ingenuity
you said, reminds you
of Yankee thrift.

The tone of this gong 
is gentle, haunting, but
hard struck three times
can call out as far 
as the back fields
to say Supper
or, drummed darkly,
Blood everywhere!
Come quick.

When barely touched it imitates
the deep nicker the mare makes
swiveling her neck
watching the foal swim
out of her body.
She speaks to it even as
she pushes the hindlegs clear.
Come to me is her message
as they curl to reach each other.

Now that you are
back on the border
numbering the lucky ones 
whose visas let them
leave everything behind
except nightmares, I hang
the gong on my doorpost.
Some days I 
barely touch it.

When his boat snapped loose
from its moorings, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
Between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

First of all do you remember the way a bear goes through
a cabin when nobody is home? He goes through
the front door. I mean he really goes through it. Then
he takes the cupboard off the wall and eats a can of lard.

He eats all the apples, limes, dates, bottled decaffeinated
coffee, and 35 pounds of granola. The asparagus soup cans
fall the floor. Yum! He chomps up Norwegian crackers,
stashed for the winter. And the bouillon, salt, pepper,
paprika, garlic, onions, potatoes.

                                                 He rips the Green Tara 
poster from the wall. Tries the Coleman Mustard. Spills
the ink, tracks in the flour. Goes up stairs and takes
a shit. Rips open the water bed, eats the incense and
drinks the perfume. Knocks over the Japanese tansu
and the Persian miniature of a man on horseback watching
a woman bathing.

                          Knocks Shelter, Whole Earth Catalogue,
Planet Drum, Northern Mists, Truck Tracks,and
Women’s Sports into the oozing water bed mess.

                                                                           He goes
down stairs and out the back wall. He keeps on going 
for a long way and finds a good cave to sleep it all off.
Luckily he ate the whole medicine cabinet, including stash
Of LSD, Peyote, Psilocybin, Amanita, Benzedrine, Valium
And aspirin.

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east 
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new—
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce 
“Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence.
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for: wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation—marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these—for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutered frowsty barn is worth
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Suspended lion face
Spilling at the centre
Of an unfurnished sky
How still you stand,
And how unaided
Single stalkless flower
You pour unrecompensed.

The eye sees you
Simplified by distance
Into an origin.
Your petalled head of flames
Continuously exploding.
Heat is the echo of your
Gold.

Coined there among
Lonely horizontals
You exist openly.
Our needs hourly
Climb and return like angels.
Unclosing like a hand,
You give for ever.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, No, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down avenues.

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of
     Time.
Luckily for us.

We are sorry to inform you
the item you ordered 
is no longer being produced.
It has not gone out of style
nor have people lost interest in it.
In fact, it has become
one of our most desired products.
Its popularity is still growing.
Orders for it come in 
at an ever increasing rate.
However, a top-level decision
has caused this product
to be discontinued forever.

Instead of the item you ordered
we are sending you something else.
It is not the same thing,
nor is it a reasonable facsimile.
It is what we have in stock
the very best we can offer.








If you are not happy 
with this substitution
let us know as soon as possible.
                       As you can imagine
we already have quite an accumulation
of letters such as the one
you may or may not write.
To be totally fair
we respond to these complaints
as they come in.
Yours will be filed accordingly,
answered in its turn.

Welcome to you
who have managed to get here.
It’s been a terrible trip;
you should be happy you have survived it.
Statistics prove that not many do.
You would like a bath, a hot meal, 
a good night’s sleep. Some of you
need medical attention.
None of this is available.
These things have always been
in short supply; now
they are impossible to obtain.

                           This is not
a temporary situation;
it is permanent.
Our condolences on your disappointment.
It is not our responsibility
everything you have heard about this place
is false. It is not our fault
you have been deceived,
ruined your health getting here.
For reasons beyond our control
there is no vehicle out.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
And this hedgerow, that hides so large a part
Of the far sky-line from my view. Sitting and gazing
I fashion in my mind what lie beyond—
Unearthly silences, and endless space,
And very deepest quiet; until almost
My heart becomes afraid. And when I hear
The wind come blustering among the trees
I set that voice against this infinite silence:
And then I call the mind Eternity,
The ages that are dead, and the living present
And all the noise of it. And thus it is
In that immensity my thought is drowned:
And sweet to me the foundering in that sea.

Don’t worry about what the world wants from you, worry about what makes you come more alive. Because what the world needs are people who are more alive. Your real job is to increase the color and zest of your life.

From "The Seeker's Guide"

If you drew a long line and put modern cynicism at the start and Beginner’s Mind at the end, you’d have a map for the contemporary spiritual pilgrim. Somehow our culture has evolved to the point where pessimism has become synonymous with intelligence, and where an overload of information is mistaken for knowledge.

If we bypass our humanness, each path leads back to the same question: What are we hiding from in ourselves and in each other?
Rumi called this the “Open Secret.” The veils we wear so we won’t see our foolishness, our pain, our tenderness. We hide from the secret fact of our very humanness. “The full catastrophe” as Nikos Kazatzakis had Zorba the Greek call it. 

From "The Seeker's Guide"

I am talking about the little ways in which we deceive ourselves on the spiritual path—the ways that allow us to read about simplicity and freedom as we become more complicated and attached; the ways that let us talk about being “free of ego”, while feeling really special saying it.

From "The Seeker's Guide"

1—choice based
2—unavoidable
3—reactive, how we react to 1 & 2
4—Time stress—how does our perception of time and the reality of time frequently differ
Greet our reactions as messengers. Messages from reality.

It’s better to view the ego as a vehicle given to us to navigate life’s journey, rather than something to be annihilated on the one hand or exalted on the other. The best way to deal with ego is to get to know it well enough to understand when it is serving you and when it is leading you astray.

Paraphrased from "The Seeker's Guide"

Abraham Maslow said that the fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing. Elizabeth Lesser takes this idea further, “How much do we want to know if knowing pulls us out of the safety zone? How much responsibility for our own discontent would we be willing to take? Are we ready to stop projecting our lack of fulfillment onto other people and take our lives into our own hands?”

From "The Seeker's Guide"

Take responsibility but give up control.

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forgot or refuse to go 
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

To speak of sorrow
Works upon it
              moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul’s hall—
out in the light it 
shows clear, whether
shrunken or known as
a giant wrath—
               Discrete
at least, where before

its great shadow joined
the walls and roof and seemed
to uphold the hall like a beam.

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems each 
summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.



A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet 
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

I know this happiness
is provisional:

               the looming presences—
                great suffering, great fear—

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
                                   This mystery.

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

Lord, not you
it is I who am absent.
At first 
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone 
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away—and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now 
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river’s purling and passing.
Not for one second 
Will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn. Not you.
It is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadows,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain’s heart
the sapphire I know is there?

Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star 
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly 
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn’t
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.

What is this joy? That no animal
falters but knows what it must do?
That a snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it 
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.

I like to find
what’s not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hidden

in white pulp: the bones of squid
which I pull out and lay 
blade by blade on the draining board—

       tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce
       the heart, but fragile, substance
       belying design.               Or a fruit, mamey,

Cased in rough brown peel, the flesh
rose-amber, and the seed:
the seed a stone of wood, carved and

polished, walnut-colored, formed
like a brazilnut, but large,
large enough to fill
the hungry palm of a hand.

I like the juicy stem or grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow
in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E.P. “It looks like dying”—Williams: “I can’t
describe to you what has been

happening to me”—
H.D. “unable to speak.”
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can’t reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road 
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don’t 
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea…

All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet 
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving 
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
                  nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled my voice
                                into the ring of the dance.

Brilliant, this day—a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green—
whether it’s ferns or lichen or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes—
greener than ever before.
                                        And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for blessing,
a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.

Brilliant, this day—a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green—
whether it’s ferns or lichen or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes—
greener than ever before.
                                        And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for blessing,
a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.

When I opened the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
                My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversations had ended
just before you arrived.
                                    I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures.
I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.

In this dark I rest,
unready for the light which dawns
day after day,
eager to be shared.
Black silk, shelter me.
I need
more of the night before I open
eyes and heart 
to illumination. I must still
grow in the dark like a root
not ready, not ready at all.

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That’s why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit 
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.
                                       We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again
but, knowing no better.
It’s toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
a wall between us and God. Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable—but reason
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell
reflecting our own faces. God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t
Quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in—as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.

My brother comes home from work
And climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face his life,

And that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I 
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt,
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers
calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds,
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say. You can have it.

Len's Tool and Dye, 1950

In the early morning before the shop
opens, men standing out in the yard
on pine planks over the umber mud,
the oil drum, squat, brooding, brimmed
with metal scraps, three-armed crosses,
silver shavings whitened with milky oil,
drill bits bitten off. The light diamonds
last night’s rain, inside a buzzer purrs.
The overhead door stammers upward
to revel the scene of our day.
                                              We sit
for lunch on crates before the open door.
Bobeck, the boss’s nephew, squats to hug
the overflowing drum, gasps and lifts. Rain
comes down in sheets staining his gun-metal
covert suit. A stake truck sloshes off
as the sun returns through a low sky.
By four the office help has driven off. We
sweep, wash up, punch out, collect outside
for a final smoke. The great door crashes 
down at last.
                    In the darkness the scents
of mint, apples, aster. In the darkness
this could be a Carthaginian outpost sent
to guard the waters of the West, those mounds
could be elephants at rest, the acrid half light
the haze of stars striking armor if stars were out.
On the galvanized tin roof the tunes of sudden rain.
The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.

We are all in this together, just bozos on the bus.

You can call it wisdom, or sanity, or health, or enlightenment. I use the word God as a shortcut. I am comfortable with the word God because I don’t have the foggiest idea what it means.

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free—
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin’s gone pale, your brain is shedding cells,
you question every tenet you set down,
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.

I want—my want. I love—my love. I’ll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what’s here to never go away.
I’ll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast….

Your heart’s in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You’d sworn no one knew you more than you.

How many people thought you’d never change?
But here you have. It’s beautiful. It’s strange.

This afternoon was the color of water falling through
    Sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square,
     Open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavor to balance myself
Upon a broken world.

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback
(if such were possible!),
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with the muscle of a seal
in his long tub,

vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale—
more cut off from words than a seal.

This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”
Porcellian ‘29
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig—
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.





In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.) 

After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds 
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.  

The wind, one brilliant day, called
To my soul with an odor of jasmine.

“In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

“I have no roses; all the flowers
In my garden are dead.”

“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals
And the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt–marvellous error!–
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

   Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt–marvellous error!–
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

   Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt–marvellous error!–
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

   Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt–marvellous error!–
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

     The train moves through the Guadarrama
one night on the way to Madrid.
The moon and the fog create
high up a rainbow.
Oh April moon, so calm,
driving up the white clouds!

     



The mother holds her boy
sleeping on her lap.
The boy sleeps, and nevertheless
sees the green fields outside,
and trees lit up by sun,
and the golden butterflies.

     The mother, her forehead dark
between a day gone and a day to come,
sees a fire nearly out
and an oven with spiders.

     There’s a traveler mad with grief,
no doubt seeing odd things;
he talks to himself, and when he looks
wipes us out with his look.

     I remember fields under snow,
and pine trees of other mountains.

     And you, Lord, through whom we all
have eyes, and who sees souls,
tell us if we all one 
day will see your face.

The pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness...I'd like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word "happiness" and to replace it with the word "wholeness". Ask yourself "is this contributing to my wholeness?" and if you're having a bad day, it is.

Seen fleetingly, from a train:
a foggy evening, strands of smoke
hanging immobile over fields,
the humid blackness of earth, the sun
almost set—against its fading shield,
far away, two dots: women in dark wraps
coming back from church perhaps, perhaps
one tells something to another, some common story,
of sinful lives perhaps—her words
distinct and simple but out of them
one could create everything
again. Keep it in memory, forever:
the sun, ploughed earth, women,
love, evening, those few words
good for the beginning, keep it all—
perhaps tomorrow we will be
somewhere else, altogether.

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional 
Thing for moths or why 
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would 
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself I would rather have
half the happiness and twice 
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

Everyday
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war, 
the end of the world.

It helps
keep my mind off things.

The emergent science of ecology is easily summed up: Everything is connected. But interconnection is anathema to a consumer notion of the world, where each of us is useful precisely to the degree that we consider ourselves the center of everything.

On the afternoon talk shows of America
the guests have suffered life’s sorrows 
long enough. All they require now
is the opportunity for closure,
to put the whole thing behind them
and get on with their lives. That their lives,
in fact, are getting on with them even
as they announce their requirement
is written on the faces of the younger ones
wrinkling their brows, and the skin
of their elders collecting just under their
set chins. It’s not easy to escape the past,
but who wouldn’t want to live in a future
where the worst has already happened
and Americans can finally relax after daring 
to demand a different way? For the rest of us,
the future, barring variations, turns out
to be not so different from the present
where we have always lived—the same 
struggle of wishes and losses, and hope,
that old lieutenant, picking us up
every so often to dust us off and adjust
our helmets. Adjustment, for that matter,
may be the one lesson hope has to give,
serving us best when we begin to find
what we didn’t know we wanted in what
the future brings. Nobody would have asked
for the ice storm that takes down trees
and knocks the power out, leaving nothing
but two buckets of snow melting
on the wood stove and candlelight so weak,
the old man sitting at the kitchen table
can hardly see to play cards. Yet how else
but by the old woman’s laughter 
when he mistakes a jack for a queen
would he look at her face in the half-light as if
for the first time while the kitchen around them
and the very cards he holds in his hands
disappear? In the deep moment of his looking
and her looking back, there is no future,
only right now, all, anyway, each one of us
has ever had, and all the two of them,
sitting together in the dark among the cracked
notes of the snow thawing beside them
on the stove, right now will ever need.

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.

For every complex problem there is a simple solution.
And it is always wrong.

(for Vanessa Meredith and Samuel Wolf Gezaril)

What it must be like to be an angel
or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.

The last time we go to bed good, 
they are there, lying about darkness.

They dandle us once too often,
these friends who become our enemies.

Suddenly one day, their juniors 
are as old as we yearn to be.

They get wrinkles where it is better
smooth, odd coughs, and smells.

It is grotesque how they go on
loving us, we go on loving them.

The effrontery, barely imaginable,
of having caused us. And of how

their lives: surely
we can do better than that.

This goes on for a long time. Everything
they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

they all do it, is to die,
taking with them the last explanation,

how we came out of the wet sea
or wherever they got us from,

taking the last link
of that chain with them.

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,
to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live,
or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair,
but ask me what I am living for, in detail,
and ask me what I think is keeping me
from living fully for the thing
I want to live for.

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
BELLE ISLE, 1949 by Philip Larkin

We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I’d never seen before and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking 
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave, and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn’t dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.

The sun sets in the cold without friends
Without reproaches after all it has done for us
It goes down believing in nothing
When it is gone I hear the stream running after it
It has brought its flute it is a long way

Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet, I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for humans invented themselves as well.

The voice–no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not
        Embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

She had always loved to read, even
in childhood during the Confederate War,
and built the habit later of staying up
by the oil lamp near the fireplace after
husband and children slept, the scrub-work done.
She fed the addiction in the hard years
of Reconstruction and even after
her husband died and she was forced
to provide and be sole foreman of the place.
While her only son fought in France
it was this second life, by the open window
in warm months when the pines on the hill
seemed to talk to the creek, or katydids
lined-out their hymns in the trees beyond the bar,
or by the familiar of fire in winter,
that sustained her. She and her daughters
later forgot the time, the exact date,
if there was such a day, she made her decision.
But after the children could cook
and garden and milk and bring in a little
by housecleaning for the rich in Flat Rock,
and the son returned from overseas
wounded but still able and married a war widow,
and when she had found just the right chair,
a rocker joined by a man over on Willow
from rubbed hickory, with cane seat and back,
and arms wide enough to rest her everlasting cup
of coffee on, or a heavy book,
she knew she had come to her place and would stay.
And from that day, if it was one time and not 
a gradual recognition, she never crossed a threshold
or ventured from that special seat of rightness,
of presence and pleasure, except to be helped to bed
in the hours before dawn for a little nap.
That chair—every Christmas someone gave her a bright
cushion to break in—was the site on which she bathed 
in a warm river of books and black coffee,
varieties of candy and cakes kept in a low cupboard
at hand. The cats passed through her lap and legs
and through the rungs of her seat. The tons
of firewood came in cold and left as light, smoke, ash.
She rode that upright cradle to sleep
and through many long visits with tiers of family,
kissing the babies like different kinds of fruit.
Always hiding the clay pipe in her cabinet
when company appeared. She chaired decisions
to keep the land and refused welfare.
On that creaking throne she ruled a tiny kingdom
through war, death of kin. Even on the night she did
stop breathing, near a hundred, no one knew
exactly when, but found the lamp still on,
the romance open to a new chapter
and the sun just appearing at her elbow.

Only calmness will reassure
the bees to let you rob their hoard.
Any sweat of fear provokes them.
Approach with confidence, and from
the side, not shading their entrance.
And hush smoke gently from the spout
of the pot of rags, for sparks will
anger them. If you go near bees
every day they will know you.
And never jerk or turn so quick 
you excite them. If weeds are trimmed
around the hive they have access
and feel free. When they taste your smoke
they fill themselves with honey and 
are laden and lazy as you 
lift the lid to let in daylight.
No bee full of sweetness wants to 
sting. Resist greed. With the top off
you touch the fat gold frames, each cell
a hex perfect as a snowflake,
a sealed relic of sun and time
and roots of many acres fixed
in crystal-tight arrays, in rows
and lattices of sweeter latin
from scattered prose of meadow, woods.

The line through the hold in the dank
vestibule ceiling ended in
a powerful knot worn slick, swinging
in the breeze from those passing. Half
an hour before service Uncle
Allen pulled the call to worship,
hauling down the rope like the starting
cord of a motor, and the tower
answered and answered, fading
as the clapper lolled aside. I watched
him before Sunday school heave on
the line as on a wellrope. And
the wheel creaked up there as heavy
buckets emptied out their startle 
and spread a cold splash to farthest
coves and hollows, then sucked the rope
back into the loft, leaving just
the knot within reach, trembling
with its high connections.

Moving & delicate
                           we saw you
that time, fragile as a raindrop
                                                 you seemed then
shining & vulnerable,     in colors
we had not known to be yours,
                                                  rare, jewel-like,
but more alive than a jewel,
                                          grained & printed,
scratched by the finger-nails of the living,
                                                               a thousand
ways of life, millions, even,
                                              with that first
lifting of man’s foot,         heavy on
the surface of the stony moon-rock     we saw you
for the first time, earth, our earth, young,
fresh, bestowed on us as new,     newest of
all possible new stars,        even knowing you
stained, soiled & trampled
                                        by our filth,
all of it transmuted somehow into living sapphire.
emerald breathing,       topaz, carnelian      alight with
fire
             O small bell,      lit with living,
swinging into danger—
                                      where is our tenderness
enough to care for you?

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells 
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

You see I want a lot
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive that don’t seem to care.
casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet, it’s not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there

It hovers in dark corners
         before the lights are turned on,
          it shakes sleep from its eyes
                and drops from mushroom gills,
                     it explodes in the starry heads 
                of dandelions turned sages,
                                      it sticks to the wings of green angels
                                 that sail from the tops of maples.

          It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
                       it lives in each earthworm segment
                                                       surviving cruelty,
              it is the motion that runs
                            from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
                                         it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
                                       of the child that has just been born.

                                                  It is the singular gift
      we cannot destroy in ourselves,
      the argument that refutes death,
        the genius that invents the future,
                                                all we know of God.

            It is the serum which makes us swear
                                               not to betray one another;
   it is this poem, trying to speak.

When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovely planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.

I never knew that by August
the birds are practically silent,
only a twitter here and there.
Now I notice. Last spring
their noisiness taught me the difference
between screamers and whistlers and cooers
and O, the coloraturas.
I have already mastered
the subtlest pitches in our cat’s 
elegant Chinese. As the river
turns muddier before my eyes,
its sighs and little smacks
grow louder. Like a spy,
I pick up things indiscriminately:
the long approach of a truck,
car doors slammed in the dark,
the night life of animals—shrieks and hisses,
sex and plunder in the garage.
Tonight the crickets spread static
across the air, a continuous rope
of sound extended to me,
the perfect listener.

Perhaps it’s my friendship with Dick,
who watches and listens from his wheelchair
but cannot speak, has never spoken,
that makes me aware of the daily
unintrusive presences
of other mute watchers and listeners.
Not the household animals
with their quick bodies—they have cry
and gesture as a kind of language—
but rooted lives, like trees,
our speechless ancestors,
which line the streets and see me,
see all of us. By August
they’re dark with memories of us.
And the flowers in the garden—
aren’t they like our children were:
tulips and roses all ears,
asters wide-open eyes?
I don’t think the sun bothers
with us; it is too full
of its own radiance. But the moon,
that silent all-night cruiser,
wants to connect with us noisy breathers
and lets itself into the house
to keep us awake. The other day,
talking to someone else 
and forgetting Dick was in the room,
I suddenly heard him laugh.
What did I say, Dick? You’re like the moon, 
an archive of utterance not your own.
But when I walk over to you,
you turn into the sun,
on fire with some news
of your own life. Your fingers search
the few, poor catchall words
you have, to let me glimpse
the white heat trapped inside you.

The laughter of women sets fire
to the Halls of Injustice
and the false evidence burns
to a beautiful white lightness

It rattles the Chambers of Congress 
and forces the windows wide open
so the fatuous speeches can fly out

The laughter of women wipes the mist
from the spectacles of the old;
it infects them with a happy flu
and they laugh as if they were young again

Prisoners held in underground cells
imagine that they see daylight
when they remember the laughter of women

It runs across water that divides,
and reconciles two unfriendly shores
like flares that signal the news to each other

What a language it is, the laughter of women,
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

Like every kingdom,
the kingdom of birds 
has its multitude of the poor,
the urban, public poor
whose droppings whiten
shingles and sidewalks,

who pick and pick
(but rarely choose)
whatever meets their beaks:
the daily litter
in priceless Italian cities,
and here, around City Hall—
always underfoot,
offending fastidious people
with places to go.

No one remembers how it happened,
their decline, the near-
abandonment of flight,
the querulous murmurs,
the garbage-filled crops.
Once they were elegant, carefree;
they called to each other in rich, deep voices,
and we called them doves
and welcomed them to our gardens.

mm

The first woman who ever wept
was appalled at what stung
her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
Saltwater, seawater.
How was it possible?
Hadn’t she and the man
spent many days moving
upland to where the grass 
flourished, where the stream
quenched their thirst with sweet water?
How could she have carried these sea drops
as if they were precious seeds;
where could she have stowed them?
She looked at the watchful gazelles
and the heavy-lidded frogs;
she looked at glass-eyed birds
and nervous, black-eyed mice.
None of them wept, not even the fish
that dripped in her hands when she caught them.
Not even the man. Only she
carried the sea inside her body.

A husband. A wife. Three children. Last year they did not exist,
today the parents are middle-aged, one of the daughters grown. I 
live with them in their summer house by the sea. I live with them, 
but they can’t see me sharing their walks on the beach, their dinner
preparations in the kitchen. I am in pain because I know what they
don’t, that one of them has snipped the interlocking threads of their
lives and now there is no end to the slow unraveling. If I am a ghost
they look through, I am also a Greek chorus, hand clapped to
mouth in fear, knowing their best intentions will go wrong.
“Don’t,” I want to shout, but I am inaudible to them; beach towels
over their shoulders, wooden spoon in hand, they keep pulling at 
the threads. When nothing is left they disappear. Closing the book I
feel abandoned. I have lost them, my dear friends. I want to write
them, wish them well, assure each one of my affection. If only they
would have let me say good-bye.

“I will take care of you,” the girl said to her brother, who had
been turned into a deer. She put her golden garter around his
neck and made him a bed of leaves and moss.
--from an old tale
By Lisel Mueller

Enchanted is what they were
in the old stories, or if not that,
they were guides and rescuers of the lost,
the lonely, needy young men and women
in the forest we call the world.
That was back in a time
when we all had a common language.

Then something happened. Then the earth
became a place to trample and plunder.
Betrayed, they fled to the tallest trees,
the deepest burrows. The common language
became extinct. All we heard from them
were shrieks and growls and wails and whistles,
nothing we could understand.

Now they are coming back to us,
the latest homeless, driven by hunger.
I read that in the parks of Hong Kong
the squatter monkeys have learned to open
soft drink bottles and pop-top cans.
One monkey climbed an apartment building 
and entered a third-floor bedroom.
He hovered over the baby’s crib
like a curious older brother.
Here in Illinois
the gulls swarm over the parking lots
miles from the inland sea,
and the Canada geese grow fat
on greasy leftover lunches
in the fastidious, landscaped ponds
of suburban corporations.
Their seasonal clocks have stopped.
They summer, they winter. Rarer now
is the long, black elegant V
in the emptying sky. It still touches us,
though we do not remember why.
But it’s the silent deer who come 
and eat each night from our garden,
as if they had been invited.
They pick the tomatoes and tender beans,
the succulent day-lily blossoms
and dewy geranium heads.
When you labored all spring,
planting our food and flowers, 
you did not expect to feed
an advancing population
of the displaced. They come,
like refugees everywhere,
defying guns and fences
and risking death on the road
to reach us, their dispossessors,
who have become their last chance.
Shall we accept them again?
Shall we fit them with precious collars?
They scatter their tracks around the house,
closer and closer to the door,
like stray dogs circling their chosen home.

Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard’s woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pope
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept 
in an alcove next to the man 
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name
weeping in Master’s bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrongheaded angel,
or Mary’s friend. I might have been you.
This poem is endless, 
the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah’s Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who—but for endless ifs—
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.

If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
the silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound 
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun 
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn’t a shudder
too high for us to hear.

What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.

Telephone poles relax their spines;
sidewalks go under. The nightly groans
of aging porches are put to sleep.
Mercy sponges the lips of stairs.

While we talk in the old concepts—
time that was, and things that are—
snow has leveled the stumps of the past
and the earth has a new language.

It is like the scene in which the girl
moves toward the hero
who has not yet said, “Come here.”

Come here, then. Every ditch
has been exalted. We are covered with stars.
Feel how light they are, our lives.

For months, numbness
in the face of broadcasts;
I stick to my resolution
not to bleed
when my blood helps no one.

For months, I accept
my smooth skin,
my gratuitous life as my due;
then suddenly, a crack—
the truth seeps through like acid,
a child without eyes to weep with
weeps for me, and I bleed
as if I were still human.

For Linda Nemec Foster

1

Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak

2

We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us



and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else

and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees

3

Because the story of our life
becomes our life

because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently

and none of us tells it 
the same way twice

because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them

and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and

The self steps out of the circle;
It stops wanting to be
the farmer, the wife, and the child.

It stops trying to please
by learning everyone’s dialect;
it finds it can live, after all,
in a world strangers.

It sends itself fewer flowers;
it stops preserving its tears in amber.

How splendidly arrogant it was
when it believed the gold-filled tomb
of language awaited its raids!
Now it frequents the junkyards,
knowing all words are secondhand.

It has not chosen poverty,
this new frugality.
It did not want to fall out of love
with itself. Young,
it celebrated itself
and richly sang itself,
seeing only itself
in the mirror of the world.

It cannot return. It assumes
its place in a universe of stars
that do not see it. Even the dead
no longer need it to be at peace.
Its function is to applaud.

Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.

My life is running away with me;
the two of us are in cahoots.
I hold still while it paints dark circles under my eyes,
streaks my hair gray, stuffs pillows
under my dress. In each new room
the mirror reassures me
I’ll not be recognized.
I’m learning to travel light,
like the juice in the power line.
My baggage, swallowed by memory,
weighs almost nothing. No one suspects
its value. When they knock on my door,
badges flashing, I open up:
I don’t match their description.
“Wrong room,” they say, and apologize.
My life in the corner winks
and wipes off my fingerprints.

All night the knot in the shoelace
waits for its liberation,
and the match on the table packs its head
with anticipation of light.
The faucet sweats out a bead of water,
which gathers strength for the free fall,
while the lettuce in the refrigerator
succumbs to its brown killer.
And in the novel I put down
before I fall asleep,
the paneled walls of a room
are condemned to stand and wait
for tomorrow, when I’ll get to the page
where the prisoner finds the secret door
and steps into air and the scent of lilacs.

We bring our hands together
in applause, that absurd noise,
when we want to be silent. We might as well
be banging pots and pans,
it is that jarring, a violation
of the music we’ve listened to
without moving, almost holding our breath.
The pianist in his blindingly
white summer jacket bows and disappears and returns
and bows again. We keep up 
the clatter, so cacophonous
that it should signal revenge 
instead of the gratitude we feel
for the two hours we’ve spent 
out of our bodies and away
from our guardian selves
in the nowhere where the enchanted live.

I saw two towering birds cleaving the air
And thought they were Paolo and Francesca
Leading the lost, whose wings like silver billows
Rippled the azure sky from shore to shore,
They were so many. The nightmare god was gone
Who roofed their pain, the ghastly glen lay open,
The hissing lake was still, the fiends were fled,
And only some few headless, footless mists
Crawled out and in the iron-hearted caves.
Like light’s unearthly eyes the lost looked down,
And heaven was filled and moving. Every height
On earth was thronged and all that lived stared upward.
I thought, This is the reconciliation,
This is the day after the Last Day,
The lost world lies dreaming within its coils,
Grass grows upon the surly sides of Hell,
Time has caught time and holds it fast for ever.
And then I thought, Where is the knife, the butcher,
The victim? Are they all here in their places?
Hid in this harmony? But there was no answer.

With all its many risks, this life endures
No more than wind-blown bubbles in a stream.
How marvelous to breathe in and out again,
To fall asleep and then awake refreshed

At the end of his life:

Do you know what astonished me most in the world? The inability of force to create
anything. In the long run, the sword is always beaten by spirit.

Not slowly wrought, nor treasured for their form
In heaven, but by the blind self of the storm
Spun off, each driven individual
Perfected in the moment of his fall.

(Describing how poetry appeared in his life as a calling, an imperative)

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, not 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 plantations,
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,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to
      pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs
      or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept.
the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough
to contain happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner 
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy 
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
                                              I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Negres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness 

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.

I am the rain coming from the dew
that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I call forth tears, the aroma of holy work.
I am the yearning for good.

One day I saw with the eyes of my eternity
in bliss and without effort, a stone.
This stone was like a great mountain
and was of assorted colors.
It tasted sweet, like heavenly herbs.
I asked the sweet stone: Who are you?
It replied: “I am Jesus.”

You do not have to be good.
you do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
               love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers 
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little, 
as you left their voices behind,
The stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its 
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime 
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able 
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

That pretty little beast, a poem,
     has a mind of its own.
Sometimes I want it to crave apples
     but it wants red meat.
Sometimes I want to walk peacefully 
      on the shore
and it wants to take off all its clothes
      and dive in.

Sometimes I want to use small words
      and make them important
and it starts shouting the dictionary,
      the opportunities.

Sometimes I want to sum up and give thanks,
      putting things in order
and it starts dancing around the room
      on its four furry legs, laughing
      and calling me outrageous.

But sometimes, when I’m thinking about you,
      and no doubt smiling,
it sits down quietly, one paw under its chin,
      and just listens.

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.

I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of 
praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of the dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
      To be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the 
      mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
       in allegiance with gravity
          while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
      never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
       scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
      who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
       “ Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
     and bow their heads.

May I never not be frisky,
May I never not be risqué.

May my ashes, when you have them, friend,
and give them to the ocean,

leap in the froth of the waves,
still loving movement,

still ready, beyond all else,
to dance for the world.

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a 
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

“As long as we are able to
be extravagant we will be
hugely and damply
extravagant. Then we will drop
foil by foil to the ground. This
is our unalterable task, and we do it
joyfully.”

And they went on. “Listen,
the heart-shackles are not, as you think,
death, illness, pain,
unrequited hope and loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,
selfishness.”

Their fragrance all the while rising
from their blind bodies, making me
spin with joy.

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
Oh what is that beautiful thing
That just happened?

Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even,
while it calls the earth its home, the soul.
So the merciful, noisy machine

stands in our house working away in its
lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel
before the fire, stirring with a 

stick of iron, letting the logs
lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room,
are in your usual position, leaning on your

right shoulder which aches 
all day.  You are breathing
patiently; it is a

beautiful sound. It is
your life, which is so close
to my own that I would not know

where to drop the knife of
separation. And what does this have to do
with love, except

everything? Now the fire rises
and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red
roses of flame. Then it settles

to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds
as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift:
our purest, sweet necessity: the air.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened 
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

I looked up and there it was 
among the green branches of the pitchpines—

thick bird,
a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back—

color of copper, iron, bronze—
lighting up the dark branches of the pine.

What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

When I made a little sound
it looked at me, then it looked past me.

Then it rose, the wings enormous and opulent,
and, as I said, wreathed in fire.

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone—
and how it slides again

out of blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance—
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough 
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed—
or have you too
turned from this world—

or have you too 
gone crazy
for power, 
for things?

In the fields
we let them have—
in the fields
we don’t want yet—

where thistles rise
out of the marshlands of spring, and spring open—
each bud
a settlement of riches—


a coin of reddish fire—
the finches
wait for midsummer,
for the long days,

for the brass heat,
for the seeds to begin to form in the hardening thistles,
dazzling as the teeth of mice,
but black,

filling the face of every flower.
Then they drop from the sky.
A buttery gold,
they swing on the thistles, they gather

the silvery down, they carry it
in their finchy beaks
to the edges of the fields,
to the trees,

as though their minds were on fire

with the flower of one perfect idea—
and there they build their nests
and lay their pale-blue eggs,

every year,
and every year
the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches
in the silver baskets,

and love the world.
Is it necessary to say any more?
Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields?
Have you ever been so happy in your life?

1.

There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can’t trust it
to go on shining when you’re

not there?  And there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

2.

I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the
       green pine tree:

little dazzler,
little song,
little mouthful.

3.

The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
 grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes—
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.

                   Near the fallen tree
something—a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down—tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.


4.

It pulls me
into its trap of attention.

And, when I turn again, the bear is gone.

5.

Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?

6.

Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

7.

Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

                                               One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me—and I thought:

So this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple tree?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal—a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire—
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, kingfishers, pressed against the edge of
their cage, they asked me to open the door.
Years later I wake in the night and remember how I said to them,
No, and walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

SINGAPORE
By Mary Oliver

In Singapore, in the airport,
a darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something
     in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings,
rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain
    rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and
     neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
     which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as
     hubcaps, with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop
     and fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

Once I looked inside
    the darkness
        of a shell folded like a pastry,
             and there was a fancy face—

or almost a face—
    it turned away
        and frisked up its brawny forearms
             so quickly

against the light
    and my looking in
        I scarcely had time to see it,
            gleaming

under the pure white roof
    of old calcium.
        When I set it down, it hurried
            along the tideline

of the sea,
    which was slashing along as usual,
        shouting and hissing
            toward the future,

turning its back
    with every tide on the past,
        leaving the shore littered
            every morning

with more ornaments of death—
    what a pearly rubble
        from which to choose a house
            like a white flower—
and what a rebellion
    to leap into it
        and hold on,
            connecting everything,

the past to the future—
    which is of course the miracle—
        which is the only argument there is
             against the sea.

Across the wide waters
    something comes
        floating—a slim
            and delicate

ship, filled
    with white flowers—
        and it moves
            on its miraculous muscles

as though time didn’t exist,
    as though bringing such gifts
        to the dry shore
            was a happiness

almost beyond bearing.
    And now it turns its dark eyes,
        it rearranges
            the clouds of its wings,

it trails
    an elaborate webbed foot,
        the color of charcoal.
            Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I do
    when that poppy-colored beak
        rests in my hand?
            Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:


I miss my husband’s company—
    he is so often
        in paradise.
            Of course! the path to heaven

doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
    It’s in the imagination
        with which you perceive
             this world,

and the gestures
    with which you honor it.
        Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
            white wings
touch the shore?

I’d seen 
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute 
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared 
from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.


This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them—I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

1.

Don’t bother me.
I’ve just
been born.

2.

The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.


3.

The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,

4.

Which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.

5.

One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightening—some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.

6.

But to lift the hoof?
for that you need 
an idea.

7.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,

And vanished
into the world. 

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it’s all you can do 
to keep on trudging—

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

When somewhere life
breaks like a pane of glass,
and from every direction casual
voices are bringing you the news,
you say: I should have known.
You say: I should have been aware.
That last Friday he looked
so ill, like an old mountain-climber
lost on the white trails, listening
to the ice breaking upward, under
his worn-out shoes. You say:
I heard rumors of trouble, but after all
we all have that. You say:
what could I have done? And you go
with the rest, to bury him.
That night, you turn in your bed
to watch the moon rise, and once more
see what a small coin it is
against the darkness, and how everything else
is a mystery, and you know
nothing at all except
the moonlight is beautiful—
white rivers running together
along the bare boughs of the trees—
and somewhere, for someone, life
is becoming moment by moment 
unbearable.

You think it will never happen again.
Then, one night in April,
the tribes wake trilling.
You walk down to the shore.
Your coming stills them,
but little by little the silence lifts
until song is everywhere
and your soul rises from your bones
and strides out over the water.
It is a crazy thing to do—
for no one can live like that,
floating around in the darkness
over the gauzy water.
Left on the shore your bones
Keep shouting come back!
But your soul won’t listen;
in the distance it is unfolding
like a pair of wings it is sparking
like hot wires. So,
like a good friend,
you decide to follow.
You step off the shore 
and plummet to your knees—
you slog forward to your thighs
and sink to your cheekbones—
and now you are caught
by the cold chains of the water—
you are vanishing while around you
the frogs continue to sing, driving
their music upward through your own throat,
not even noticing
you are something else.
And that’s when it happens—
you see everything
through their eyes,
their joy, their necessity;
you wear their webbed fingers;
your throat swells.
and that’s when you know
you will live whether you will or not,
one way or another,
because everything is everything else,
one long muscle.
It’s no more mysterious than that.
So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore,
the darkness coming down
called water,
called spring,
called the green leaf, called
a woman’s body
as it turns into mud and leaves,
as it beats in its cage of water,
as it turns like a lonely spindle
in the moonlight, as it says
yes.

It isn’t very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: 
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

I looked up and there it was 
among the green branches of the pitchpines—

thick bird,
a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back—

color of copper, iron, bronze—
lighting up the dark branches of the pine.

What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

When I made a little sound
it looked at me, then it looked past me.

Then it rose, the wings enormous and opulent,
and, as I said, wreathed in fire.

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone—
and how it slides again




out of blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance—
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough 
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed—
or have you too
turned from this world—

or have you too 
gone crazy
for power, 
for things?

In the fields
we let them have—
in the fields
we don’t want yet—

where thistles rise
out of the marshlands of spring, and spring open—
each bud
a settlement of riches—


a coin of reddish fire—
the finches
wait for midsummer,
for the long days,

for the brass heat,
for the seeds to begin to form in the hardening thistles,
dazzling as the teeth of mice,
but black,

filling the face of every flower.
Then they drop from the sky.
A buttery gold,
they swing on the thistles, they gather

the silvery down, they carry it
in their finchy beaks
to the edges of the fields,
to the trees,

as though their minds were on fire

with the flower of one perfect idea—
and there they build their nests
and lay their pale-blue eggs,

every year,
and every year
the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches
in the silver baskets,

and love the world.
Is it necessary to say any more?
Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields?
Have you ever been so happy in your life?

1.

There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can’t trust it
to go on shining when you’re

not there?  And there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

2.

I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the
       green pine tree:

little dazzler,
little song,
little mouthful.

3.

The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
 grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes—
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.

                   Near the fallen tree
something—a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down—tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.


4.

It pulls me
into its trap of attention.

And, when I turn again, the bear is gone.

5.

Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?

6.

Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

7.

Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

                                               One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me—and I thought:

So this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple tree?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

"Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal—a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire—
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, kingfishers, pressed against the edge of
their cage, they asked me to open the door.
Years later I wake in the night and remember how I said to them,
No, and walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a buddha with wings,
it was beautiful
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings—
five feet apart—and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys
of the snow—

and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows—
so I thought:
maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us—
as soft as feathers—
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,

not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow—
that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light—
in which we are washed and washed 
out of our bones.

In Singapore, in the airport,
a darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something
     in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings,
rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain
    rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and
     neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
     which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as
     hubcaps, with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop
     and fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

Once I looked inside
    the darkness
        of a shell folded like a pastry,
             and there was a fancy face—

or almost a face—
    it turned away
        and frisked up its brawny forearms
             so quickly

against the light
    and my looking in
        I scarcely had time to see it,
            gleaming

under the pure white roof
    of old calcium.
        When I set it down, it hurried
            along the tideline

of the sea,
    which was slashing along as usual,
        shouting and hissing
            toward the future,

turning its back
    with every tide on the past,
        leaving the shore littered
            every morning

with more ornaments of death—
    what a pearly rubble
        from which to choose a house
            like a white flower—
and what a rebellion
    to leap into it
        and hold on,
            connecting everything,

the past to the future—
    which is of course the miracle—
        which is the only argument there is
             against the sea.

Across the wide waters
    something comes
        floating—a slim
            and delicate

ship, filled
    with white flowers—
        and it moves
            on its miraculous muscles

as though time didn’t exist,
    as though bringing such gifts
        to the dry shore
            was a happiness

almost beyond bearing.
    And now it turns its dark eyes,
        it rearranges
            the clouds of its wings,

it trails
    an elaborate webbed foot,
        the color of charcoal.
            Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I do
    when that poppy-colored beak
        rests in my hand?
            Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:


I miss my husband’s company—
    he is so often
        in paradise.
            Of course! the path to heaven

doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
    It’s in the imagination
        with which you perceive
             this world,

and the gestures
    with which you honor it.
        Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
            white wings
        touch the shore?

I’d seen 
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute 
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared 
from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.


This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them—I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

1.

Don’t bother me.
I’ve just
been born.

2.

The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.


3.

The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,

4.

Which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.

5.

One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightening—some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.

6.

But to lift the hoof?
for that you need 
an idea.

7.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,

And vanished
into the world.

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it’s all you can do 
to keep on trudging—

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,


whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

When somewhere life
breaks like a pane of glass,
and from every direction casual
voices are bringing you the news,
you say: I should have known.
You say: I should have been aware.
That last Friday he looked
so ill, like an old mountain-climber
lost on the white trails, listening
to the ice breaking upward, under
his worn-out shoes. You say:
I heard rumors of trouble, but after all
we all have that. You say:
what could I have done? And you go
with the rest, to bury him.
That night, you turn in your bed
to watch the moon rise, and once more
see what a small coin it is
against the darkness, and how everything else
is a mystery, and you know
nothing at all except
the moonlight is beautiful—
white rivers running together
along the bare boughs of the trees—
and somewhere, for someone, life
is becoming moment by moment 
unbearable.

Things are
    changing; things are starting to
        spin, snap, fly off into
            the blue sleeve of the long
                 afternoon. Oh and ooh
come whistling out of the perished mouth
    of the grass, as things
turn soft, boil back
    into substance and hue. As everything,
        forgetting its own enchantment, whispers:
            I too love oblivion why not it is full
                of second chances. Now,
hiss the bright curls of the leaves. Now!
    booms the muscle of the wind.

You think it will never happen again.
Then, one night in April,
the tribes wake trilling.
You walk down to the shore.
Your coming stills them,
but little by little the silence lifts
until song is everywhere
and your soul rises from your bones
and strides out over the water.
It is a crazy thing to do—
for no one can live like that,
floating around in the darkness
over the gauzy water.
Left on the shore your bones
Keep shouting come back!
But your soul won’t listen;
in the distance it is unfolding
like a pair of wings it is sparking
like hot wires. So,
like a good friend,
you decide to follow.
You step off the shore 
and plummet to your knees—
you slog forward to your thighs
and sink to your cheekbones—
and now you are caught
by the cold chains of the water—
you are vanishing while around you
the frogs continue to sing, driving
their music upward through your own throat,
not even noticing
you are something else.
And that’s when it happens—
you see everything
through their eyes,
their joy, their necessity;
you wear their webbed fingers;
your throat swells.
and that’s when you know
you will live whether you will or not,
one way or another,
because everything is everything else,
one long muscle.
It’s no more mysterious than that.
So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore,
the darkness coming down
called water,
called spring,
called the green leaf, called
a woman’s body
as it turns into mud and leaves,
as it beats in its cage of water,
as it turns like a lonely spindle
in the moonlight, as it says
yes.

It isn’t very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: 
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!


Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

Over the local stations, one by one,
Announcers list disasters like dark poems
That always happen in the skull of winter.  
But once again the storm has passed us by:
Lovely and moderate, the snow lies down
While shouting children hurry back to play,
And scarved and smiling citizens once more
Sweep down their easy paths of pride and welcome.

And what else might we do? Let us be truthful.
Two counties north the storm has taken lives.
Two counties north, to us, is far away,--
A land of trees, a wing upon a map,
A wild place never visited,--so we
Forget with ease each far mortality.

Peacefully from our frozen yards we watch
Our children running on the mild white hills.
This is landscape that we understand,--
And till the principle of things takes root,
How shall examples move us from our calm?
I do not say that it is not a fault.
I only say, except as we have loved,
All news arrives as from a distant land.

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water—hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don’t say he’s right. Neither
do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body 
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to something, anything) perfectly.

Let us try what it is to be true to gravity,
to grace, to the given, faithful to our own voices,
to lines making the map of our furrowed tongue.
Turned toward the root of a single word, refusing
solemnity and slogans, let us honor what hides
and does not come easy to speech. The pebbles
we hold in our mouths help us to practice song,
and we sing to the sea. May the things of this world
be preserved to us, their beautiful secret
vocabularies. We are dreaming it over and new,
the language of our tribe, music we hear
we can only acknowledge. May the naming powers
be granted. Our words are feathers that fly
on our breath. Let them go in a holy direction.

Because of the menace
your father opened
like a black umbrella
and held high
over your childhood blocking the light,
your life now seems

to you exceptional
in its simplicities.
You speak of this,
throwing the window open
on a plain spring day,
dazzling
after such a winter.

It is raining on the house
of Anne Frank
and on the tourists
herded together under the shadow
of their umbrellas,
on the perfectly silent
tourists who would rather be somewhere else
but who wait here on stairs
so steep they must rise
to some occasion
high in the empty loft,
in the quaint toilet,
in the skeleton
of a kitchen
or on the map—
each of its arrows
a barb of wire—
with all the dates, the expulsions,
the forbidding shapes
of continents.
And across Amsterdam it is raining
on the Van Gogh Museum
where we will hurry next
to see how someone else
could find the pure
center of light
within the dark circle
of his demons.

From "Writing to Change the World"

My dad told me about a rule he and other soldiers followed in the Pacific during WWII. It was called the Law of 26, and it postulates that for every result you expect from an action there will be twenty-six results you do not expect.

The star exploding in the body;
The creeping thing, growing in the brain or bone;
The hectic cannibal, the obscene mouth.

The mouths along the meridian sought him.
Soft as moths, many a moon and sun,
Until one
In a pale fleeing dream caught him.

Waking, he did not know himself undone.
Nor walking, smiling, reading that the news was good.
The star exploding in his blood.

The birds have vanished down the sky,
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Climbed high, to gaze upon the sea,
Heaven and Earth, so vast, so vast,
Frost clothes all things in Autumn,
Winds waft, the broad wastes cold.
Glory, splendor; eastward flowing stream,
This world’s affairs, just waves.
White sun covered, its dying rays,
The floating clouds, no resting place.
In lofty Wu-t’ung trees nest lowly finches.
Down among the thorny brush the Phoenix perches.
All that’s left, to go home again,
Hand on my sword I sing, “The Going’s Hard.”

Once upon a time there was an error
So ridiculous so minute
No one could have paid attention to it

It couldn’t stand
To see or hear itself

It made up all sorts of nonsense
Just to prove
That it really didn’t exist



It imagined a space
To fit all its proofs in
And time to guard its proofs
And the world to witness them

All that it imagined 
Was not so ridiculous
Or so minute
But was of course in error

Was anything else possible

Everyone stands alone at the heart of this earth
Stunned by a ray of sunlight
and suddenly it is evening.

Yes, his face really is so terrible
you cannot turn away. And only
that thin sheet of glass between you,
clouding with his breath.
Behind him: the dark scribbles of trees
in the orchard, where you walked alone
just an hour ago, after the storm had passed,
watching water drip from the gnarled branches,
stepping carefully over the sodden fruit.
At any moment he could put his fist
right through the window. And on your side
you could grab hold of this 
letter opener, or even now try
very slowly to slide the revolver
out of the drawer of the desk in front of you.
But none of this will happen. And not because
you feel sorry for him, or detect
in his scarred face some helplessness
that shows in your own as compassion.
You will never know what he wanted,
what he might have done, since
this thing, of its own accord, turns away.
And because yours is a life in which
such a monster cannot figure for long,
you compose yourself, and return
to your letter about the storm, how it bent
the apple trees so low they dragged
on the ground, ruining the harvest.

I am not I.
                 I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I forget;
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk where I am not,
The one who will remain standing when I die.

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
                             
                                    And nothing 
happens! Nothing….Silence….Waves….

       --Nothing happens? Or has everything hap-
pened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

I unpetalled you, like a rose,
to see your soul,
and I didn’t see it.

                             But everything around
--horizons of lands and of seas--,
everything, out to the infinite,
was filled with a fragrance,
enormous and alive.

What I used to regard as a glory shut in my face,
was a door, opening
toward this clarity:
                        Country without a name:

Nothing can destroy it, this road
of doors, opening, one after another,
always toward reality:
                         Life without calculation!

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-
    year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting
    pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the
    grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be
    grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia,
    grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy,
    for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the
    hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses, that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

Days pass and the years vanish as we walk
sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes 
with seeing and our minds with knowing.

Let there be moments when your Presence, like
lightening illumines the darkness in which we 
walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that
the bush burns unconsumed.

And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for 
holiness and exclaim in wonder, “How filled
with awe is this place and we did not know it”.

Lying under the stars,
In the summer night,
Late, while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the Cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telescope by
And watch Deneb
Move towards the zenith.
My body is asleep. Only 
My eyes and brain are awake.
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.

Buddha took some Autumn leaves
In his hand and asked
Ananda if these were all
The red leaves there were.
Ananda answered that it
Was autumn and leaves
Were falling all about them,
More than could ever
Be numbered. So Buddha said,
“I have given you
A handful of truths. Besides
These there are many 
Thousands of other truths, more
Than can ever be numbered.”

From "Why Meditate"

No change occurs if we just let our habitual tendencies and automatic patterns of thought perpetuate and even reinforce themselves, thought after thought, day after day, year after year. But those tendencies and patterns can be challenged.
…..How could it (the mind) be subject to change without the least effort, just from wishing alone? That makes no more sense than expecting to play a Mozart Sonata by just occasionally doodling around on the piano.

From "Why Meditate"

Awareness makes it possible for us to perceive phenomena of every kind. Buddhism describes this basic quality of the mind as luminous because it illuminates both the external world through perceptions and the (internal) inner world of sensation, emotion, reasoning, memory, hope, and fear.
Although this cognitive faculty underlies every mental event it is not itself affected by any of these events. A ray of light may shine on a face disfigured by hatred or on a smiling face; it may shine on a jewel or on a garbage heap; but the light itself is neither dirty or clean. Understanding that the essential nature of consciousness is neutral shows us that it is possible to change our mental universe. We can transform the content of our thoughts and experiences. The neutral and luminous background f our consciousness provides us with the space we need to observe mental events rather than be at their mercy. We then also have the space we need to create the conditions necessary to transform these mental events.

From "Why Meditate"

We expect a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering. If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by the form of mind training called meditation.
SO, the primary goal of meditation is to transform our experience of the world.

According to Buddhism, the mind is not an entity but rather a dynamic stream of 
experiences, a succession of moments o consciousness.

Quotes from "Why Meditate"

The past no longer exists, the future hasn’t arisen yet, and the present is paradoxically both ungraspable and unchanging. It is ungraspable because it never stays still, and it is unchanging because, in the words of the physicist Erwin Shroedinger, “The present is the only thing with no end.” Cultivating mindfulness does not mean that you should not take into account the lessons of the past or not make plans for the future; rather it is a matter of living clearly in the present experience, which includes all three times.


Most of the time our mind is unstable, disorderly, and driven by whims as it bounces back and forth between hope and fear. It is self-centered, hesitant, fragmented, confused, and sometimes even absent, as well as weakened by internal contradictions and a feeling of insecurity. It rebels against any kind of training and is constantly occupied by a stream of inner chatter that generates a constant background noise we are barely aware of. Because these dysfunctional states are nothing but the product of the mind itself, it makes sense that the mind can also remedy them. That is the object of practicing (meditation).

According to Buddhist analysis, the world is a result of the coming together of an infinite number of causes and conditions that are continually changing. Just as a rainbow is formed at the precise moment the sun shines on a collection of raindrops and disappears as soon as the factors that produce it are no longer present, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no permanent, independent existence. Ultimate reality is therefore described as “empty” of independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena. Everything is relationship; nothing exists in and of itself.

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Living   in the earth-deposits   of our history

Today a backhoe divulged   out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle   amber perfect   a hundred-year-old
cure for fever   or melancholy   a tonic
for living on this earth   in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered   from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years   by the element
she had purified
it seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin   of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold   a test-tube or a pencil

She died   a famous woman   denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds   came   from the same source as her power

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in a psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is a letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan when he nervously lets himself down

into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each minute more fully grown,
more like a king, composed, farther and farther on.

Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go…

You nights of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more
     deeply to accept you,
Inconsolable sisters and, surrendering, lose
      myself in your loosened hair. How we 
       squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
To see if they have an end. Though they are really
Seasons of us, our winter…..

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
Away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Excerpt from "The Man Watching"

When we win it’s with small things,
And the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
Does not want to be bent by us.

….Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being beaten, decisively,
By constantly greater things.

It is possible I am pushing against solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I can see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief—
so this darkness makes me feel small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupils rise
without a sound….then a shape enters,
slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart, and dies.

We must not portray you in king’s robes,
you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.

Once again from the old paintboxes
we take the same gold for scepter and crown
that has disguised you through the ages.

Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
And when our hearts would simply open,
our fervent hands hide you.

If only for once it were still.
If the not quite right and the why this
could be muted, and the neighbor’s laughter,
and the static my senses make—
if all of it didn’t keep me from coming awake—

Then in one vast thousandfold thought
I could think you up to where thinking ends.

I could possess you,
even for the brevity of a smile,
to offer you
to all that lives,
in gladness.

I read it here in your very word,
in the story of the gestures
with which your hands cupped themselves
around our becoming—limiting, warm

You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be.

But before the first death came murder.
A fracture broke across the rings you’d ripened.
A screaming shattered the voices

that had just come together to speak you,
to make of you a bridge
over the chasm of everything.

And what they have stammered ever since
are fragments 
of your ancient name.

I believe in all that has never been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

I am, you anxious one.

Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can’t you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?
Hasn’t my longing ripened in you
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am that wanting:
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.

You come and go. The doors swing closed
ever more gently, almost without a shudder.
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow. For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hands to
widens from turn to turn.

Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor:
It thinks us out of our world.

Each mind fabricates itself.
We sense its limits, for we have made them.
And just when we would flee them, you come
And make of yourself an offering.

I don’t want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your gospel can be comprehended
Without looking for its source.

When I go toward you
It is with my whole life.

And God said to me, Write:

        Leave the cruelty to kings.
        Without that angel barring the way to love
        there would be no bridge for me
         into time.

And God said to me, Paint:

         Time is the canvas
         stretched by my pain:
         the wounding of woman,
         the brother’s betrayal,
         the city’s sad bacchanals,
         the madness of kings.

And God said to me, Go forth:

         For I am king of time.
         But to you I am only the shadowy one
         who knows with you your loneliness
         and sees through your eyes.

He sees through my eyes
in all ages.

The poets have scattered you.
A storm ripped through their stammering.
I want to gather you up again
in a vessel that makes you glad.

I wander in your winds
and bring back everything I find.


The blind man needed you as a cup.
The servant concealed you.
The homeless one held you out as I passed.

You see, I like to look for things.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered
         leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undamned,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong
and varied as the land.

And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock 
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.

No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.

God, give us each our own death,
The dying that proceeds
From each of our lives:

The way we loved,
The meanings we made,
Our need.

For we are only the rind and the leaf.

The great death, that each of us carries inside,
is the fruit.

Everything enfolds it.

Mind is harder to describe. It is not a “thing” we can point to as easily as we can identify the body or speech. However deeply we investigate this aspect of being, we can’t really locate any definite object that we can call mind….
At best, centuries of investigation have been able to determine the mind has no specific location, shape, color, form, or any other tangible quality we can ascribe to other basic aspects….
In fact, the more scientists scrutinize mental activity the more closely they approach the Buddhist understanding of mind as a perpetually evolving EVENT rather than a distinct entity.
…….a constantly evolving occurrence arising through the interaction of neurological habits and the unpredictable elements of immediate experience.
When we look at our mind, it’s like trying to see the back of our head without the aid of a mirror.

The Tibetan Buddhist term for mind is sem:  That which knows. Not so much an object as a capacity to recognize and reflect on our experiences. The brain is the physical support for the mind.

The mind is, in many ways, like the ocean. The “color” changes from day to day or moment to moment, reflecting the thoughts, emotions, and so on passing “overhead”, so to speak. But the mind itself, like the ocean, never changes. It’s always clean and clear, no matter what it is reflecting.

The neuronal gossip that keeps you from seeing your mind in its fullness doesn’t really change the fundamental nature of your mind. Thoughts like “I’m ugly, I’m stupid, or I’m boring are nothing more than a kind of biological mud, temporarily obscuring the brilliant qualities of Buddha nature or natural mind.

Thinking is the natural activity of the mind. Meditation is not about stopping your thoughts. It is simply a process of resting the mind in its natural state, which is open and naturally aware of thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they occur. It is like a river.
But that doesn’t mean you have to be a slave to whatever your mind produces.

Happiness cannot be found through great effort and will power
But is already there, in relaxation and letting-go.
Don’t  strain yourself, there is nothing to do.
Only our search for happiness prevents us from seeing it.
Don’t believe in the reality of good and bad experiences,
They are only rainbows.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable, you exhaust yourself in vain.
As soon as you relax this grasping, space is there
--open, inviting, and comfortable.

So, Make use of it. All is yours already.
Don’t search any further….
Nothing to do.
Nothing to force,
Nothing to want
--and everything happens by itself.

What will it do for him, to have internalized
The many slender stems of riverlets and funnels,
The blunt toes of the pine cone fallen, to have ingested
Lakes in gold slabs at dawn and the peaked branches 
Of the fir under snow? He has taken into himself
The mist of the hazel nut, the white hairs of the moth,
And the mole’s velvet snout. He remembers, by inner
Voice alone, fogs over frozen grey marshes, fine
Salt on the blunt of the cliff.

What will it mean to him to perceive things
First from within—the mushroom’s fold, the martin’s
Tongue, the spotted orange of the wallaby’s ear,
To become the object himself before he comprehends it,
Putting into perfect concept without experience
The din of the green gully in spring mosses?







And when he stretches on his bed and closes his eyes,
What patterns will appear to him naturally—the schematic
Tracings of the Vanessa butterfly in migration, tacks
And red strings marking the path of each mouse
In the field, nucleic chromosomes aligning their cylinders
In purple before their separation? The wind must settle
All that it carries behind his face and rise again
In his vision like morning.

A giant has swallowed the earth,
And when he sleeps now, o when he sleeps,
How his eyelids murmur, how we envy his dream.

When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself.

There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
Knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!

But of this I am certain:  that I’ve come this far makes me one of the lucky ones. Many people never had a chance to see the view from where I stand, and I might well have been among them. I’ve known days when the voice of depression told me that death was a better idea than trying to carry on. For a long time, I bored my doctors, but over the past fifteen years, I’ve become a “person of interest” to several kinds of specialists.
So I’m not given to waxing romantic about aging and dying. I simply know that the first is a privilege and the second is not up for negotiation.

I am the water. I am the thorn.
that catches someone’s clothing….

There’s nothing to believe.
Only when I quit believing in myself
did I come into this beauty.

Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul.
Now in this ocean of pearling currents,
I’ve lost track of which was mine.

You see I want a lot
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive that don’t seem to care.
casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet, it’s not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
      That’s not for human beings.

Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes 
       you move.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
        and frightened.

Don’t open the door to the study 
        and begin reading.

Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss
       the ground.

I imagine Nice and topless beaches,
women smoking and reading novels in the sun.
I pretend I am comfortable undressing
in front of men who go home to their wives,
in front of women who have seen
         twenty pairs of breasts today,
in front of silent ghosts who walked
          through these same doors before me,
who hoped doctors would find it soon enough,
          that surgery, pills and chemo could save them.






Today, they target my lump
with a small round sticker, a metal capsule
embedded beneath clear plastic.
I am asked to wash off my deodorant,
wrap a lead apron around my waist,
pose for the nurse, for the white walls—
one arm resting on the mammogram machine,
that “come hither” look in my eyes.
This is my first time being photographed topless.
I tell the nurse, Will I be the centerfold
or just another playmate?

My breast is pressed flat—a torpedo,
a pyramid, a triangle, a rocket on this altar;
this can’t be good for anyone.
Finally, the nurse, winded
from fumbling, smiles
says “Don’t breathe or move.”
A flash and my breast is free,
but only for a moment.

In the waiting room, I sit between magazines,
An article on Venice,
Health charts, people in white.
I pretend I am comfortable watching
Other women escorted off to a side room,
Where results are given with condolences.

I imagine leaving here
          with negative results and returned lives.
I imagine future trips to France,
           to novels I will write and days spent
beneath a blue and white sun umbrella,
waves washing against the shore like promises.

In all the directions of the universe,
there is only one truth.
When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.
What can ever be lost? What can be attained?
If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of time.
If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now 
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious denouement
to the unsurprising end—riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

Before going to bed
After a fall of snow
I look out on the field
Shining there in the moonlight
So calm, untouched and white
Snow silence fills my head
After I leave the window.

Hours later near dawn
When I look down again
The whole landscape has changed
The perfect surface gone
Criss-crossed and written on
Where the wild creatures ranged
While the moon rose and shone.

Why did my dog not bark?
Why did I hear no sound
There on the snow-locked ground
In the tumultuous dark?

How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we’ll never know
Sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.

Excerpt from Shambhala Sun--May 2014

On distraction.  It is not just a modern obsession. According to Buddhism, it is the ego’s fundamental defense mechanism. What we are actually distracting ourselves from—what we are protecting ourselves against—is the open space and full intensity of reality.
From the ego’s point of view, enlightenment is the worst possible news.

That to me is the most wonderful thing about any vital spiritual practice. It doesn’t necessarily say, stop doing that. Or if it does, it says, here’s how to stop doing that. Because you can only get so good with sheer will power. You have to look into the way things actually work to empower yourself to do better.
Here is a wonderful metaphor I sometimes use with my students. Imagine you are on a cruise ship in heavy seas. You’re the only person who’s stable, and everybody else is moving around in a crazy way. You decide to have mercy on them, and that’s pretty good, right?
But I think a better model is to imagine you’re on a cruise ship and the surface is made of ice, and you’re carrying six trays, and you’re wearing roller skates, and you’re drunk and so is everyone else.
So nobody’s the boss and the situation is unstable. There’s no fixed point. When I think of life that way, it sums up the proper level of mercy and tolerance. We really don’t know what’s going on, so our feelings of sympathy or empathy is related to our mutual lostness.
                         Everybody’s lost at once.

The children’s room glows radiantly by
The light of the pumpkins on the windowsill
That fiercely grin on sleeping boy and girl.
She stirs and mutters in her sleep, Goodbye,

Who scared herself a little in a sheet
And walked the streets with devils and dinosaurs
And bleeping green men flown from distant stars.

Our awkward, loving Frankenstein in bed
Who told his sister that it isn’t true,
That real me in real boxes never do
Haunt houses. But the King of the Dead

Has taken off his mask tonight, and twirled
His cape and vanished, and we are his
Who know beyond all doubt how real he is:
Out of his bag of sweets he plucks the world.

In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave,
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall.
Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,
Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,
A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
Their freights covered, as usual.
The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram
Slid slowly forth.
                          Hearing the milkman’s chop,
His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink,
I rose from bed, lit a cigarette,
And walked to the window. The stony street
Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand,
The street-lamp’s vigil and horse’s patience.
The winter sky’s pure capital
Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes.

Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose
Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls,
Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer.
A car coughed, starting. Morning, softly
Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair
From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,
Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.
The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,
Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet
With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,
O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of beginning
Again and again,
                          While History is unforgiven.

The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.

“Call us what you will: we are made such by love.”
We are such studs as dreams are made on, and 
Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,
Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping
All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,
Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.

Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing,
After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,
Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which
Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up and blaze?
                              For it is not the sea
Which murmurs in a shell,
And it is not only heart, at harp o’clock,
It is the dread terror of the uncontrollable
Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread
Toward Arcturus—and returning as suddenly…

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by.
Learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’erfraught heart, and bids it break.

It is best not to begin with Adam and Eve. Original Sin is 
baffling, even for the most sophisticated minds. Besides,
children are frightened of naked people and apples. Instead,
start with the talking snake. Children like to hear what animals 
have to say. Let him hiss for a while and tell his own tale.
They’ll figure him out in the end. Describe sin simply as those
acts which cause suffering and leave it at that. Steer clear of
musty confessionals. Children associate them with outhouses. 
Leave Hell out of the discussion. They’ll be able to describe it 
on their own soon enough. If they feel the need to apologize 
for some transgression, tell them that one of the offices of the
moon is to forgive. As for the priest, let him slumber a while
more.

The time of the year for the mystics.
October sky and the Cloud of Unknowing.
The routes of eternity beckoning.
Sign and enigma in the humblest of things.

Master cobbler Jakob Boehme
Sat in our kitchen all morning.
He sipped tea and warned of the quiet
To which the wise must school themselves.

The young woman paid no attention.
Hair fallen over her eyes,
Breasts loose and damp in her robe,
Stubbornly scrubbing a difficult stain.

Then the dog’s bark brought us all outdoors.
And that wasn’t just geese honking
But Dame Julian of Norwich herself discoursing
On the marvelous courtesy and homeliness of the Maker.

There was a child’s Sunday suit
Pinned to a tailor’s dummy
In a dusty store window.
The store looked closed for years.

I lost my way there once
In a Sunday kind of quiet,
Sunday kind of afternoon light
On a street of red-brick tenements.

How do you like that?
I said to no one.
How do you like that?
I said again today upon waking?

That street went on forever
And all along I could feel the pins
In my back prickling
The dark and heavy cloth.

The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.

They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me,
And then didn’t.

Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own 
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild

Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
More and more dark houses
Hushed and abandoned.

There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The thought of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.

The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn’t leave her room much.

The sun pointed to one or two 
Things that had survived
The long night intact,
The simplest things,

Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People describe as “perfect.”

Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins? A hand-mirror?
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn’t it.

Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light,
And the trees waiting for the night.

There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years.
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

With the wind gusting so wildly,
So unpredictably,
I’m willing to bet one or two ants
May have tumbled on their backs
As we sit here on the porch.

Their feet are pedaling
Imaginary bicycles.
It’s a battle of wits against
Various physical laws,
Plus Fate, plus—
So-what-else-is-new?

Wondering if anyone’s coming to their aid
Bringing cake crumbs,
Miniature editions of the Bible,
A lost thread or two
Cleverly tied end to end.

The plastic statue of the Virgin
On top of a bedroom dresser
With a blackened mirror
From a bad-dream grooming salon.

Two pebbles from the grave of a rock star,
A small, grinning wind-up monkey,
A bronze Egyptian coin
And a red movie-ticket stub.

A splotch of sunlight on the framed
Communion photograph of a boy
With the eyes of someone
Who will drown in a lake real soon.

An altar dignifying the god of chance.
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.

By Charles Simic

It’s just a boarded-up shack with a steeple
Under the blazing summer sky
On a back road seldom traveled
Where the shadows of tall trees
Graze peacefully like a row of gallows,
And crows with no carrion in sight
Caw to each other of better days.

The congregation may still be at prayer.
Farm folk from flyspecked photos
Standing in rows with their heads bowed
As if listening to your approaching steps.
So slow they are, you must be asking yourself
How come we are here one minute
And in the very next gone forever?

That’s what the leaves are telling us tonight.
Hear them frighten and be struck dumb
So that we sit up listening to nothing,
Which is always more worrisome than something.

The minutes crawl like dog fleas up our legs.
We must wait for whatever it is to identify itself
In some as-yet-unspecified way
As the trees are rushing to warn us again.

The branches beat against the house to be let in,
And then change their minds abruptly.
Think how many leaves are holding still in the woods
With no wish to add to their troubles.

With something so large closing upon us?
It makes one feel vaguely heroic
Sitting so late with no light in the house
And the night dark and starless out there.

Psst, psst, psst,
Is what the snow is saying
To the quiet woods,
With the night falling.

Something pressing,
That can’t wait,
On a path that went nowhere,
Where I found myself

Overtaken by snow flakes
With so much to confide,
The bare twigs pricked their ears—
Great God!

What did they say?
What did they say?
I went badgering
Every tree and bush.

Who are without mercy,
Who confide in trumpet flowers,
Who carry loose change in their pockets,
Who dress in black velvet, 
Who wince and fidget like bats,
Who balance their haloes on hatracks,
Who watch reruns of famine,
Who powder their noses with pollen,
Who laugh and unleash earthquakes,
Who sidle in and out of our dreams
Like magicians, like childhood friends,
Who practice their smiles like pirates,
Who exercise by walking to Zion,
Who live on the edge of doubt,
Who cause vertigo but ease migraines,
Who weep milky tears when troubled,
Whose night sweats engender the plague,
Who pinion their arms to chandeliers,
Who speak in riddles and slant rhymes,
Who love the weak and foolhardy,
Who lust for unripe persimmons,
Who scavenge the field for lost souls,
Who hover near lighthouses,
Who pray at railroad crossings,
Who supervise the study of rainbows,
Who cannot blush but try,
Who curl their hair with corkscrews,
Who honeymoon with Orion,
Who are not wise but pure,
Who behave with impious propriety,
Who hourly scour our faces with hope,
Whose own faces glow like radium,
Whom we’ve created in our own form,
Who are without mercy, seek and yearn
To return us like fossilized roses
To the wholeness of our original bloom.

If ignorance is bliss, Father said,
shouldn’t you be looking blissful?
You should check to see if you have
the right kind of ignorance. If you’re
not getting the benefits that most people
get from acting stupid, then you should
go back to what you always were—
being too smart for your own good.

I feel the vacuum, the loneliness, the silence, the dehydration of the soul as people who want desperately to save our constitution, country and planet still wander the streets without knowing how to say hi to one another.

If women ruled the world and
    we all got massages,
there would be no war.

By its own nature
    it towers above
       the tangle of rivers
Don’t say
    it’s a lot of dirt
        piled high
Without end the mist of dawn
    the evening cloud
        draw their shadows across it
From the four directions
    you can look up and see it
         green and steep and wild.

his small head heavy against my chest,
round eyes watching me in the dark,
his body a sandbag in my arms.
I longed for sleep but couldn’t bear his crying
so bore him back and forth until the sun rose
and he slept. Now the doors are open,
noon sunlight coming in,
and I can see fuchsias opening.
Now we bathe. I hold him, the soap
makes our skins glide past each other.
I lay him wet against my thighs, his head on my knees,
his feet dancing against my chest,
and I rinse him, pouring water
from my cupped hand.
No matter how I feel, he’s the same,
eyes expectant, mouth ready,
with his fat legs and arms,
his belly, his small solid back.
Last night I wanted nothing more
than to get him out of my arms.
Today he fits neatly 
along the hollow my thighs make,
and with his fragrant skin against mine
I feel brash, like a sunflower.

Don't mistake my frivolity for shallowness, and I won't mistake your seriousness for
profundity.

But for your Terror
Where would be Valour?
What is Love for
     But to stand in your way?
Taker and Giver,
For all your endeavor
You leave us with more
     Than you touch with decay!

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the
      hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go, but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter,
    the love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and
     curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not
      approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in
       the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight.

I built on the sand
And it tumbled down,
I built on a rock
And it tumbled down
Now when I build, I shall begin
With the smoke from the chimney.

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others 
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt–ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

Sometimes you look at an empty valley
       like this
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the world happened—
there was nothing and then…..

But maybe sometime you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world becoming nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?

We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear 
if we don’t watch out.

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe
on the world. Hold out your hands to it.
When mornings and evenings roll along,
watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party your life is.

At noon in the desert a panting lizard
waited for history, its elbows tense,
watching the curve of a particular road
as if something might happen.

It was looking for something farther off
than people could see, an important scene
acted in stone for little selves
at the flute end of consequences.

There was just a continent without much on it
under a sky that never cared less.
Ready for a change, the elbows waited.
The hands gripped hard on the desert.

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a post-war Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, 
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop—in 1945—
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.



When I walk
I part the air
and always 
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
Where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will 
not keep on for days at a time, it will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.

Body is a thing you have to carry
from one day into the next. Always the
same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same
skin when you look in the mirror, and the
same creaky knee when you get up from the
floor and the same wrist under the watchband.
The changes you can make are small and
costly—better to leave it as it is.

Body is a thing that you have to leave
eventually. You know that because you have
seen others do it, others who were once like you,
living inside their pile of bones and
flesh, smiling at you, loving you,
leaning in the doorway, talking to you
for hours and then one day they
are gone. No forwarding address.

Song of excess,
strength, mighty tenderness,
pliant ecstasy.
Magnificence
lovingly dancing.

I quiver as a body in rapture,
I quiver as a wing,
I am an explosion,
I overstep myself,
I am a fountain,
I have its resilience.
Excess,
a thousand excesses,
strength,
song of gushing strength.

These are gifts in me,
flowerings of abundance,
curls of light are sobbing,
a flame is foaming, its lofty ripeness
is ripening.
Oceans of glare,
rosy as the palate
of a big mouth in ecstasy

I am astonished
up to my nostrils, I snort
a snorting universe of astonishment
inundates me
I am gulping excess, I am choking with fullness,
I am impossible as reality.

My body you are an animal
whose appropriate behavior
is concentration and discipline.
An effort
of an athlete, of a saint and of a yogi.

Well trained
you may become for me
a gate
through which I will leave myself
and a gate through which I will enter myself.
A plumb line to the center of the earth
and a cosmic ship to Jupiter.

My body, you are an animal
for whom ambition is right.
Splendid possibilities
are open to us.

Lying down I lift my legs
my soul by mistake jumps into my legs.
This is not convenient for her,
besides, she must branch,
for the legs are two.

When I stand on my head
my soul sinks down to my head.
She is then in her place.

But how long can you stand on your head,
especially if you do not know
how to stand on your head.

Three days
I starve my belly 
so that it learns
to eat the sun.

I say to it: Belly,
I am ashamed of you. You must
spiritualize yourself. You must
eat the sun.

The belly keeps silent
for three days. It’s not easy
to waken in it higher aspirations.

Yet I hope for the best.
This morning, tanning myself on the beach,
I noticed that, little by little,
it begins to shine.

Must present alternatives.
Change, but on condition that nothing changes.
That is easy, impossible, difficult, worth trying.
Her eyes are, as required, now deep blue, now grey,
black, sparking, unaccountably filled with tears.
She sleeps with him as one of many, as the one and only.
She’ll bear him four children no children, one.
Naïve, but gives best advice.
Weak, but she’ll carry.
She has no head, so she’ll have a head,
reads Jaspers and women’s magazines.
Has no clue what that nut is for and will build a bridge.
Young, young as usual, always still young.
Holds in her hands a sparrow with a broken wing,
her own money for a long and distant journey,
a chopper, a poultice and a glass of vodka.
Where is she running, perhaps she’s tired.
But no, only a little, very, it’s no matter.
She either loves him or she’s just stubborn.
For better, for worse and for love of God.

In my dream
I paint like Vermeer of Delft.

I speak fluent Greek
and not just with the living.

I drive a car
which obeys me

I am gifted,
I compose epic verse.

I hear voices
as clearly as genuine saints.

My piano performances
would simply amaze you.

I fly the way prescribed,
that is, out of myself.

Falling off a roof
I know how to land softly on the lawn.

Breathing under water
is no problem.

I’m not complaining:
I managed to discover Atlantis.

It’s a pleasure always
to wake before death.

Immediately war starts
I turn over to a better side.

I exist, but don’t have to be
a child of the times.

Some years ago
I saw two suns.

And the day before yesterday a penguin.
as clearly as this.

A strange planet with its strange people.
They yield to time but don’t recognize it.
They have ways of expressing their protest.
They make pictures, like this one for instance:

At first glance, nothing special.
You see water.
You see a shore.
You see a boat sailing laboriously upstream.
You see a bridge over the water and people on the bridge.
The people are visibly quickening their step,
because a downpour has just started
lashing sharply from a dark cloud.

The point is that nothing happens next.
The cloud doesn’t change its colour or shape.
The rain neither intensifies nor stops.
The boat sails on motionless.
The people on the bridge
run just where they were a moment ago.
It’s difficult to avoid remarking here:
this isn’t by any means an innocent picture.
Here time has been stopped.
Its laws have been ignored.
It’s been denied influence on developing events.
It’s been insulted and spurned.

Thanks to a rebel,
A certain Hiroshige Utagawa
(a being which as it happens 
has long since and quite properly passed away)
time stumbled and fell.

Maybe this was a whim of no significance,
a freak covering just a pair of galaxies,
but we should perhaps add the following:



Here it’s considered proper
to regard this little picture highly,
admire it and thrill to it from age to age.

For some this isn’t enough.
They even hear the pouring rain,
they feel the cool drops on necks and shoulders,
they look at the bridge and the people
as if they saw themselves there
in the self-same never-finished run
along an endless road eternally to be travelled
and believe in their impudence
that things are really thus. 

My apologies to the accidental for calling it necessary.
However, apologies to necessity if I happen to be wrong.
Hope happiness won’t be angry if I claim it as my own.
May the dead forget they barely smoulder in my 
                                                                         remembrance.
Apologies to time for the abundance of the world missed
                                                                     every second.
Apologies to my old love for treating the new as the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, that I prick my finger.
Apologies to those calling from the abyss for a record of a
                                                                                 minuet.
Apologies to people catching trains for sleeping at dawn.
Pardon me, baited hope, for my sporadic laugh.
Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing with a spoonful of water;
and you too, hawk, unchanged in years, in that self-same
                                                                                       cage,
staring motionless, always at the self-same spot,
forgive me, even if you are stuffed.
Apologies to the hewn tree for the four table-legs.
Apologies to the big questions for small replies.
Truth don’t pay me too much attention.
Seriousness—be magnanimous.
Mystery of Being—suffer me to pluck threads from your
                                                                               train.


Soul—don’t blame me for having you but rarely.
Apologies to everyone for failing to be every him or her.
I know that while I live nothing can excuse me,
since I am my own impediment.
Speech—don’t blame me for borrowing big words
and then struggling to make them light.

An island where everything becomes clear.

Here one can stand on the ground of proofs.

The only road has its destination.

Shrubs are burdened with answers.

Here grows the tree of Proper Conjecture,
its branches eternally untangled.
The dazzlingly straight tree of Understanding
is next to a spring called Ah So That’s How It Is.

The deeper you’re in the wood, the wider grows 
the Valley of Obviousness.

Whatever the doubt, the wind blows it away.

Echo speaks uncalled
and readily solves the mysteries of the worlds.

On the right a cave where sense reclines.

On the left a lake of Deep Conviction.

Truth stirs from the bottom and lightly breaks the surface.

Unshakeable Certainty dominates the vale
and Essence of Things spreads from its head.

Despite these attractions, the island is deserted,
and the tiny footmarks seen along the shores
all point towards the sea.

As though people always went away from here
and irreversibly plunged in the deep.

In life that’s inconceivable.

Reality doesn’t vanish
the way dreams do.
No rustle, no bell
disperses it,
no cry or thump
rouses from it.

Images in dreams 
are blurred and uncertain,
open to many interpretations.
Reality denotes reality,
and that’s a greater puzzle.
Dreams have keys.
Reality opens on itself
and won’t quite shut.
It trails
school reports and stars,
it drops butterflies
and the souls* of old irons,
headless hats
and shards of clouds
resulting in a riddle
that’s insoluble.
Without us there would be no dreams.
The one, without whom there would be no reality,
is unknown
while the product of his sleeplessness
affects everyone
that wakes.

It’s not dreams that are mad,
reality is mad,
if only because of the tenacity
with which it clings
to the course of events.

In dreams our recently dead
still survives,
he even enjoys good health
and recovered youth.
Reality displays
his dead body.
Reality retreats not an inch.

The volatility of dreams
allows memory to shake them off.
Reality needn’t fear being forgotten.
It’s a tough nut.
It sits on our shoulders
lies heavily on our hearts,
bars the way.
There is no escape from her,
she accompanies each flight.
There is no stop 
on the route of our journey
where she isn’t waiting.

Common miracle:
The happening of many common miracles.

Ordinary miracle:
invisible dogs barking 
in the silence of the night.

A miracle among many:
a tiny ethereal cloud
able to cover a large heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
An alder reflected in water
moreover turned from left to right
moreover growing crown downwards
yet not reaching the bottom
though the waters are shallow.

An everday miracle:
soft gentle breezes
gusting during storms.

Any old miracle:
cows are cows.

And another like it:
just this particular orchard
from just this pip.  

Miracle without frock coat or top hat:
a scattering of white doves.

Miracle—what else would you call it:
today the sun rose at 3.14
and will set at 20.01.

Instant living.
Unrehearsed performance.
Untried-on body.
A thoughtless head.

I am ignorant of the role I perform.
All I know is it’s mine, can’t be exchanged.

What the play is about 
I must guess promptly on stage.

Poorly prepared for the honour of living
I find the imposed speed of action hard to bear.
I improvise though I loathe improvising.
At each step I trip over my ignorance.
My way of life smacks of the provincial.
My instincts are amateurish.
The stage-fright that is my excuse only humiliates me more.
Mitigating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and gestures that cannot be retracted,
stars that counted to the end,
my character like a coat I button up running—
this is the sorry outcome of such haste.

If only one could practice ahead at least one Wednesday, 
repeat a Thursday!
But now Friday’s already approaching with a script I don’t
                                                                                   know.

Is this right?—I ask
(in a rasping voice,
Since they didn’t even let me clear my throat in the wings).

You’re deluded if you think it’s only a simple exam
set in a makeshift office. No.
I stand among the stage-sets and see they’re solid.
The revolving stage’s been turning for quite some time.
Even the nebulae are switched on.
Oh, I have no doubt this is the opening night.
And whatever I’ll do
will turn for ever into what I have done.

The drop of water on my hand
is drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,

From the sky-ascending hoar on a seal’s whisker,
from broken jars in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

On my index-finger
the Caspian Sea is an open sea

and the Pacific meekly drains into the Rudawa,
the very river that sailed in a cloud over Paris

in the year seventeen-hundred-and-sixty-four
on the seventh of May at three in the morning.

There aren’t enough lips to utter
your fleeting names, Oh water!

I would need to name you in every tongue,
voicing together every single vowel

and simultaneously keep mum—for the benefit
of the lake still awaiting a name,

with no place on earth—and for
the heavenly star reflected in it.

Someone’s been drowning, someone dying has been calling
                                                                                         you.
That was long ago and happened yesterday.


You’ve dowsed homes, you’ve snatched them
like trees, snatched forests like cities.

You were present in baptismal fonts and courtesans’ baths.
in kisses, in shrouds.

Biting stones, feeding rainbows.
In the sweat and dew of pyramids and lilacs.

How light a drop of rain.
How gently the world touches me.

Wherever, whenever, whatever took place
is recorded on the waters of Babel.

That’s where one should have started: the sky.
A window without a sill, without frames or panes.
An opening, and nothing besides,
but gaping wide.

I needn’t wait for a clear night
nor crane my neck
to examine the sky.
The sky is behind me, under my hand, on my eye-lids.
The sky wraps me up tightly
and lifts me from below.

Even the highest mountains
are not nearer the sky
than deepest valleys.
At no point is there more of it
than at another.
A cloud is crushed by the sky
as ruthlessly as a grave.
A mole as sky-ascending
as a wing-flapping owl.
An object falling into an abyss
falls from the sky to sky.



Granular, fluid, rocky
fiery and airborne
expanses of sky, crumbs of sky,
gusts and snatches of sky.
The sky ever-present
even in darkness beneath the skin.

I eat sky, I defecate sky.
I am a trap inside a trap.
A dwelt-in dweller,
an embraced embrace,
a question in answer to a question.

The division into sky and earth
is not a proper way
of considering this whole.
It only allows one
to survive under a more precise address,
quicker to find,
should any one seek me.
My distinguishing marks
are wonder and despair

It’s come to pass that one sunny morning
I am sitting under a tree
on a river-bank.
It’s a trivial event
history will not record.
It’s not like wars or treaties
whose causes await scrutiny
nor memorable assassinations of tyrants.

And yet I am sitting on a river-bank, that’s a fact.
And since I am here,
I must have come from somewhere,
and earlier
I must have been around many places,
just like conquerors of kingdoms
before they set sail.


The fleeting moment also has its past,
its Friday before Saturday,
May proceeding June.
Its horizons are as real
as they are in commanders’ field-glasses.

This tree—a poplar with ancient roots.
The river is the Raba: flowing since beyond yesterday.
The path through the thickets: made not the day before.
To blow away the clouds
the wind must first have blown them here.
And though nothing significant is happening nearby,
the world is not therefore the poorer in details,
the less justified, less well defined
then when it was being conquered by nomadic people.

Silence is not confined to secret plots,
the pageant of causes to coronations.
Pebbles by-passed on the beach can be as rounded
as the anniversaries of insurrections.

The embroidery of circumstance is also twisty and thick.
The ant’s seam in the grass.
The grass sewn into the earth.
The pattern of a wave darned by a stick.

It just so happens I am and I look.
Nearby a white butterfly flutters in the air
with wings that are wholly his
and the shadow that flies over my hands
is not other, not anyone’s, but his very own.

Seeing such sights I lose my certainty
That what is important
is more important than the unimportant

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer-whale’s heart weights one hundred kilos 
but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.

The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
--three cheers for the ants. And let five o’clock come
if we’re to go on living.

We call it a grain of sand
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it it’s no different than falling on anything else
with no assurance that it’s finished falling
or that it’s falling still.


The window has a wonderful view of a lake
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake’s floor exists floorlessly
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character’s invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself
               together
for some clear “meaning”—some momentary summary?
                no one
can have poetry or dances, prayers or climaxes all day,
               the ordinary
blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the
               health sometimes,
only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long
               long tumultuous stretches;
look what that intensity did to poor great Van Gogh!;
               linger, lunge,
scrounge and be stupid, that doesn’t take much centering
                of one’s forces;
as wise Whitman said “lounge and invite the soul.” Get
                enough sleep;
and not only because (as Cocteau said) “poetry is the
                 literature of sleep”;
be a dumb bell for a few minutes at least; we don’t want
                  Sunday church bells
                  ringing constantly.

Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.

In the beginning of heaven and earth
There were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately sees the surface
The core and the surface are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.

They didn’t have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
“You look like a god sitting there.
why don’t you try writing something?”  

I learned two things
from an early riding teacher.
He held a nervous filly
in one hand and gestured
with the other, saying “Listen.
Keep one leg on one side,
the other leg on the other side,
and your mind in the middle.”

He turned and mounted.
She took two steps, then left
the ground, I thought for good.
But she came down hard, humped
her back, swallowed her neck,
and threw her rider as you’d
throw a rock. He rose, brushed
his pants and caught his breath,
and said, “See that’s the way 
to do it. When you see
they’re gonna throw you, get off.”

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
     Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,
     Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
     Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
     In a long-forgotten snow.

Translation:  Amaravali Sangha

Whatever living beings there may be,
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short, or small,

The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and those living far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease!
Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.

Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:

Radiating kindness over the entire world.
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths,
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill will

Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down,
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this mindfulness.
That is said to be the sublime abiding.

We do not see things as they are.
We see them as we are.

The cosmos is filled with precious gems.
I want to offer a handful of them to you this morning.
Each moment you are alive is a gem,
shining through and containing earth and sky,
water and clouds.

It needs you to breathe gently
for the miracles to be displayed.
Suddenly you hear the birds singing,
the pines chanting,
see the flowers blooming,
the blue sky,
the white clouds,
the smile and the marvelous look
of your beloved.

You, the richest person on Earth,
who have been going around begging for a living,
stop being the destitute child.
Come back and claim your heritage.
We should enjoy our happiness
and offer it to everyone.
Cherish this very moment.
let go of the stream of distress
and embrace life fully in your arms.

(for Yoshikazu Uehata)

Your camera
has caught it all, the lit
angle where ceiling and wall
create their corner, the flame
in the grate, the light
down the window frame
and along the hair
of the girl seated there, her face
not quite in focus—that
is as it should be, too,
for, once see, Eden
is in flight from you, and yet
you have set it down complete
with the asymmetries
of journal, cushion, cup,
all we might then have missed
in that gone moment when
we were living it.

Night, two o’clock: moonlight. The train stopped
in the middle of the plain. Distant bright points of a town
twinkle cold on the horizon.

As when someone goes into a sickness so deep
that all his former days become twinkling points, a swarm,
cold and feeble on the horizon.

The train stands perfectly still.
Two o’clock: full moonlight, few stars.

All things pass
A sunrise does not last all morning
All things pass
A cloudburst does not last all day
All things pass
Nor a sunset all night
All things pass
What always changes?

Earth...sky…thunder…
    mountain…water…
    wind…fire…lake…

These change
And if these do not last

Do man’s visions last?
Do man’s illusions?

Take things as they come

All things pass

Old fisherman spends his night beneath the western cliffs
At dawn, he boils Hsiang’s waters, burns bamboo of Ch’u.
When the mist’s burned off, and the sun’s come out, he’s gone.
The slap of the oars: the mountain waters green.
Turn and look, at heaven’s edge, he’s moving with the flow.
Above the cliffs the aimless clouds go too.

Even as a child I could
induce it at will.
I’d go to where the big rocks

stayed cold in the woods all summer,
and tea mind would come to me

like water over stones, pool to pool,
and in that way I taught myself to think.
Green teas are my favorites, especially


the basket-fired Japanese ones
that smell of baled hay.

Thank you, makers of tea.
Because of you my mind is still tonight,
transparent, a leaf in air.

Now it rides a subtle current.
Now it can finally disappear.

When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets—
He is out of his mind!

His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting—
And the need to win
Drains him of power.

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers' hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?

And you—what of your rushed and
useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note: "Gone to the fields
to be lovely. Be back when I'm through
with blooming."

Even now, unneeded and uneaten, the
camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake.
Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

Overcome any bitterness that may have come
because you were not up to the magnitude
of the pain that was entrusted to you.
Like the mother of the world,
Who carries the pain of the world in her heart,
Each one of us is part of her heart,
And therefore endowed
With a certain amount of cosmic pain

Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a buddha with wings,
it was beautiful
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings—
five feet apart—and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys
of the snow—

and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows—
so I thought:
maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us—
as soft as feathers—
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,

not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow—
that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light—
in which we are washed and washed 
out of our bones.

I honor the place in you
where the entire universe resides.
I honor the place in you
of love, of light, of truth, of peace.

I honor the place in you
where if you are in that place in you and
I am in that place in me,
there is only us.

You’re going to bed now
At the quiet end of business
With the default ingredients
Of your body, no longer inclined
To follow the example
Of molecules or to rub
Your sticks and stones together
Or bustle about at random.

You’ll slowly shrink away
From the obvious to embody
All your philosophy
By turning into a playground
Of teeter-totter, swing,
Sandbox, and monkey bars, 
Steep slide and roundabout
Play the leading and minor
Parts of all the players.

In the earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people 
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
And what people wanted to happen could
              happen—
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.

That is a road
Which some day we all travel
I had heard before,
Yet I never expected
To take it so soon myself.

Everything the Power of the World does
is done in a circle. The sky is round,
and I have heard that the earth is round
like a ball, and so are the stars.
The wind, in its greatest power, whirls.

Birds make their nests in circles,
for theirs is the same religion as ours.

The sun comes forth and goes down again
in a circle. The moon does the same,
and both are round. Even the seasons
form a great circle in their changing,
and always come back again to where they were.

The life of man is a circle from childhood to childhood,
and so it is in everything where power moves.

At least the robbers
     left this one thing behind—
moon in my window.

For ages now you’ve been
Beguiled, entranced, and fooled by appearances.
Are you aware of that? Are you?
Right this very instant, when you’re
Under the spell of mistaken perception
You’ve got to watch out.
Don’t let yourself get carried away by this fake and
      empty life.
Your mind is spinning around 
About carrying out a lot of useless projects:
It’s a waste! Give it up!
Thinking about the hundred plans you want to
      accomplish,
With never enough time to finish them,
Just weighs down your mind.
You’re completely distracted
By all these projects, which never come to an end,
But keep spreading out more, like ripples in water.
Don’t be a fool: for once, just sit tight….

If you let go of everything—
Everything, everything—
That’s the real point!

The day we die
the wind comes down
to take away
our footprints.

The wind makes dust
to cover up
the marks we left
while walking.

For otherwise
the thing would seem 
as if we were
still living.

Therefore the wind
is he who comes
to blow away
our footprints.

May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.
May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the
    love that
has been given to you….
May you be content knowing you are a child of God….
Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the
    freedom to
sing, dance, praise and love.
It is there for each and every one of us.

Today’s skies are perfect for a clear
Flute and singing kot. And touched

This deeply by those laid under these
Cypress trees, how could we neglect joy?

Clear songs drift away anew. Emerald wine
Starts pious faces smiling. Not knowing

What tomorrow brings, it’s exquisite
Exhausting whatever I feel here and now.

It is Spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echos
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you,
An empty boat, floating, adrift.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers.
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

My father, looking for trouble, would find it
On his hands and knees by hammering on walls
Between the joists or drilling through baseboards
Or crawling into the attic where insulation
Lay under the leaks like sleeping-bags.

It would be something simple as a rule
To be ingenious for, in overalls;
And he would kneel beside it, pouring sweat
Down his red cheeks, glad of a useful day
With something wrong unknown to the landlord.

At those odd times when everything seemed to work
All right, suspiciously all right like silence
In concrete shelters, he’d test whatever hung
Over our heads: such afternoons meant ladders,
Nails in the mouth, flashing and shaking roofs.

In safety shoes going down basement stairs,
He’d flick his rewired rearrangement of lights
And chase all shadows into the coalbin
Where they could watch him, blinking at his glare.
If shadows hadn’t worked, he would have made them.

With hands turning to horn against the stone
He’d think on all fours, hunch as if to drink
If his cold chisel broke, the cold foundation
And brought dark water pulsing out of clay.
Wrenching at rows of pipes like his cage-bars,

He made them creak in sockets and give way.
But rammed them back, putting his house in order.
Moonlight or rain, after the evening paper,
His mouth lay open under the perfect plaster
To catch the first sweet drops, but none came down.

Five months after your death, I come like the others
Among the slash and stumps, across the cratered
Three square miles of your graveyard:
Nettles and groundsel first out of the jumble,
Then fireweed and bracken
Have come to light where you, for ninety years,
Had kept your shadows.

The creek has gone as thin as my wrist, nearly dead
To the world at the dead end of summer,
Guttering to a pool where the tracks of an earth-mover
Showed it the way to falter underground.
Now pearly everlasting
Has grown to honor the deep dead cast of your roots
For a bitter season.

Those water- and earth-led roots decay for winter
Below my feet, below the fir seedlings
Planted in your place (one out of ten alive
In the summer drought),
Below the small green struggle of the weeds
For their own ends, below grasshoppers,
The only singers now.

The chains and cables and steel teeth have left
Nothing of what you were:
I hold my hands over a stump and remember
A hundred and fifty feet above me branches
No longer holding sway. In the pitched battle
You feel and fell again and went on falling
And falling and always falling.

Out in the open where nothing was left standing
(The immoral equivalent of a forest fire),
I sit with my anger. The creek will move again,
Come rain and snow, gnawing at raw defiles,
Clear-cutting its own gullies.
As selective as reapers stalking through wheatfields,
Selective loggers go where the roots go.

She carries it unsteadily, warily
Off balance on bare feet across the room,
Believing wholeheartedly in what she carries
And knowing where she is going carefully
Through the narrow doorway into the sunlight,
Holding by handle and lip what she begins
To pour so seriously and slowly now, she leans
That way as if to pour herself. She grows
More and more light. She lightens. She sees it flowing
Away from her to fill her earth to the brim.
Then she stands still, smiling above flowers.

Over the sheer stone cliff-face, over springs and star clusters
Of maidenhair giving in and in to the spray
Through thorn-clawed crookshanks
And gnarled root ends like vines where the sun has never from dawn
To noon or dusk come spilling its cascades,
The stream is falling, at the brink
Blue-green but whitening and churning to pale rain
And falling farther, neither as rain nor mist
But both now, pouring
And changing as it must, exchanging all for all over all
Around and past your shape to a dark-green pool
Below, where it tumbles
Over another verge to become a stream once more
Downstream in curving slopes under a constant
Cloud of what it was
And will be, and beside it, sharing the storm of its arrival
Your voice and all your words are disappearing
Into this water falling.

Nurserymen tell us trees
grown under glass
in the calm of a greenhouse
          are spindlier, their trunks
          more modest, more inclined
          to bend under the burdens
of new branches and leaves,
their ordinarily haphazard
outgrowth unbalanced
          in the direction of sunlight
          exclusively, taking no part
          in the play of weather
outside the windows. Inside,
trees that have grown accustomed
to constant temperature
          and easygoing air
          become much less sturdy
          than wild ones subjected
to sudden changes, surprises
of much too much, too little
or too late. Yet their caretakers
          behind glass have discovered
          if they hold the privileged ones
          in hand and shake them,
shake them, even pound them
with padded mallets, they straighten,
stiffen, and grow tall.

Their necks and their dark heads lifted into a dawn
Blurred smooth by mist, the loons
Beside each other are swimming slowly
In charmed circles, their bodies stretched under water
Through ripples quivering and sweeping apart
The gray sky now held lose by the lake’s mercurial threshold
Whose face and underface they share
In wheeling and diving tandem, rising together
To swell their breasts like swans, to go breasting forward
With beaks turned down and in, near shore,
Out of sight behind a windbreak of birch and alder,
And now the haunted uprisen wailing call,
And again, and now the beautiful sane laughter.

After that moment when you’ve lost all reason
for going back where you started, when going ahead
is no longer a yes or no but a matter of fact,
you’ll need to weigh, on the one hand, what will seem
on the other, almost nothing and must choose
again and again, at points of fewer and fewer
chances to guess when and which way to turn.


That’s when you might stop thinking about stars
and storm clouds, the direction of wind,
the difference between rain and snow, the time
of day or the lay of the land, about which trees
mean water, which birds know what you need
to know before it’s too late, or what’s right here
under your feet, no longer able to tell you 
where it was you thought you had to go.

She thinks she has a pretty good idea
what seaweed is. It’s bushes under water.
and half a clamshell doesn’t call for words

from either of us, so we send it sailing
back to the shallows to fulfill itself.
When asked, I try to explain what a heap of kelp

is doing above the tide line, bladders and holdfasts
shrinking from so much air, but I stop
short when sand fleas jump out of the folds.

I redirect her attention to the horizon,
where the setting sun is doing something more
familiar to her, but she goes wading ahead

to concentrate on the carcass of a scoter
still trailing the black feathers of one wing.
She stoops to pick it up (one thumb, one finger

As precise as a gull’s beak) and holds it dripping
halfway out of the arriving surf
and looks up at me sideways. Our eyes meet.

She seems to be accusing me of something
she can’t yet say out loud. I hear
my teacher’s impassioned voice recite John Donne:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore.
but keep it to myself. She lets the bird fall
back to where it had been and balances
her brand-new body above the water and sand
and against the wind splashes ahead of me.

Although I’m telling them once more the sun
is larger than the Earth and the moon smaller,
that large sources of light cast two-toned shadows
beyond small objects, they refuse to remember.

I’ve joined those other teachers trying to show them
everything that’s known about erring stars,
who’ve graded them slightly down for believing in something
else out of their dream-filled-love for the sky.

If they won’t puzzle out the solar system,
why should I scold them? Neither would Sherlock Holmes
or the wisest wise men before Copernicus.
They all settled for nests of crystal spheres.

Emerson said a kind of light shines through us
and makes us aware we’re nothing. “Nothing” seems wrong.
We transmit something or other. We interfere.
Cosmically speaking, we have a nuisance value.

And nobody knows why, not even today,
not even the first that rounded the sun-kissed moon,
tongue-tied with wonder, garbling old testaments,
just barely raising moondust while sleepwalking.

Though the Earth has caught our moon in the outer cone
of its double shadow for a while this evening,
at dawn the sun will make up for lost time
by spinning fire around all daughters of men.

My daughters are both playing
under the sun this morning,
in and out of the shade
on primary-colored swings
and slides and spiral ladders,
and they’re being just as good
as can be at tagging others.

They’re among the most evasive
(when they’re not It) and clever 
enough (when they are)
to touch the ones they’re after.
I’m proud watching over them
from my safe place on the bench.

A man sits next to me.
His long gray hair hangs down
the back of his wrinkled coat.
He’s wearing a yachting cap,
thick glasses, a woman’s skirt,
sneakers with open toes,
and blue-and-white batting gloves.

He’s holding much of his life
ready to eat or wear
in a plastic shopping bag.
He leans my way and offers
the part of it that’s French fries 
and tells me I’d better help
myself or be sorry later.

And now two women are guiding
three disadvantaged children
out of a van. A girl,
maybe eleven, who scuttles
to a sandbox and sits down,
laughing. A younger boy
who knows how to run and clamber
up onto a platform
and straddle a tunnel slide.
A teenage Latina, her arms
akimbo who smiles around
at the wide world of sports.
All three are as pale as if trained
to grow up in the dark.

The girl in the sand is squealing,
lifting, and letting fly
whatever these handfuls are.
The boy in the air
eyes shut in ecstasy,
is pounding his blue drum.
The Latina is strutting around
on the grass like a mistress
of ceremonies, waving
as if to coax applause
or to congratulate
herself for winning something
by shaking most of the hands
of most of the babysitters
within reach, including mine
and the two in batting gloves
beside me, that go on shaking
hers over and over
and won’t let go till she sees
he’s as proud of her as a father.

       Do you believe you are a poet? If so, then what you must do
       is obvious.  Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.
Do you still believe, old man, you are a poet?
If so, what you must do is so obvious,
you shouldn’t need reminding. You should keep trying
to do whatever you haven’t done or start
doing again what you didn’t manage to do 
right in the first place. You should stay alive
as often as possible and keep yourself open
to anything out of place and everything
with nowhere else to go, to carry what’s left
of your voice out and beyond, into, over,
and under, past, within, outside, between, 
among, across, along, and up and around
and to be beside yourself when the spirit moves you
and to thank Miss Clippinger for your prepositions.

Worshippers who can sing
(or try to) don’t want their faith
taken for granted. They long for
melodic turns of phrase
and memorable cadences.
They’d be listening in the pews
if they hadn’t needed to make
music of empty air.

Any tone-deaf preacher
had better do his damnedest
as an off-the-beat, white-throaty,
black-robed, timorous,
sharp, flat soloist
for critically minded singers
sitting there behind him,
flinching at his droning
and trying to forgive him
for conducting only himself
and turning his back on them.

Is everything we think
we know as certain truth
             a metaphor we make
             between our capable hands
and our heads? We recognize
resemblances, and whatever
             we do or see is like
             something we did or saw
before, and isn’t it strange
to realize we’re repeating
             ourselves, working and dreaming
             in tandem, in ways
we’re trying to give names to
as we bring our cupped palms
             full of cold water
             up against our faces

and feel the chilling 
relief of lifelessness
           and shut our eyes
           and try to blink it away
as if we might be happy
to have a clearer look
           again at what’s going on
           around us in broad daylight.

She knew where it was,
that thing you were looking for,
and if it wasn’t there
           she could tell you just how long
           you’d have to wait for it
           to be yours, not quite
long enough to finish perhaps 
or as long as you could hope for,
but in either case
           you would hear from her
           when she wanted it back
           as soon as (or even sooner)
than possible. If you became
over time familiar
with her ways and obeyed
           the rules and even understood
           why they were hers, who knew
           when time was up,
who could keep quiet
or at least hold his speaking voice
down, who could go without
            food or drink, who could show
            the proper attitudes
            of polite attention
or even of being lost
in thought, she would give you
for a while whatever
            you might desire within
            reason, and if it turned out
            to be what you really hadn’t
been looking for at all,
she would take it back
without the least sign
               of resentment (perhaps a sigh),
               within the natural bounds
               of the love of propriety,
she would give you almost anything
else you might still have
in mind, this good librarian.

After he’d strung the turtle shell with catgut,
the ends of his numb fingers (which he’d thought
he knew how to bring together and tell apart)
had trouble deciding which of the strings to pluck
and which to press down on. But because
he’d been swearing with it, his ordinarily
so-so baritone voice had soured, had gone
to hell and back and kept refusing to meet
or match the strains he could still hear in his head.

He sat down on a rock and tried his damnedest
to think about something else. He thought of the woods.
He thought of weather. He thought of picking daisies.
He thought of selling his lute and leaving home
and going to sea and forgetting about all this
music business, all this mechanical strumming
sharp and flat and this memorizing
and rearranging the picking at dull tunes.

Meanwhile, behind his back, the trees bowed down.
snow melted on the mountains. Wildflowers flourished
in a constant springtime, and the noisy ocean
lowered the crests of its waves and paused to listen.

Do they catch their hands
muttering sometimes
when they’re not signing, their fingers
           whispering to each other
           or trying to tell whoever
           that might be at the other end
of an arm what they’ve forgotten
and must remember? Do they
hesitate to go on saying
           what they won’t have the slightest
           chance of meaning tomorrow?
           Do slips of the fingers count
against them? Do they practice
sleights of hand? Do they slur
under the influence
           of second thoughts or do battle
           almost helplessly
           with those quicker to reach
conclusions, with interrupters,
with careless, heavy thinkers,
with ambiguous partners
          or strangers? It must be easy
          to babble or go crazy
          without half trying, but how
can lovers hold hands
unless they mean to go
quietly all the way?

It will seem strange at first
going back under water,
            but soon your difficult breathing
            will feel like a birthright,
and you’ll settle down
to a more buoyant life
            where each step and each touch
            will be an easy impulse
to give in to. Your body
will discover old proportions,
             old whispered asides,
             sotto voce wheedlings
and basso profundo groans,
and even your angriest shouts
             will be dissolved in the wailing,
             the whistling and humming
of others who came back
to their senses. In place of speech
              you’ll have your exclusive silence.
              Now the dissolution of shadows
and the scattering of the sun
into ribbons and broken crescents
             will show what swims around you—
             diatoms, plankton, the suspense
of colloidal particles—
and will blur your vision
             momentarily
             into the visionary
and you’ll know why you’re here
why you’ve grown tired 
             of breath, earth, and sunlight,
             tired of your heavy torso
slumping. If you go back
to the glare and the wind, if you flounder
             ashore on the sand and lift
             your shape on surprising legs
and finally stand once more,
beached, weighted down,
             your strange nose in the air,
             you’ll find what’s left of yourself
sinking slowly, easily,
into half-sleep once more.

Its face, as calm as the air,
holds an invented world
of trees and a trembling sky,
and I’m looking at a garden
as far away from my eyes
as if I lay underwater.

What the seers and sibyls learned 
in their rippling mirrors no one
can say for sure. A dropped stone
would send it flying and show
where the earth begins again.

All I can ask for answers
from what I see in my mirror
are the shades of apple blossoms
over which water striders
lighten the touch of bees
against the mud of heaven.

But I’m not there. Right now
I’m sitting in a room
alone, remembering
being there. I can feel
absolutely sure that creek 
is rushing forward, pausing
in hollows, turning over
and under itself and pouring
whatever it has to give
in whatever order water
manages to perform whatever
whitens into a constant
cascade of what it was 
all along and is and is
going to be again
and again. It comforted
and bewildered me, both 
of me, at the same time,
year after year. It kept saying,
I’m here. I wasn’t here
an instant ago, but now 
I’m here and gone.
I’m going to be here again this moment,
and already I’m falling out of the same place 
I’m going to be always.

DUST
By David Wagoner

Through stubble the color of dust, the dust devil
spins down the sloping furrows, the only cloud
at this day’s end gone furious under the sky
and on earth in a coil toward me, snarled
tight at the churning base, one streamer
flung up and around and lost and left
with a hunch and hump sideslipping
to tanglefoot past me full of itself
and tall as a house with nothing
and no one home long enough
to matter in its hurry to be
done with it, to outrace
what it lifts, swivels, 
and tosses to earth
to settle for less
and less, now
for even
less.

Whatever frightened you, whatever you thought
might happen someday, is not happening now.

This is only a test so we can be sure
we can tell you when we think it’s happening

before it does or at last no later than
simultaneously. What you should do

(when you hear the official sound we’re about to make
at almost any moment) is to listen

as closely as you can, then tell yourself
This is what it’s going to sound like

When it might happen. You’ll remember how 
to hear yourself thinking if it ever does.

Though he would have no clothes worth borrowing
except for amusement, he wouldn’t borrow yours
and leave them scattered around, unwashed.
He would forgive you for making impolite noises
and listen to any exaggerated entries
in your overlong, untitled, unpublished,
and unpublishable autobiography
with its anecdotes about schools and carnal love
with a straight, polite face. When the rent was due 
and you needed to render unto the landlord
what was the landlord’s, he would forgive and forget
if you forgot or didn’t or couldn’t give,
and he would clean up after himself. If you didn’t
he would do it for you, and you’d feel guilty,
naturally, and most certainly move out
when he gave shelter to beggars, thieves, crackpots,
lepers, down-and-out whores, or you again.

         When energy is destroyed in one form, it reappears in a 
         corresponding quantity in another.

You can pound it, pound it
down till you think, Thank god,
            It’s finally gone away,
            or you can shoot it
up in the air and hope
it will keep on going
            and going somewhere else
            and leave you alone
at last, but here it comes
in disguise, not only claiming
           to be your long-lost brother,
           but your father and the father
of your father’s children. No matter
how many times you snap
           your wrist and your fingers
           to get rid of the shred
of plastic, it clings there
like flypaper as you grow
           warmer with exercise,
           or you can huff and puff
at a candle flame: the seizure
of the diaphragm is transformed
           into a moving column
           of air, which narrows
between your lips 
to send a burning gold
           hydrocarbon crown
           back to the blue beginning
and in its smoky way
into a jangle of molecules,
           leaving you to recover
           your breath in your own darkness.

Holly is calling me from the cemetery.
She wants to plot my future. She really wants me
to be considerate of my loved ones
in advance, to make all the arrangements
now so none of them will have to feel
the expensive thrill of it at the wrong time,
and she can make a place for me all at once
over the phone and spare every one of us
our pain and awkwardness. The facilities
I wouldn’t believe. They’re in a sylvan setting,
which means it’s like under trees with a very tasteful
horizontal stone so the grass around it
can be mowed off of my name and dates, and a twelve-
(or under)-letter characterization
engraved there (such as Dearest or Beloved
Or in my case Husband) would be visibly
permanent regardless of growth. She’s offering
today what she won’t call a once-in-a-lifetime
discount, but let’s face it, it sort of is.

Plato believed the gods
           had aimed our eyes and feet
forward because looking
           backward, though necessary
sometimes, was less important
           for the fulfillment of tasks
than getting on with them.
           We were contrived to swivel
suddenly and jump, to hang on
           and wait for the right moment
to let go and run for it.
           Our lateral symmetry
and our bundle of bones
           allowed for that and for simply
walking away, maintaining
           the balance of our burdens
with our well-defined hands
           and fingers, sometimes more
eloquent than our mouths.
            He thought the spherical skull
had been fashioned purposefully
            in the manner of sun and moon
to keep the house of the soul
            from being broken into
by intruders. Our apparatus
            stood to reason and sat
to think better of it, knelt
            to save what little it could,
crouched to be slightly less
            apparent, or lay down
curled to be shut against
            (or at length more open to)
the wisdom of the night.

When a man or a woman died, something of theirs,
some token—a beaded belt, a pair of moccasins,
a necklace—would be left beside the path
where a hunting party, returning, would see it
and know that name was dead now.
They would remember how to say it,
but not at the campfire, not in stories,
not whispered in the night to anyone else,
but only to themselves.

Then, after years, when the right one had been born,
they would hold that child above the earth
to the four directions and speak the name again.

You have been taken down
           the first and only step in the learning process,
                  so even a raw beginner
like you is already skilled in every aspect
           of our craft. Your envies and temptations
                  at last are over. Who wore the best clothes?
Who had all the money? Who knew exactly
           where to go when there was nowhere to go?
                  Who could recite all five of the wrong names
of love by heart? Now, even if you tried
           as hard as you once knew how, you won’t have time
                   to think of any more answers. At one stroke
in the eyes of your only teacher you’ll achieve
           a comfortable failure
                   and be marked present, absent, and excused forever.
              

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

You prepare for one sorrow,
but another comes.
It is not like the weather,
you cannot brace yourself,
the unreadiness is all.
Your companion, the woman,
the friend next to you,
the child at your side,
and the dog,
we tremble for them,
we look seaward and muse
it will rain.
We shall get ready for rain;
you do not connect 
the sunlight altering 
the darkening oleanders
in the sea-garden,
the gold going out of the palms.
You do not connect this,
the fleck of the drizzle
on your flesh,
with the dog’s whimper,
the thunder doesn’t frighten,
the readiness is all;
what follows at your feet 
is trying to tell you
the silence is all:
it is deeper than the readiness,
it is sea-deep,
earth-deep,
love-deep,

The silence
is stronger than thunder,
we are stricken dumb and deep
as the animals who never utter love
as we do, except
it becomes unutterable
and must be said,
in a whimper,
in tears,
in the drizzle that comes to your eyes
not uttering the loved thing’s name,
the silence of the dead,
the silence of the deepest buried love is
the one silence,
and whether we bear it for beast,
for child, for woman, or friend, 
it is the one love, it is the same,
and it is blest
deepest by loss
it is blest, it is blest.

Ram Dass quoting Alan Watts about using drugs to obtain altered states of consciousness.

"Once you've gotten the message, hang up the phone."

As my boat sails into Xingze Lake
I am stunned by this glorious city!
A canal meanders by narrow courtyard doors.
Fires and cooking smoke crowd the water.
In these people I see strange customs
and the dialect here is obscure.
In late autumn, fields are abundant.
Morning light. Noise wakes at the city wells.
Fish merchants float on the waves. 
Chickens and dogs. Villages on either bank.
I’m heading away from white clouds.
What will become of my solitary sail?

(He needed to travel for his work but he longed
 for Buddhist detachment, which, in his poetry
is always symbolized by white clouds—Czeslaw Milosz)

The waterfall on South Mountain hits the rocks,
tosses back its foam with terrifying thunder,
blotting out even face-to-face talk.
Collapsing water and bouncing foam soak blue moss,
old moss so thick
it drowns the spring grass.
Animals are hushed.
Birds fly but don’t sing
yet a white turtle plays on the pool’s sand floor
        under riotous spray,
sliding about with torrents.
The people of the land are benevolent.
No angling or net fishing.
The white turtle lives out its life, naturally

Autumn is crisp and the firmament far,
especially far from where people live.
I look at cranes on the sand
and am immersed in joy when I see mountains beyond
              the clouds.
Dusk inks the crystal ripples.
Leisurely the white moon comes out.
Tonight I am with my oar, alone, and can do
             everything,
yet waver, not willing to return.

My friends, let’s grow up.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven’t noticed, let’s wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It’s simple–how could we have missed it for so long?
Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be shocked by them.

This is the true ride–let’s give ourselves to it!
Let’s stop making deals for a safe passage:
There isn’t one anyway, and the cost is too high.
WE ARE NOT CHILDREN ANYMORE.
The true human adult gives everything for what
           Cannot be lost.

Let’s not act so betrayed,
As though life has broken a secret promise to us.
Impermanence is life’s only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion exquisitely precise:
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.

The rain’s pounding away
        at the rusty eaves.
Twirling, sliding bubbling foam—
       well, that’s rain.

You too, and I should walk now
       as free as that
on cloud, on air, the meadow
       and the vapor roads.

Move around up there and here below
       like this liquid thing,
flowing into human life on rooftops
       and on shoes.

I wake up in the morning torn between the desire to save the world and to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

And we know, when Moses was told,
      in the way he was told,
“Take off your shoes!” He grew pale from that simple

reminder of fire in the dusty earth.
      He never recovered
his complicated way of loving again

and was free to love in the same way
      he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him.
As if the lion earth could roar

and take him in one movement.
      Every step he took
from there was carefully placed.

Everything he said mattered as if he knew
      the constant witness of the ground
and remembered his own face in the dust

the moment before revelation.
      Since then thousands have felt
the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak.

Like the moment you too saw, for the first time,
      your own house turned to ashes.
Everything consumed so the road could open again.

Your entire presence in your eyes
      and the world turning slowly
into a single branch of flame.

Those who will not slip beneath 
    the still surface on the well of grief

Turning downward through its black water
    to the place we cannot breathe

Will never know the source from which we drink,
    the secret water, cold and clear,

Nor find in the darkness glimmering
    the small round coins
         thrown by those who wished for something else.

The strategic mind tells us that we need to be in control to be safe. The soul says something more radical and frightening to us, wholly unlike the soothing reassurances of the strategic mind. Out of the silence the soul startles us by telling us we are safe already, safe in our own experiences, even if that may be the path of failure. The soul loves the journey itself. The textured and undulations of the path it has made through the landscape by hazard and design, are nourishing in themselves.

The motivational speakers and self-help books are all wrong: there is no way of creating a life where we are full participants one hundred percent of the time. There is no way of being fully human without at times being fully stuck or even completely absent; we are simply not made that way. There is no possibility of pursuing a work without coming to terms with all the ways it is impossible to do it. Feeling far away from what we want tells us two things about our work: that we are at the beginning or that we have forgotten where we are going.

The imagination and its ability to discern bigger underlying patterns is just as important if not more important than a firm grasp of details of what we want. The mighty interior wish is more important than mere outward details that see to tell others that you don’t have a clue what you are doing.

In many ways, our to-do lists have become the postmodern equivalent of the priest’s rosary, the lama’s sutra, or the old prayer book—keeping a larger, avalanching reality at bay. Above all, the to-do list keeps the evil of not-doing at bay, a list that many of us like to chant and cycle through religiously as we make our way to work through the commute.
…..Little wonder, then, made as we are and trained to organize complexity, we are constantly trying to assign each and everything a name so that we can organize it and control it, so much so that it can be tempting to try to name and organize something that cannot be pressured or regulated, this elusive thing called the self.

As human beings, we have a necessary conceit about our own ability to influence events. The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality. The United States, that supposed bedrock of upward mobility, is actually one of the developed industrial nations where people are most likely to live and die in the class to which they were born. We are creatures who like to believe our own publicity, and we do not like to face powers that can easily surpass and encompass our best hopes. We hope always for a free pass to circumvent forces that humble us on a daily basis.

Engaging within the self, starting to treat ourselves as if we were a living, learning surprise, worthy of existence despite our constant fears, enables us to engage in a real way with others, to see others as possible surprises and even gifts.

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place 
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what 
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you 
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake 
a life,

questions 
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions 
that have no right
to go away.

An open sandy shell 
on the beach
empty but beautiful
like a memory
of a protected previous self.
The most difficult griefs
ones in which
we slowly open
to a larger sea, a grander
sweep that washes
all our elements apart.

So strange the way
we are larger
in grief
than we imagined
we deserved or could claim
and when loss floods
into us
like the long darkness it is
and the old nurtured hope
is drowned again
even stranger then
at the edge of the sea
to feel the hand of the wind
laid on our shoulder
reminding us
how death grants
a fierce and fallen freedom
away from the prison 
of a constant
and continued presence,
how in the end
those who have left us
might no longer need us
with all our tears
and our much needed 
measures of loss
and that their own death
is as personal 
and private
as that life of theirs,
which you never really knew,
and another disturbing thing,
that exultation
is possible without them.

And they for themselves
in fact
are glad to have let go
of all the stasis 
and the enclosure
and the need for them to live
like some prisoner
that you only wanted
to remain incurious
and happy in your love
never looking for the key
never wanting to
turn the lock and walk
away
like the wind
unneedful of you,
ungovernable,
unnamable,
free.

Good poetry begins with 
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
                         Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

     Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing.

     Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water, and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
                          The soul shrinks.

     From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
             “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

     Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

     “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
                        Keeping their difficult balance.”

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.

His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a god-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to Paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago,
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life and death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look freshly generated
     from fresh excrement
and who maneuver through our airspace with a deft intentionality that makes
     them seem to think,
materializes just above my desk, then vanishes, his dense, abrasive buzz
     sucked in after him.

I wait, imagine him, hidden somewhere, waiting, too, then think, who knows
     why, of you—
don’t laugh—that he’s a messenger from you, or that you yourself (you’d howl 
     at this),
ten years afterwards have let yourself be incarnated as this pestering
     anti-angel.

Now he, or you, abruptly reappears, with a weightless pounce alighting near
     my hand.
I lean down close, and though he has to sense my looming presence, he
     patiently attends,
as though my study of him had become an element of his own observations—
     maybe it is you!

Joy! To be together, even for a time! Yes, tilt your fuselage, turn it towards the 
     light,
aim the thousand lenses of your eyes back up at me: how I’ve missed the
     layers of your attention,
how often been bereft without your gift for sniffing out pretentiousness and
     moral sham.

Why would you come back, though? Was that other radiance not intricate
     enough to parse?
Did you find yourself in some monotonous century hovering down the tidy
     queue of creatures
waiting to experience again the eternally unlikely bliss of being matter ad
     extension?

You lift, you land—you’re rushed. I know; the interval in all our terminals is
     much too short.
Now you hurl against the window, skid and jitter on the pane: I open it and 
     step aside
and follow for one final moment of felicity your brilliant ardent atom swerving
     through.

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand’s width and two generations away,
in this still present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
And you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and god and politics
with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child, whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago,

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

San Miguel, N.M.

The long night
moves over my walls:
inside a candle is lighted
by one of my daughters.



Even from here I can see
the illuminated eyes, bright
face of the child before flame.

It’s nearly time to go in.
the wind is cooler now,
pecans drop, rattle down—

the tin roof of our house
rivers to platinum in the early moon.
dogs bark & in the house, wine, laughter.

Let me quickly tell you about the time I ran into my mate Uge, a surfer I’ve known from around the neighborhood for a number of years. He was sitting in the sun having a coffee at a café. I asked what he was doing because he wasn’t reading the paper or talking into a phone. He was just sitting there. “Sez, I’m checking in with my Inside People,” he said everyday-ishly.
   I pressed him on this. He explained this entailed just sitting and asking of one’s people, “Are we happy? Comfortable? Heading in a good direction?” …..
   
   It’s pretty much meditation spelled out fresh. In fact, it reminds me of Sky’s advise to just meditate. It’s a powerful point. Just create the space with your Inside People and the rest will unfurl as it needs to.
   Uge tells me that we then feel where our inside peeps are at. Try saying to yourself, as he does, “Are we good? Are we comfortable? Is this where we should be? Is it making sense?”
    “Don’t think or plan in this space, just check in,” he says.

   Chatting to Uge I realized it’s also important to listen to what your peeps tell you when you ask them how they are. It will probably be heard with a feeling, perhaps an expansiveness, a release. It’s funny, for me, the answer that I hear is invariably, “Better than we thought, actually.” Inside peeps are like that. When you check in on them

There is no sense talking about "being true to myself" until you are sure what voice you are
being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voices of the unconscious.

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign is Solitude!
How potent a mere image of her sway!
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre—Hermit
Deep in the bosom of Wilderness;
Votary (in vast Cathedral, where no foot
Is treading and other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayer; or Watchman on the top
Of Lighthouse beaten by Atlantic Waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless Wastes.

I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Two miles I had to walk along the fields
Before I reached my home. Magnificent
The morning was, a memorable pomp,
More glorious that I ever had beheld,
The sea was laughing at a distance; all
The solid mountains were as bright as clouds,
Grain tinctured, drenched in empyrean lights;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
And labourers going forth into the fields.
Ah! Need I say, dear Friend, but to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, also sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walk’d
In blessedness, which even yet remains.

After Picasso (painting of this story)


It is the little girl
guiding the minotaur
with her free hand—
that devourer

and all the terror he’s accustomed to
effortlessly emanating,
his ability to paralyze
merely by becoming present,

entranced somehow, and transformed
into a bewildered
and who knows, grateful
gentleness…

and with the other hand
lifting her lamp.

While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass,
The small house,
White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now. It is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At a touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their
         Happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

When I first saw a woman after childbirth
the room was full of your glance who had just gone away.
And when the mare was bearing her foal
you were with her but I did not see your face.

When in fear I became a woman
I first felt your hand.
When the shadow of the future first fell across me
it was your shadow, my grave and hooded attendant.




It is all one whether I deny or affirm you;
it is not my mind you are concerned with.
It is no matter whether I submit or rebel;
the event will still happen. 

You neither know nor care for the truth of my heart;
but the truth of my body has all to do with you.
You have no need of my thoughts or my hopes,
living in the realm of the absolute event.

Then why is it that when I at last see your face
under that hood of slate-blue, so calm and dark,
so worn with the burden of an inexpressible knowledge—
why is that I begin to worship you with tears?  

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great-great-grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,

who, having had eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland

and from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice-floe,
drift down the current towards a water fall
that struck rock-bottom eighty feet below,

while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
and with the artist’s isolating eye
my great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene,
the sketch survives to prove the story by.

Year, if you have no Mother’s day present planned;
reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand. 

The wind blows the line out from his fishing pole.
In a straw hat and grass cape the fisherman
Is invisible in the long reeds.
In the fine spring rain it is impossible to see far
And the mist rising from the water has hidden the hills.

As if gathering together,
                                   the peaks of the ranges.
As if raging,
                the waves on these banks.
Winding along
                      these mountains and rivers,
the road to the T’ung Pass.
I look west
                & hesitant I lament
here where
                 opposing armies passed through.
Palaces
           of countless rulers
           now but dust.
Empires rise:
                 people suffer.
Empires fall:
                 people suffer.

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun,
Now may I wither into the truth.

I lie in my bed,
Listening to the monastery bell.
In the still night
The sound re-echoes amongst the hills.
Frost gathers under the cold moon.
Under the overcast sky.
In the depths of the night,
The first tones are still reverberating
While the last tones are ringing clear and sharp.
I listen and I can still hear them both.
But I cannot tell when they fade away.
I know the bondage and vanity of the world.
But who can tell when we escape
From life and death!

Bobbing on the breeze blown waves
Blowing to the tide
Hyacinth rises and falls

Falling but not felled
By flotsam, twigs, leaves
She ducks, bobs and weaves.

Ducks, ducks by the score
Jolting, quacking and more
She spins through—

Spinning, swamped, slimed, sunk
She rises, resolute
Still crowned by petals.

I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.

My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.

Full of the grey wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches
is setting in Western America.

I can see thousands of droplets
of steam—each a tiny spectrum—rising
from my goblet of grey wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly—like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.

Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!