Through it all

"Above all, read everything, be kind, and don’t worry. Some bad things are going to happen to you and to those you love. But through it all you will have poetry."

http://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2014/01/01/new-year-letter/

Descend, descend

The Pear

November. One pear
sways on the tree past leaves, past reason.
In the nursing home, my friend has fallen.
Chased, he said, from the freckled woods
by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais.
Delusion too, it seems, can be well read.

He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread.
The old fineness in him hangs on
for dear life. “My mind now?
A small ship under the wake of a large.
They force you to walk on your heels here,
the angles matter. Four or five degrees,
and you’re lost.”

Life is dear to him yet,
though he believes it his own fault he grieves,
his own fault his old friends have turned against him
like crows against an injured of their kind.
There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy.

Descend, descend,
some voice must urge, inside the pear stem.
The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it.
Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.

Jane Hirshfield, 2008

You can begin again, and we are saved every day

In the heat of late afternoon...
Gary Young

In the heat of late afternoon, lightning streaks from a nearly
cloudless sky to the top of the far mesa. At dusk, the whole south
end of the valley blazes as the clouds turn incandescent with
some distant strike. There is a constant congress here between
the earth and the sky. This afternoon a thunderstorm crossed the
valley. One moment the ground was dry, and the next there were
torrents running down the hillsides and arroyos. A quarter-mile off
I could see a downpour bouncing off the sage and the fine clay
soil. I could see the rain approach, and then it hit, drenching me,
and moved on. Ten minutes later I was dry. The rain comes from
heaven, and we are cleansed by it.

Suddenly the meaning of baptism
is clear to me: you can begin again, and we are saved every day.

I will be years gathering up our words

How It Is

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?
A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.  
The dog at the center of my life recognizes  
you've come to visit, he's ecstatic.
In the left pocket, a hole.
In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.  
In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a flinging from the pods of the soul.
My skin presses your old outline.
It is hot and dry inside.

I think of the last day of your life,
old friend, how I would unwind it, paste  
it together in a different collage,
back from the death car idling in the garage,  
back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,  
reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish  
into a ceremony of sandwich,
running the home movie backward to a space  
we could be easy in, a kitchen place
with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.  
I will be years gathering up our words,  
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Maxine Kumin, "How It Is" from Selected Poems 1960-1990.

Homer

(Heinrich Schliemann (1822 – 1890) was a German businessman and a pioneer of the field of archaeology. He was an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer. Schliemann was an archaeological excavator of Hissarlik, now presumed to be the site of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns.)

Schliemann is outside, digging. He’s not
not calling a spade a spade.
The stadium where the Greeks once played
used to stand on this very spot.

Each night, Penelope, operating
in mythical time, unspools the light
gray orb Schliemann has just unearthed. Come daylight,
her hands will restitch it. The suitors sigh, waiting.

And each night I’d watch as my hero curled
himself round home plate, as if he were going
to bat for me. And I’d hold my breath, knowing
a strong enough shot might be heard round the world.

One must imagine Penelope.
One must imagine Penelope happy.
One must imagine Schliemann excavating
the dugouts and outfields of Troy, carbon-dating

the box score stats and the ticket stubs
he pulls from the lurid dirt. He rubs
the remains of Achilles’s rage on his shirt.
What does not kill you can still hurt.

Penelope’s suitors are striking out,
one after another. Their sad swings and misses.
They can’t even get to first base. She’ll cut
the stitches once more, then blow them all kisses.

Odysseus won’t care that the orb is undone.
He’ll take a swing at it with all his might.
The ball takes flight. Odysseus takes flight.
It feels to Penelope like he’s been gone

since the dawn of mankind, but he’s already zoomed
round third and flies like an arrow toward home,
as the unearthly orb trails its guts in the air — 
the yarn fanning out like Penelope’s hair — 

not knowing yet whether to fall foul or fair.

Troy Jollimore

How Paris Would Look With Outdoor Ads Replaced By Art

"The more difficult our lives, the more a graceful depiction of a flower might move us. The tears — if they come — are in response not to how sad the image is, but how pretty.

We should be able to enjoy an ideal image without regarding it as a false picture of how things usually are. A beautiful, though partial, vision can be all the more precious to us because we are so aware of how rarely life satisfies our desires."

Alain de Botton, 'Art as Therapy'

How Paris Would Look With Outdoor Ads Replaced By Art

http://www.fastcocreate.com/3026140/how-paris-would-look-with-outdoor-ads-replaced-by-art#1

To live amid the great vanishing

Against Certainty

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 strictness.

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.

Stanley Kunitz

From Remembering Stanley Kunitz, by Jane Hirshfield

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Constantine Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.


His other famous poem, Waiting for the Barbarians.

A day so happy

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the 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.

Czeslaw Milosz

From here: http://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2014/02/06/a-day-so-happy/

"I don’t think the word ‘grace’ is overstating it. The unexpected and surprised note of delight spills out from observations of the natural world and towards the speaker’s past, his very own body, and even encompasses ‘evil’, which Milosz had cause more than most to disown."

Change must come from within :) :)

Zen Jokes:  http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/Miscellaneous/Zen_Jokes.html

Be here now.
Be someplace else later.
Is that so complicated?

To Find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.

Zen is not easy.
It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have?
Bugger all.

A Zen master visiting New York City goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, "Make me one with everything."
The hot dog vendor fixes a hot dog and hands it to the Zen master, who pays with a $20 bill.
The vendor puts the bill in the cash box and closes it. "Excuse me, but where’s my change?" asks the Zen master.
The vendor responds, "Change must come from within."

Touch me, remind me who I am

​Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.

Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.

It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;

and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.

What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.

So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.

Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Stanley Kunitz, From 'Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected'

That you came to love it, that was the gift

Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World

If the gods bring to you
a strange and frightening creature,
accept the gift
as if it were one you had chosen.

Say the accustomed prayers,
oil the hooves well,
caress the small ears with praise.

Have the new halter of woven silver
embedded with jewels.
Spare no expense, pay what is asked,
when a gift arrives from the sea.

Treat it as you yourself
would be treated, brought speechless and naked
into the court of a king.

And when the request finally comes,
do not hesitate even an instant----
stroke the white throat,
the heavy trembling dewlaps
you'd come to believe were yours,
and plunge in the knife.

Not once
did you enter the pasture
without pause,
without yourself trembling,
that you came to love it, that was the gift.

Let the envious gods take back what they can.

Jane Hirshfield

Audio: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20441

Thanks, K.

Tending your inner garden, eyes closed

​​And this is where I fell in love with Hank Hudepohl -

What inspires your writing? 

Sometimes I'm inspired by the way light falls across the kitchen floor, or by one of my wife's long, curly hairs on the sleeve of my sweater, or by the way my youngest daughter calls everything "blue" as she practices her knowledge of colors. For me, inspiration is a mix of imagination and observation; it is the outcome of paying attention to the world around you.

http://hankhudepohl.com/interview.html

Family Garden

Tell me again about your garden
Tell me how you planted, in the small
flat of mountain land, corn seed

and bean seed, how your finger poked the soil
then you dropped in three dark bean seeds
for every yellow seed of corn.

Trees and mountains collared your land,
but the fenced garden opened freely
to sun and warm summer rains.

Your potato rows bulged in July. You ached
from digging them up, your hands down in dirt,
the cool lump of a tuber, brown-spotted,

just recovered, a greeting, like shaking hands.
Baskets full of bumpy brown potatoes filled
your basement until fall, until you gave

away what you could, throwing out the rest.
You gave away honey from the white hive too,
that box of bees beside the garden,

honey stored in Mason jars, a clearest honey
nectar from lin tree blossoms and wild flowers.
The bright taste of honey on the tongue

spoke of the place, if a place can be known
by the activity of bees and a flavor in the mouth,
if a person can be known by small acts

such as these, such as the way you rocked
summer evenings from a chair on the porch
tending your inner garden, eyes closed.

"Family Garden" by Hank Hudepohl from The Journey of Hands. © Word Press, 2007

The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

Mark Strand

The Mercy Seat

And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this weighing of the truth.

The Mercy Seat, Johnny Cash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGSTiDOjKU

Thanks, K.