Advice for those starting out

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.

—Ron Koertge

Moving

For my part,
I travel
not to go anywhere,
but to go.

I travel
for travel’s sake.

The great affair is
to move.

 – Robert Louis Stevenson

Everending, Always Beginning

I don't pay attention to the
world Ending.
It has ended for me
many Times
and began again in the morning.

-- Nayyirah Waheed

The onion-skin transparence of the living

The magician seemed to promise that
something torn to bits might be
mended without a
seam,

that what had vanished might
reappear,

that a scattered handful of doves or dust
might be reunited by a word,

that a paper rose consumed by fire
could be made to bloom
from a pile of ash.

But everyone knew
that it was only
an illusion.

The true magic of this broken world
lies in the ability of the
things it contains

to vanish,
to become so thoroughly lost,
that they might never have existed in the first place.

- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, p. 339
(arranged quote)

Reckless Poem

Today again I am hardly myself.
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.

It flows through me
like the blue wave.
Green leaves – you may believe this or not –
have once or twice
emerged from the tips of my fingers

somewhere
deep in the woods,
in the reckless seizure of spring.

Though, of course, I also know that other song,
the sweet passion of one-ness.

Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
      tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
      is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything
      until I came to myself.

And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand,
I have flown from the other window of myself
to become white heron, blue whale,
      red fox, hedgehog.
Oh, sometimes already my body has felt like the body of a flower!
Sometimes already my heart is a red parrot, perched
      among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming.

—Mary Oliver