The crunch of the gravel road, coming home

While You Are in the Hospital

...If I could really love, I would take away
these tubes dripping lipids and glucose
into your blood. I would liquefy the things
you love and flood them through your veins:

our sleeping dogs' rhythmic breathing, huge
orange trumpets of the amaryllis we thought
would never bloom, the crunch of the gravel
road coming home.

If I could really love,
I would climb onto your narrow back
and wrap myself around, guarding like
a ladybug, or Achilles' mighty shield.

Laurie Cooper

Sweeping up Fallen Leaves

“….Most music tries to control its circumstances, just as most of us do. But there’s another way to live. Accept indeterminacy as a principle, and you see your life in a new light, as a series of seemingly unrelated jewel-like stories within a dazzling setting of change and transformation. Recognize that you don’t know where you stand, and you will begin to watch where you put your feet. That’s when a path appears.

“After a long and arduous journey a young Japanese man arrived deep in a forest where the teacher of his choice was living in a small house he had made. When the student arrived, the teacher was sweeping up fallen leaves. Greeting his master, the young man received no greeting in return. And to all his questions, there were no replies. Realizing there was nothing he could do to get the teacher’s attention, the student went to another part of the same forest and built himself a house. Years later, when he was sweeping up fallen leaves, he was enlightened. He then dropped everything, ran through the forest to his teacher, and said, “Thank you.”

Page 20, 'D.T.Suzuki', Section 1: 'Mountains are Mountains' from ‘Where the Heart Beats - John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists’, by Kay Larson, 2012.

Coming to This

We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.
And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.
Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.

Mark Strand

Possible Life

Going There

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

Jack Gilbert

Diminished

Morning, Thinking of Empire

We press our lips to the enameled rim of the cups
and know this grease that floats
over the coffee will one day stop our hearts.
Eyes and fingers drop onto silverware
that is not silverware. Outside the window, waves
beat against the chipped walls of the old city.
Your hands rise from the rough tablecloth
as if to prophesy. Your lips tremble ...
I want to say to hell with the future.
Our future lies deep in the afternoon.
It is a narrow street with a cart and driver,
a driver who looks at us and hesitates,
then shakes his head. Meanwhile,
I coolly crack the egg of a fine Leghorn chicken.
Your eyes film. You turn from me and look across
the rooftops at the sea. Even the flies are still.
I crack the other egg.
Surely we have diminished one another.

Raymond Carver

The little deaths you live

What's Left
How often now, raging weeping for the days
love gives then takes away, takes from you
the slightly chapped hand laid on the one
you’re pointing at a tree, and the voice
that breathes coffeeberry bush into your mouth. 

The finger that taps and feathers your ear
but the giggle’s gone before you turn around.
The sandalwood scent hanging in the room,
the auburn strand like a flaw in the porcelain,
the off-course nail clipping in the carpet.

The days eat into your stomach, knife you
with longing for relief from love
that you cannot leave or leave alone,
from its rings of fire where you won’t
burn down to ash or be transformed.
You become them, and they keep burning
and have a coffeeberry voice.

Listen how
their rhymes sing
the little deaths you live.

W. S. Di Piero

The Way, not the wayfarer

"To possess anything means to be possessed by it - the world enthralls those who possess some of its goods, whereas "the true faqir should not possess anything and thus not be possessed by anything".

"...Dervishhood in all its meaning is a metaphorical poverty, and amidst all its subordinate aspects there is a transcendent principle. The Divine mysteries come and go over the dervish, so that his affairs are acquired by himself, his actions attributed to himself, and his ideas attached to himself. But when his affairs are freed from the bonds of acquisition, his actions are no more attributed to himself. Then he is the Way, not the wayfarer, i.e, the dervish is a place over which something is passing, not a wayfarer following his own will."

Page 119, 'The Path', from 'The Mystical Dimensions of Islam', Annemarie Schimmel

A single finger outstretched, like a tiny flame

This Was Once a Love Poem

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

It spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

Jane Hirshfield

Just look at September, look at October!

A time to remember the Zenrin poem again, that this moment is enough. And a time to watch the light of October.

The Light of October: https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/TheLightOfOctober

Just look at September, look at October!: http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.in/2010/09/just-look-at-september-look-at-october.html

Name

When did your name
change from a proper noun
to a charm?

Its three vowels
like jewels
on the thread of my breath.

Its consonants
brushing my mouth
like a kiss.

I love your name.
I say it again and again
in this summer rain.

I see it,
discreet in the alphabet,
like a wish.

I pray it
into the night
till its letters are light.

I hear your name
rhyming, rhyming,
rhyming with everything.

Carol Ann Duffy

In Defense of Joy

Defending joy like a trench
defending it from scandal and routine
from misery and the miserable
from absences both transitory
and definitive

Defending joy like a principle
defending it from fright and nightmares
from neutrality and neutrons
from sweet infamy
and grave diagnoses

Defending joy like a flag
defending it from lighting and despair
from the guileless and the guilty
From rhetoric and cardiac arrests
from the endemic and the academic

Defending joy like a destiny
defending it from fire and firemen
from the suicidal and the homicidal
from holidays and oppression
from the obligation to be joyful

Defending joy like a certainty
defending it from rust and filth
from the popular patina of time
from relentment and opportunism
from panderers of laughter

Defending joy like a right
defending it from God and the winter
from capitalization and death
from last names and regrets
from chance
…and from joy itself.

Mario Benedetti

Touching back to Wonder

The Beautiful Changes
Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides  
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you  
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed  

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;  
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves  
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says  
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes  
In such kind ways,  
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose  
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

A Manner of Searching

“Drawing is anyway an exercise in orientation and as such may be compared with other processes of orientation which take place in nature.

When I’m drawing I feel  a little closer to the way birds navigate when flying, or to hares finding shelter when pursued, or to fish knowing where to spawn, or trees finding a way to the light, or bees constructing their cells.

I’m aware of a distant, silent company. Almost as distant as the stars. Company nevertheless. Not because we are in the same universe, but because we are involved – each according to his own mode – in a comparable manner of searching.

Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself."

Page 149, ‘Bento’s Sketchbook’, John Berger

Hold everything dear

Hold Everything Dear
For John Berger

....the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them

the justice of grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching

the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days
as it sinks to becomes what it loves

memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed

the words
the bread

the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door

the yearning to begin again together

the people in the room the people in the street the people

hold everything dear

19th May 2005, Gareth Evans
From 'Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance', John Berger

A bend in the river

Midlife

This is as far as the light
of my understanding
has carried me:
an October morning
a canoe built by hand
a quiet current

above me the trees arc
green and golden
against a cloudy sky

below me the river responds
with perfect reflection
a hundred feet deep
a hundred feet high.

To take a cup of this river
to drink its purple and gray
its golden and green

to see
a bend in the river up ahead
and still
say
yes.

Julie Cadwallader-Staub