Saturday, February 9, 2013

near field




This is not something new or kept secret
the tilled ground unsown in late spring
the dead are not separate from the living
each has one foot in the unknown
and cannot speak for the other
the field tells none of its turned story
it lies under its low cloud like a waiting river
the dead made this out of their hunger
out of what they had been told
out of the pains and shadows
and bowels of animals
out of turning and 
coming back singing
about another time



~ W. S. Merwin
from The Shadow of Sirius
photo by Kathleen Connally



Friday, February 8, 2013

there is no poverty





There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, "I must," then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.
Then draw near to nature. Pretend you are the very first man and then write what you see and experience, what you love and lose. Do not write love poems, at least at first; they present the greatest challenge. It requires great, fully ripened power to produce something personal, something unique, when there are so many good and sometimes even brilliant renditions in great numbers. Beware of general themes. Cling to those that your every- day life offers you. Write about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts, your belief in anything beautiful. Describe all that with fervent, quiet, and humble sincerity. In order to express yourself, use things in your surroundings, the scenes of your dreams, and the subjects of your memory.
If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself. Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. For the creative artist there is no poverty—nothing is insignificant or unimportant. Even if you were in a prison whose walls would shut out from your senses the sounds of the outer world, would you not then still have your childhood, this precious wealth, this treasure house of memories? Direct your attention to that. Attempt to resurrect these sunken sensations of a distant past. You will gain assuredness. Your aloneness will expand and will become your home, greeting you like the quiet dawn. Outer tumult will pass it by from afar.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Letters to a Young Poet  (the first letter)
translated by Joan M. Burnham


Monday, February 4, 2013

5 Japanese songs







~ Kathleen Battle



clarity and confusion





VII. 
There are, in fact, moments when a person stands out from his grandeur in clarity and silence before you. These are rare festive pleasures that you never forget. You love this person from then on. In other words, you work to retrace with your own tender hands the outlines of the personality that you came to know in this hour.


VII. 
Art does the same thing. For art is a farther reaching, more immodest love. It is God’s love. It cannot stop with an individual, who is only the portal of life itself: it must move through that individual. It cannot tire. To fulfill its destiny, it has to appear where everyone is — a someone. Then it bestows its gifts on this someone, and boundless riches come over everyone.


XI. 
Art has accomplished nothing, except to show us the confusion in which we already find ourselves most of the time. It has frightened us, rather than making us quiet and peaceful. It has shown us that we all live on different islands, only the islands are not far enough apart for us to stay solitary and untroubled. Someone on one island can pester someone on another, or terrorize him, or hunt him with spears — the only thing no one can do to anyone else is help him.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Notes on the Melody of Things 
found in The Inner Sky 
translated by Damion Searls
photo by ansel adams




Friday, February 1, 2013

transformed into love








~ Franz Peter Schubert
performed by Andrea Bocelli


Schubert at the piano - by Gustav Klimt


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

~ Schubert




Thursday, January 31, 2013

heaven kicks away the blankets and sheets




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



~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
from Divine Flashes
art by Lynda Lehmann


Tuesday, January 29, 2013

after the wedding





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




~ John Daniel
with thanks to writers almanac

three stanzas







1.

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

2.

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

3.

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




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








Monday, January 28, 2013

gleninagh




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

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

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

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




~ John O'Donohue
from Echoes of Memory




Friday, January 25, 2013

you can smell it and that is all



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




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


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


~ Somerset Maugham



exposed





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

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

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




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





Wednesday, January 23, 2013

taking the hands





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



~ Robert Bly


why I write





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

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

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



~ Jane Hirshfield
with thanks to national writing project




their lonely betters





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

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

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

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




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




Monday, January 21, 2013

when I am not present to myself






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



~ Thomas Merton
from No Man is an Island