In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,

are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

— Mary Oliver

Epitaph

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.

And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.

And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.

Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on in your eyes
And not your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

- Merrit Malloy

The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip beneath

the still surface on the well of grief

turning down through its black water

to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink,

the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering

the small round coins

thrown by those who wished for something else.

- David Whyte

Perceptual Portal

My antennae sweep and scan

for reception, for a portal

in perception, for a porous

passage to a green breathing

land where every presence

offers itself to be known,

where everything speaks,

even galaxies, even stone,

where interspecies

lovetalk leaps like

flashing fish and flying

dragons in blue-pooled

dream canyons, where poems

sprout from cracked bark

of sequoia and oak, and

madcap music mushrooms

from decay and darkness.

Sometimes human beings listen,

ears tilting in a creaturely way,

tuned to something not entirely

audible though there is no barrier

to reception, and through

this listening we might remember

how to live, hearing the old

voice that still bells forth

from the primal body

who birthed us all,

the old voice reverberating

along tendrils of mycelia

that entwine the human psyche

with the mother tree:

living psyche of Earth.

It’s not a far country or fictional

galaxy, but an unfiltered mode

of consciousness with no screen

to block or deaden the Others

and their always-streaming voices,

their ancient kinships, star-studded

extravaganzas, where even human

beings might harmonize their wildly

necessary sound. I have sojourned

plenty in that stone-talking terrain

but lost the way of return

busy as I was with all varieties

of civilized absurdity,

forgetting I even had

antennae, formed long

before we became human.

But here: a passageway

opens on the mossy edge

of imagination. Shadows

illustrate the way, flicker

and hum their own language.

Praise the revived antennae

and sing with the Others now:

cackling trills, creaking

dreams, moon swoons, rough

poems sprouting from

portals in perception.

- Geneen Marie Haugen

Mindful

Every day

I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight, 
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen, 

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy, 
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional, 

the fearful, the dreadful, 
the very extravagant — 
but of the ordinary, 
the common, the very drab, 

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar, 
I say to myself, 
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world, 
the ocean’s shine, 
the prayers that are made
out of grass? 

- Mary Oliver

To be alive

When we were 

children we used to think 

that when we were grown up 

we would no longer be vulnerable. 

But to grow up 

is to accept 

vulnerability. 

To be alive 

is 

to be vulnerable. 

—Madeleine L’Engle

The Greatest Victory

For all that we speak

as a culture and a people,

of victory and defeat,

of good and evil,

of hero and coward, 

it is none of it quite true.

The truth is that the greatest

victory is to endure with grace

and humor, to stay in the game,

to achieve humility.

- Brian Doyle, 

One Long River of Song:

Notes on Wonder

(tip of the hat to Brendan Leonard's most recent post on his always excellent website)

Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping, 
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you, 
sleeping. I would like to sleep 
with you, to enter 
your sleep as its smooth dark wave 
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent 
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves 
with its watery sun & three moons 
towards the cave where you must descend, 
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver 
branch, the small white flower, the one 
word that will protect you 
from the grief at the center 
of your dream, from the grief 
at the center. I would like to follow 
you up the long stairway 
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands 
to where your body lies 
beside me, and you enter 
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

- Margaret Atwood, 1939

In the Storm

Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing

hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,

five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,

and settled
in a row
behind the ducks --
whose backs were also

covered with snow --
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under

the roof of the duck's tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,

for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away

out over the water
which was still raging.
But, somehow,
they came back

and again the ducks,
like a feathered hedge,
let them
crouch there, and live.

If someone you didn't know
told you this,
as I am telling you this,
would you believe it?

Belief isn't always easy.
But this much I have learned --
if not enough else --
to live with my eyes open.

I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn't a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness --

as now and again
some rare person has suggested --
is a miracle.
As surely it is.

-- Mary Oliver

A Story That Could Be True

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away. 

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by–
you wonder at their calm. 

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”–
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.” 

~ William Stafford

[Setting an intention for the new year: re-start the poetry posts. The beauty of
intentions over resolutions? They can never be broken but are easily restarted.
A wonderful 2018 to each and all! -z]

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

One Great Thing

There's only one great thing

And that one great thing

Is just to live

To open our eyes

To the great light of dawn

Moving across the land

And the beginning of the day

-Inuit saying, per the creators of
"Return to Noatak"

Time

Time is the substance from which I am made. 

Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; 

it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; 

it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.


- Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
                  It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

—Jane Kenyon

The Risk

One runs the risk
of weeping a
little

if one lets
oneself be
tamed.

--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
(arranged quote)

The Cure

The cure for 
anything 

is salt water: 

sweat, 

tears 

or the sea.

 - Isak Dinesen

Working Together

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air

passed at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self,
by forming it well

to the great
intangibles about us.

- David Whyte

A Wreath to the Fish

Who is this fish, still wearing its wealth,
flat on my drainboard, dead asleep,
its suit of mail proof only against the stream?
What is it to live in a stream,
to dwell forever in a tunnel of cold,
never to leave your shining birthsuit,
never to spend your inheritance of thin coins?
And who is the stream, who lolls all day
in an unmade bed, living on nothing but weather,
singing, a little mad in the head,
opening her apron to shells, carcasses, crabs,
eyeglasses, the lines of fisherman begging for
news from the interior-oh, who are these lines
that link a big sky to a small stream
that go down for great things:
the cold muscle of the trout,
the shinning scrawl of the eel in a difficult passage,
hooked-but who is this hook, this cunning
and faithful fanatic who will not let go
but holds the false bait and the true worm alike
and tears the fish, yet gives it up to the basket
in which it will ride to the kitchen
of someone important, perhaps the Pope
who rejoices that his cook has found such a fish
and blesses it and eats it and rises, saying,
"Children, what is it to live in the stream,
day after day, and come at last to the table,
transfigured with spices and herbs,
a little martyr, a little miracle;
children, children, who is this fish?"

—Nancy Willard

A Momentary Creed

I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me

I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me

it extends beyond whatever I may
think I know and all that is real to me

it is the present that it bears away
where has it gone when it has gone from me

there is no place I know outside today
except for the unknown all around me

the only presence that appears to stay 
everything that I call mine it lent me

even the way that I believe the day
for as long as it is here and is me

— W.S. Merwin 
from his Pulitzer-Prize winning book 
The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

Machines

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsicord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsicordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

—Michael Donaghy