Not Even Moving One Step

The rain falling too lightly to shape
an audible house, an audible tree,
blind, soaking, the old horse waits in his pasture.
He knows the field for exactly what it is:
his limitless mare, his beloved.
Even the mallards sleep in her red body maned
in thistles, hooved in the new green shallows of spring.

Slow rain streams from fetlocks, hips, the lowered head,
while she stands in the place beside him that no one sees.

The muzzles almost touch.
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

~Jane Hirshfield.
This poem is like a piece of the finest black velvet. So soft, you can hardly feel it. I found it unbelievably touching.

Eurydice

I am not afraid as I descend,
step by step,
leaving behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river,

the damp city streets,
their sodium glare
of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon.

Already your face recedes beneath the station clock,
a damp smudge among the shadows
mirrored in the train's wet glass,

will you forget me? Steel tracks lead you out
past cranes and crematoria,
boat yards and bike sheds, ruby shards

of roman glass and wolf-bone mummified in mud,
the rows of curtained windows like eyelids
heavy with sleep, to the city's green edge.

Now I stop my ears with wax, hold fast
the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.

You turned to look.
Seconds fly past like birds.
My hands grow cold. I am ice and cloud.

This path unravels.
Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust
and sour night-breath the lost city is sleeping.

Above the hurt sky is weeping,
soaked nightingales have ceased to sing.
Dusk has come early. I am drowning in blue.

I dream of a green garden
where the sun feathers my face
like your once eager kiss.

Soon, soon I will climb
from this blackened earth
into the diffident light.

-- Sue Hubbard
I understand the poet wrote this from Eurydice's point of view. She was the lost wife of Orpheus, a (wandering?) minstrel and poet.
One more reason to get more into Greek mythology. And a rather grandiose similarity to my own plight.

This is just to say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

~William Carlos Williams. How could I not post this?

The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
"Ha," he said,"I see that no one has passed here
In a long time."
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
"Well," he mumbled at last,
"Doubtless there are other roads."

~Stephen Crane

Mockingbird

the mockingbird had been following the cat
all summer
mocking mocking mocking
teasing and cocksure;
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
tail flashing
and said something angry to the mockingbird
which I didn't understand.
yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
feathers parted like a woman's legs,
and the bird was no longer mocking,
it was asking, it was praying
but the cat
striding down through centuries
would not listen.
I saw it crawl under a yellow car
with the bird
to bargain it to another place.
summer was over.

~Charles Bukowski.
It is possible to hate someone's prose and like his poems. Thank you J for giving me Bukowski.

hmm?

I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

~last lines from a Bukowski poem. I don't know what these lines mean but for some reason they stuck in my head.

falling stars

Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Oda a los calcetines

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheep-herder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin.

Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons:my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.

They were so handsome- for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.

Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

~Ode to My Socks, Pablo Neruda.
But who else could write this?
Also, this is for the person who lent me warm dry socks because mine got wet through with snow because my shoes were broken because I couldn't buy new ones...

So much happiness

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.
You are happy either way.
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 so much 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.

~Naomi Shihab Nye
I particularly liked that part about coffee cakes and ripe peaches. Then again, how predictable. What can I say...I like poems about fruit. As J famously remarked, it should go on my permanent record: 'likes poems about fruit.'

Japan

Today I pass the time reading

a favorite haiku,

saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating

the same small, perfect grape

again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it

and leave its letters falling

through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.

I say it front of a painting by the sea.

I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,

and I say it without listening,

then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,

I kneel down on the floor

and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It’s the one about the one-ton

temple bell

with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it,

I feel the excruciating

pressure of the moth

on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,

the bell is the world

and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it into the mirror,

I am the heavy bell

and the moth is life with its papery wings.

~Billy Collins, from Japan

I used to write some manner of haiku until very recently. Oh, where have all the haiku gone? Sob.

Coming

On longer evenings,

Light, chill and yellow,

Bathes the serene

Foreheads of houses.

A thrush sings,

Laurel-surrounded

In the deep bare garden,

Its fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon,

It will be spring soon–

And I, whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom,

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling,

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter,

And starts to be happy.

~Philip Larkin.

(Image from Google Images)

a box of pastels

I once held on my knees a simple wooden box

in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.

It was a set of pastels that had years before

belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,

and all of the colors she'd used in her work

lay open before me. Those hues she'd most used,

the peaches and pinks, were worn down to stubs,

while the cool colors--violet, ultramarine--

had been set, scarcely touched, to one side.

She'd had little patience with darkness, and her heart

held only a measure of shadow. I touched

the warm dust of those colors, her tools,

and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.

-Ted Kooser

The archipelago of kisses

But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

~Jeffrey McDaniel, the last lines from The Archipelago of Kisses. Such good lines from such a dreadfully-titled poem.

Wash

All day the blanket snapped and swelled

on the line, roused by a hot spring wind.

From there it witnessed the first sparrow,

early flies lifting their sticky feet,

and a green haze on the south-sloping hills.

Clouds rose over the mountain.

At dusk

I took the blanket in, and we slept,

restless, under its fragrant weight.

- Jane Kenyon
I like the way Jane Kenyon can talk about the mundane and elevate it to something like this.

You who never arrived

Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

~from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

Consolation for Tamar

(on the occasion of her breaking an ancient pot)

You know I am no archaeologist, Tamar,
And that to me it is all one dust or another.
Still, it must mean something to survive the weather
Of the Ages-earthquake, flood, and war-

Only to shatter in your very hands.
Perhaps it was gravity, or maybe fated-
Although I wonder if it had not waited
Those years in drawers, aeons in distant lands,

And in your fingers' music, just a little
Was emboldened by your blood, and so forgot
That it was not a rosebud, but a pot,
And, trying to unfold for you, was brittle.

~A.E. Stallings

Highlights and Interstices

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

~Jack Gilbert

What will become of me

I was falling always
and now i'm falling this way
what will become of me?
when i'm all far away
i'm spinning down
i'm spinning up
upon this way
wondering what will become of me
when i'm all far away
i'm spinning down
i'm all away
a greater way
what will become of me ...

~Dave Matthews Band

Mocambique

Beads on the bottle of vinho verde,
a plate of prawns bathed in a heat of passion,
the fado singer keening softly--
reminding me
how much I still
and always
miss you.

Not that I knew you then,
those weekends spent
with friends
around the bay of Lourenco Marques.
But it seems as though
you were in my genes,
even then,
so long ago--
in another lifetime.

~Yvonne van Onselen.

The Thing is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

~ Ellen Bass

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look

into each other's eyes more,

the government has decided to allot

each person exactly one hundred

and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it

to my ear without saying hello.

In the restaurant I point

at chicken noodle soup. I am

adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long

distance lover and proudly say

I only used fifty-nine today.

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond, I know

she's used up all her words

so I slowly whisper I love you,

thirty-two and a third times.

After that, we just sit on the line

and listen to each other breathe.

~Jeffrey McDaniel

The Sea Question

The sea asks 'How is your life now?'

It does so obliquely, changing colour.

It is never the same on any two visits.

It is never the same in any particular

Only in generalities: tide and such matters

Wave height and suction, pebbles that rattle.

It doesn't presume to wear a white coat

But it questions you like a psychologist

As you walk beside it on its long couch.

~Elizabeth Smither

September garden party

We sit with friends at the round glass table.
The talk is clever
everyone rises to it.
Bees come to the spiral pear peeling on your plate.
From my lap
or your hand
the spice of our morning’s privacy
comes drifting up.
Fall sun
passes through the wine.

~Jane Kenyon

that yellow flower on your lane

I complained
long and slightly loud
about how the neighbors
had the TV on all last night.
I could not sleep, I said.
It was too loud.
I tried to distract myself:
Focused on lovely things
like that yellow flower on your lane
that I don’t know the name of
or how my nephew’s nose wrinkles
when he reads.
But the real reason I complained
about the neighbor’s TV
was that
it got in the way
of my listening
to you breathe.

~Anonymous

Blossoms

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road

where we turned toward signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs,

from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin,

but the shade,

not only the sugar,

but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it,

then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background;

from joy to joy to joy,

from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom,

to sweet impossible blossom.

~Li-Young Lee

storms to season your journey

I wish you sunshine on your path and storms to season your journey. I wish you peace in the world in which you live... More I cannot wish you except perhaps love to make all the rest worthwhile.

~Robert A. Ward

The Suitor

We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like the timid suitor.

~Jane Kenyon

I adore irony

twelfth birthday-
the butcher's daughter
turns vegan

Dust of snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

~Robert Frost

midday breeze~
the pop of soap bubbles
across a dandelion field

Because I love you

I cannot tell you that last night in the exhaust-fume impatience
of nearly-stopped traffic
through which cars crept, linked
with short chains of light,the driver at my front failed for whole minutes
to follow closely the blue Buick in front of him,
stopped, in fact, entirely, while a thousand
engines idled in molasses-sticky Virginia heat.
I caught the fine, still cut-out of his face
as he leaned a little out the window, looking,
so I turned, too, and saw that I had missed in long minutes
of waiting: a bank of cloud like descending birds,
a great, bright raspberry moon,
and I was surprised into loving this man
as I have loved others -- ancient-eyed boys reading on benches,
crossing guards in white gloves, businessmen sleeping on trains
-- easily,as I have never loved you.

~Marisa de los Santos

spring dusk
a turtle rests
in the rock garden

Greivance

All over the world people sit hunched over pens and papers notepads and word processors writing and writing. Where do they get their inspiration?
I no longer
have the desire
to share of myself.

~Unknown