Inside you, vault opens behind vault, endlessly

Romanesque Arches

Inside the huge Romanesque church the tourists jostled in the half darkness.
Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.
A few candle flames flickered.

An angel with no face embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:

"Don't be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that's how it's meant to be."

Blind with tears
I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza
together with Mr and Mrs Jones, Mr Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini,
and inside them all vault opened behind vault endlessly.

Tomas Tranströmer, 1931-2015
from New Collected Poems. Translated from the original Swedish by Robin Fulton

All that is life

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

From here: http://calmthings.blogspot.in/2015/03/did-you-hear-that-winters-over.html

We wake as if surprised

Object Permanence
(for John)

We wake as if surprised the other is still there,
each petting the sheet to be sure.

How have we managed our way
to this bed—beholden to heat like dawn
indebted to light. Though we’re not so self-
important as to think everything
has led to this, everything has led to this.

There’s a name for the animal
love makes of us—named, I think,
like rain, for the sound it makes.

You are the animal after whom other animals
are named. Until there’s none left to laugh,
days will start with the same startle
and end with caterpillars gorged on milkweed.

O, how we entertain the angels
with our brief animation. O,
how I’ll miss you when we’re dead.

Nicole Sealey

Courage

"Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.

To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply, and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.

To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.

Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made."

David Whyte, 'Consolations'

The many ways of going on and on...

Calling Card
Kristjana Gunnars

the many small ways of being human

removing rust from old windowsills
sandpapering blue paint off the railing
then paint that has peeled off in straggles

once again shining silver goblets never used
once again wiping rain off the veranda tables

moving rose buses from one spot to another
planting another lilac tree in place of the one lost
yet again watering the everdrooping fuchsias

an endless core of small services
observations on daily life forever incomplete

the many ways of going on and on...

From here: http://calmthings.blogspot.in/2015/03/did-you-hear-that-winters-over.html

Language

"For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else.

That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument.

I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be."

Jeanette Winterson

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/07/21/jeanette-winterson-elinor-wachtel-interview/

Sometimes

The Russian Greatcoat
Theodore Deppe

While my children swim off the breakwater,
while my wife sleeps beside me in the sun,
I recall how you once said you knew
a sure way to paradise or hell.

Years ago, you stood on the Covington bridge,
demanded I throw my coat into the Ohio—
my five dollar "Russian greatcoat,"
my "Dostoevsky coat," with no explanations,
simply because you asked.

From that height, the man-sized coat fell
in slow motion, floated briefly,
one sinking arm bent at the elbow.

At first, I evade the question when my wife asks
as if just thinking of you were an act of betrayal.

The cigarette I shared with you above the river.
Our entrance into the city, your thin black coat
around both our shoulders. Sometimes I can go
weeks without remembering.

March

"... Because the heart
buries its losses again and again
till longing shocks it: bright sun
breaking upon a white-washed necropolis."

Chris Forhan

This afternoon brightness, this blinding flood...

(letter to her with map, terror & excitement)

Rain echoes through the hollow of this
late afternoon light & the shadow
of my hand drags across the Great Lakes,
across states, & it shakes, & O how inexplicable.

I said love when I know I meant predisposition.
I meant empty rooms, sun cascading
through slats after rain, that life I can easily
imagine & want. I meant there is no way

to express the complex architecture of
what you are to me - the you you are in words,
the body of you, the you I don’t even know.
I know what I hope for.  This afternoon

brightness, this blinding flood, this thing
we’ve built up, this heaviness masquerading
as lightness & I just don’t know
what to say.  I can see you standing there,

can almost hear your voice.  I can see the sun
& it’s setting & there are the two of us facing
each other, people made out of words with
real bodies, standing together & breathing.

Nate Pritts

Bright sun breaking upon a white-washed necropolis

Why Did the Kissing Start?

Because of leavings:  silt-drift, silica
that falls and turns to rock in us.

Because we are foolish and will not last.

Because in the murk of dusk
she trilled to the bats in Italian.
Because she is pretty.

O my armada, in a minute
you were sunk, ocean closing
over the cannons and intricate rigging,
swift gift of absolution and forgetting.

Great blue herons, thruways—because
of them, because of the glut of comets
and eclipses amid which we have no choice.

Because we have blood in us and do not own it.

Because her imagination is a forest
with a fox in it, fur silver-tipped, glimpsed
and gone.  Because we are unaffirmed.

Because we are death’s pretty children
and task her patience.  Because the heart

buries its losses again and again
till longing shocks it:  bright sun
breaking upon a white-washed necropolis.

Chris Forhan

A little love goes a long long long way

I Say I Say I Say
Simon Armitage

Anyone here had a go at themselves
for a laugh? Anyone opened their wrists
with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark
at the back, listen hard. Those at the front

in the know, those of us who have, hands up,
let's show that inch of lacerated skin
between the forearm and the fist. Let's tell it
like it is: strong drink, a crimson tidemark

round the tub, a yard of lint, white towels
washed a dozen times, still pink. Tough luck.
A passion then for watches, bangles, cuffs.
A likely story: you were lashed by brambles

picking berries from the woods. Come clean, come good,
repeat with me the punch line 'Just like blood'
when those at the back rush forward to say
how a little love goes a long long long way.

Found, and harbored

Nights in the Neighborhood

Linda Gregg

I carry joy as a choir sings,

but quietly as the dark

carols. To keep the wind away

so the hidden ones will come

out into the street and add

themselves to this array of

stars, constellations and moon.

I notice the ones in pain

shine more than the others.

It’s so they can be found,

I think. Found and harbored.

Crowds

"We worship individuality and long for freedom, but we are invariably drawn to crowds, which leaves us with a resentful ambivalence toward ourselves and others."

"Only together can men free themselves from their burdens of distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd… Each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd."

Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti on Our Fear of Being Touched, the Four Attributes of Crowds, and the Paradox of Why We Join Them

Maria Popova

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/06/crowds-and-power-elias-canetti/

Unsaid

So much of what we live goes on inside–
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.

Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Dana Gioia

Take loneliness

Dear Ezra

I have to confess:
there are abstractions
I no longer go in fear of.

Take loneliness.
I've started calling it solitude.
It feels so new and improved now,
I can honestly say it soaks up time
better than a sponge soaks up water.

The other day I actually washed this poem with it.

Ez, let me tell you,
aging is a Laundromat,
and eventually you find yourself
watching what you spurned
and dreaded for years
spread out in widening gyres,
like sheets fluffed in the dryer.

Life is quite a bit cozier
when you let all the bugaboos—
you know—say, sadness and fear
crawl into bed with you.

Pace them with your breathing
and they fall asleep
fast as a couple of kids.

The other night we huddled together
staring at the moon
as it slid past my window:
big-bellied sail on a wet black sea.

Eileen Moeller

http://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2015/03/eileen-d-moeller-dear-ezra.html