Monday Poem

For The Sake Of Strangers, by Dorianne Laux

2012-01-23T11:38:00.001-08:00

For The Sake Of Strangers

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another – a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them –
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

by Dorianne Laux, from What We Carry, 1994

The Way It Is, by William Stafford

2012-01-16T13:51:00.001-08:00

Hello Poets,
William Stafford’s journey with words began most mornings before sunrise. This simple poem was written 26 days before he passed. The day before he wrote “Haycutters” and four days later on August 6, 1993 he wrote “November” in honor of Hiroshima Day.
One of his students, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, wrote, “In our time there has been no poet who revived human hearts and spirits more convincingly than William Stafford. There has been no one who gave more courage to a journey with words, and silence, and an awakened life.”

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

By William Stafford, from The Way It Is, 1998

Sitting In The Orchard, by Jelaluddin Rumi

2012-01-09T13:26:00.000-08:00

Hello Poets,
Rumi imagining more, the taste and scent of reality.
Best,
Sam

Sitting In The Orchard

A man sits in an orchard, fruit trees full
and the vines plump. He has his head
on his knee; his eyes are closed.

His friend says, “Why stay sunk in mystical
meditation when the world is like this?
Such visible grace.”

He replies, “The outer is an elaboration
of the inner. I prefer the origin.”

Natural beauty is a tree limb reflected
in the water of a creek, quivering there, not
there. The growing that moves in the soul

is more real than tree limbs and reflections.
We laugh and feel happy or sad over all this.

Try instead to get a scent
of the true orchard. Taste the vineyard
within the vineyard.

by Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), from Rumi the Book of Love, 2003
translated from the Persian by Coleman Barks

Topography, by Sharon Olds

2011-12-19T14:02:00.000-08:00

Hello Poets,
Sharon Olds on the unification of a divided nation. This is my kind of politics.
Best,
Sam

Topography

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

by Sharon Olds, from The Gold Cell, 1987

Prayer, by James Armstrong

2011-12-05T09:52:00.001-08:00

Hello Poets,
James Armstrong lived for a year in the middle of Lake Superior ("the blue that looks through us") at Isle Royale National Park.
I imagine him waking up on a winter morning to the emptiness and a wild beating heart.
Best,
Sam

Prayer

If we don’t believe in heaven, who reads the letters we mail there
every evening?
Children send most of them, kneeling by the bedpost
imagining the universe under the care of a father
who rumbles behind the newspaper
smelling of cigarettes and Old Spice.
To grow up is to lose one’s God at sea –
better to lose one than be one.
If you believe the world is perfect,
think of Keats dying young.
I never would have seen it if I hadn’t believed it,
the saying goes. Somebody has to awaken us
to the time of day it is when the earth is empty
of any intention, or any human presence.

And yet it is noon, and here you are – your blue headlands
and swords, your wave-moistened silences.
As if at the heart of things
there were a heart.

by James Armstrong, from Blue Lash, 2006

Happiness, by Jane Kenyon

2011-11-14T10:37:00.001-08:00

Hello Poets,
A surprise, a return, a remembrance. Warmth reappearing on cold fingers. Lentil stew, bread out of the oven, flickering flames on the burning log.
Bless you Jane Kenyon.
Best,
Sam

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 basket maker,
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.

by Jane Kenyon from Otherwise, 1996

Warm Spell, by Bill Holms

2011-10-31T14:29:00.001-07:00

Warm Spell

A long November warm spell;
all the blizzards still asleep.
Bees hum unbelieving
around still blooming flowers.
Leaves, piled in compost heaps,
move around uneasily.
The dried branch bends down
in warm wind,
inviting them home again.

People who haven’t spoken in years
smile and greet each other in the street.
Relatives forget old quarrels
over family heirlooms.
The town atheist admits that God exists;
and the town drunk drinks coffee on his front porch.
The Lutheran minister forgets
St. Paul and the furrows
vanish from around his mouth.
Children are conceived in the open air
under willow trees by the river.

Like the life in the body,
this cannot last, so everyone
wastes time joyfully,
not even remembering
the old wounds they gave their spirit.
The old man on the stoop
in front of the beer joint
remembers his first lover,
and his toes begin dancing
around inside his shoes.

by Bill Holms, from The Dead Get By with Everything, 1990

Whispered Into The Ground, by William Stafford

2011-10-17T15:30:00.000-07:00

Whispered Into The Ground

Where the wind ended and we came down
it was all grass. Some of us found
a way to the dirt – easy and rich.
When it rained, we grew, except
those of us caught up in leaves, not touching
earth, which always starts things.
Often we sent off our own
just as we’d done, floating that
wonderful wind that promised new land.

Here now spread low, flat on this
precious part of the world, we miss
those dreams and the strange old places
we left behind. We quietly wait.
The wind keeps telling us something
we want to pass on to the world:
Even far things are real.

by William Stafford, from Stories That Could Be True, 1977

Sky, by William Stafford

2011-10-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

Sky

I like you with nothing. Are you
what I was? What I will be?
I look out there by the hour,
so clear, so sure. I could
smile, or frown – still nothing.

Be my father, be my mother,
great sleep of blue; reach
far within me; open doors,
find whatever is hiding; invite it
for many clear days in the sun.

When I turn away I know
you are there. We won’t forget
each other: every look is a promise.
Others can’t tell what you say
when it’s the blue voice, when
you come to the window and look for me.

Your word arches over
the roof all day. I know it
within my bowed head, where
the other sky listens.
You will bring me
everything when the time comes.

by William Stafford, from Sometimes I Breathe, 1992

After Love, by Maxine Kumin

2011-10-03T15:33:00.000-07:00

After Love

Afterward, the compromise
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

by Maxine Kumin, from Selected Poems 1960-1990, 1965

What Is Usual Is Not What Is Always, by Jane Hirschfield

2011-09-26T13:53:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
Let's not forget, says Jane Hirshfield, the peculiarities, oddities and aberrations of everyday life.
More real than vacuous hopes and promises or soothing narratives, exceptions arrive somehow and take root.
These simple offerings are the odd matter to crystalize new worlds around.
Best,
Sam

What Is Usual Is Not What Is Always

What is usual is not what is always.
As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back.

Footsteps resume their clipped edges,
birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear.

Where were they? By what route did they return?

A woman mute for years
forms one perfect sentence before she dies.

The bitter young man tires;
the aged one sitting now in his body is tender,
his face carries no regret for his choices.

What is usual is not what is always, the day says again.
It is all it can offer.

Not ungraspable hope, not the consolation of stories.
Only the reminder that there is exception.

by Jane Hirschfield, from After, 2006

The Way In, by Linda Hogan

2011-08-23T15:05:00.001-07:00

The Way In

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.

by Linda Hogan, from Rounding the Human Corners, 2008

Walt Whitman, from the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass

2011-07-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
Still looking for Walt Whitman's thread of democratic and fraternal humanism?
Here are some frayed beginnings, remembrances of one who contained multitudes and wasn't afraid to begin again.
Best,
Sam

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school, or church, or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

by Walt Whitman, from the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass
(reprinted in Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition,
ed. by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley 1965).

An Echo Of Wang Wei’s Reply To Vice Magistrate Chang- Stephen Levine

2011-07-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
Stephen Levine lives with his wife Ondrea in mountains of northern New Mexico.
His work can be seen at www.levinetalks.com
Best,
Sam

An Echo Of Wang Wei’s Reply To Vice Magistrate Chang

Growing old I love the quiet that used to
disturb me. I have distance on my life.
The boast and pity of self-regard
have fallen somewhat behind.
Heading home, the home I carry with me,
I settle into the clouds. On the mountain
I sit quietly in a sage meadow
visited by the same bees that make lovers
of flowering bushes.
I become part of the golden comb hidden
in the hive humming with delight.

by Stephen Levine, from Inquiring Mind, Fall 2010

A Cedary Fragrance, by Jane Hirshfield

2011-06-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

A Cedary Fragrance

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water –

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.

by Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001

To Be Alive, by Gregory Orr

2011-05-31T11:37:00.000-07:00

To Be Alive

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That's crudely put, but…

If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

by Gregory Orr, from Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved, 2005

Winning, by Linda Gregg

2011-05-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

Winning

There is having by having
and having by remembering.
All of it a glory, but what is past
is the treasure. What remains.
What is worn is what has lived.
Death is too familiar, even though
it adds weight. Passion adds size
but allows too much harm.
There is a poetry that asks for
this life of silence in midday.
A branch of geranium in a glass
that might root. Poems of time
now and time then, each
containing the other carefully.

by Linda Gregg from Things and Flesh, 1999

Poetry Jam at the White House

2011-05-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Sam is having computer trouble this week. So in the meantime, here is a film of the Poetry Jam at the White House, on May 11, introduced by the President.

An Invocation To Pan, by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

2011-04-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
The lyrical English poet Hilary Llewellyn-Williams works with direct, urgent and sensuous language to conjure up the shamanic heart of nature.
Enjoy,
Sam

An Invocation To Pan

Come, eye of the forest
come, beast-footed
stag-crowned
man-membered; come, tree-sinewed
soil-rubbed, leaf-garlanded;
come, goat-nimble
come, bird-joyful
come, fox-cunning;
out of the boles and burrows
out of the humps and hollows
out of the heaps of leaves;
out of mist and darkness
out of sunshafts, gold motes,
flowers, insects humming:
brown lying down in summer by the river
your flute notes cool
and black striding up from the woods in winter
wreathed in fogs, your voice belling;
come, old one, come, green one,
tree-protector, beast-befriender
good shepherd, wise steward:
come, earth-brother
long long lost
long long lost
let us find you
call you
call you up, out, back, forth –
be here now!
O musk of fur sour
in the wind, your branched head
through the thickets
coming, coming
in your power, your power, your power.

by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, from Hummadruz, 2001

Assurance, by Bill Stafford

2011-04-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
The Bill Stafford poem below "seemed to be a way we could raise our faces and talk back to the darkness around us."
Following his sudden death in 1993 "Assurance" was sent to hundreds of his friends and readers.
Thanks to the many of you who inquired about missing the Monday Poems. It was the combined effects of my electronic ineptitude and the demands of spring gardening.
Best,
Sam

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightening before it says
its names- and then the clouds' wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles- you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head-
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

by William Stafford, from Smoke’s Way, 1983

King of the River (excerpt), Stanley Kunitz

2011-03-07T13:09:00.000-08:00

Hello Poets,
In this last section of a shamanic poem about dying salmon and a dissolving self, Stanley Kunitz falls back from false assurances and rational choice to a deeper complexity that undoes ordinary reality, allowing another reality to enter.
Best,
Sam

King of the River (excerpt)

If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery,
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.

by Stanley Kunitz, from The Testing-Tree, 1971

The Real Work, by Wendell Berry

2011-02-22T11:34:00.000-08:00

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

by Wendell Berry, from Collected Poems, 1987

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond- E.E. Cummings

2011-02-14T20:16:00.000-08:00

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

by E.E. Cummings, from ViVa, 1931

When I Am In The Kitchen, by Jeanne Marie Beaumont

2011-02-09T12:24:00.000-08:00

When I Am In The Kitchen
I think about the past. I empty the ice-cube trays
crack crack cracking like bones, and I think
of decades of ice cubes and of John Cheever,
of Anne Sexton making cocktails, of decades
of cocktail parties, and it feels suddenly far
too lonely at my counter. Although I have on hooks
nearby the embroidered apron of my friend's
grandmother and one my mother made for me
for Christmas 30 years ago with gingham I had
coveted through my childhood. In my kitchen
I wield my great aunt's sturdy black-handled
soup ladle and spatula, and when I pull out
the drawer, like one in a morgue, I visit
the silverware of my husband's grandparents.
We never met, but I place this in my mouth
every day and keep it polished out of duty.
In the cabinets I find my godmother's
teapot, my mother's Cambridge glass goblets,
my mother-in-law's Franciscan plates, and here
is the cutting board my first husband parqueted
and two potholders I wove in grade school.
Oh the past is too much with me in the kitchen,
where I open the vintage metal recipe box,
robin's egg blue in its interior, to uncover
the card for Waffles, writ in my father's hand
reaching out from the grave to guide me
from the beginning, "sift and mix dry ingredients"
with his note that this makes "3 waffles in our
large pan" and around that our an unbearable
round stain of egg yolk or melted butter?

by Jeanne Marie Beaumont, excerpted from Burning of the Three Fires, 2010

A Brief For The Defense, by Jack Gilbert

2011-01-31T20:01:00.000-08:00

A Brief For The Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowing out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

by Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven: Poems, 2005

Poetry, by Pablo Neruda

2011-01-28T23:00:00.000-08:00

Hello Poets,
"The truth of who you are calls to you through the poems you love."
This from Pablo Neruda is one of those poems. A vital, voiced wisdom when spoken aloud, an invitation to make the first faint line of your life.
Blessings,
Sam

Poetry

And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid,
from Memorial de IslaNegra, 1964.

Love After Love, by Derek Walcott

2011-01-17T18:17:00.000-08:00

Hello Poets,
Glyn Maxwell ascribes the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s power to his verse which ". . . is constantly trembling with a sense of the body in time, the self slung across meter, whether meter is steps, or nights, or breath, whether lines are days, or years, or tides."
Best,
Sam

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door,
in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

by Derek Walcott, from Collected Poems 1948-1984, 1986

Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis, by Philip Whalen

2011-01-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis

I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick
                        splashed picture- bug, leaf,
                        caricature of Teacher
            on paper held together now by little more than ink
            & their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it-
Cheered as it whizzed by-
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.

by Philip Whalen, from Overtime, 1999

I Am Going To Start Living Like A Mystic, Ed Hirsch

2011-01-03T13:42:00.001-08:00

Hello Poets,
Looking for something to be this year? Ed Hirsch takes a walk to find his path.
Best,
Sam

I Am Going To Start Living Like A Mystic

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusty snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage – silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.

by Edward Hirsch, from Lay Back the Darkness, 2003

Eternity, William Blake

2010-12-27T12:29:00.001-08:00

Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise.

by William Blake, from The Complete Poetry
and Prose of William Blake, 1997

Footnote To Howl, Allan Ginsburg

2010-12-20T10:54:00.000-08:00

Hello Poets,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti promised to publish Allan Ginsberg's poem Howl after it was read to a stunned audience on October 7, 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Since Howl was too short to make a entire book, Ginsberg completed Part II and Footnote which follows below.
In response to Ginsberg's reading, Michael McClure famously wrote: "Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America..."
Best,
Sam

Footnote To Howl

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
   Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
   The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
   and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
   holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
   angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
   holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is
   holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy
   Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas-
   sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering
   beggars holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks
   of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop
   apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana
   hipsters peace & junk & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy
   the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the
   mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the
   middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-
   ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &
   Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow
   Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the
   clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy
   the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the
   locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-
   tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the
   abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!
   bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent
   kindness of the soul!

by Allen Ginsberg, from Howl, 1956

Lighthouse, by Jane Hirshfield

2010-12-13T21:55:00.000-08:00

Hello Poets,
Jane Hirshfield captures the slow dance of consciousness in image and metaphor, there and then gone.
Take your time, read it several times over, commit it to memory. There is much depth and simple beauty here.
Best,
Sam

Lighthouse

Its vision sweeps its one path
like an aged monk raking a garden,
his question long ago answered or moved on.
Far off, night-grazing horses,
breath scented with oatgrass and fennel,
step through it, disappear, step through it, disappear.

by Jane Hirshfield, from The Wisdom Anthology
of North American Buddhist Poetry
ed. Andrew Schelling, 2005

The Journey, by Mary Oliver, from Dream Work

2010-12-11T18:06:00.000-08:00

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.

by Mary Oliver, from Dream Work, 1994
________________________

So long as you haven't experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
- Goethe

Allegiances, by William Stafford

2010-11-29T13:31:00.000-08:00

Hello Poets,
As the nights lengthen, I turn to Bill Stafford's poems. They nourish with their common wisdom and everyday joy.
Bill famously wrote a poem every morning before sunrise. Allegiances is from his 1970 volume of the same name and I can imagine him this cold, dim morning sitting down in the dark before everyone wakes and writing these simple truths.
Best to you all,
Sam

Allegiances

It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked—
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:—we
encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.

by William Stafford, from Allegiances, 1970

The Third Body, by Robert Bly

2010-11-22T12:37:00.000-08:00

The Third Body

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do
not long
At this moment to be older, or younger, or born
In any other nation, or any other time, or any other
place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not
talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do
not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
He sees her hands close around a book she hands to
him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have promised to love that body.
Age may come; parting may come; death will come!
A man and a woman sit near each other;
As they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
Someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

by Robert Bly, from Eating the Honey of Words, 1999

Lines Written In The Days Of Growing Darkness, by Mary Oliver

2010-11-16T09:10:00.000-08:00

Lines Written In The Days Of Growing Darkness

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to say,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

through the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

by Mary Oliver, from New York Times, Sunday, November 7, 2010

The Low Road, by Marge Piercy

2010-11-10T12:07:00.000-08:00

Hello Poets,
What's unnerving after the recent election is the atomized, isolated, knocked down feeling of being clobbered. But the vanquished are also strangely at liberty to look forward to a new beginning, unencumbered by the ruinous missteps that led to defeat.
As Marge Piercy knows, it happens one person at a time and grows from there.
Best,
Sam

The Low Road

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t blame them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

by Marge Piercy, from The Moon is Always Female, 1980

The Wind Blows Through The Doors Of My Heart- Deborah Digges

2010-11-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
When Deborah Digges died in the spring of 2009, at the age of fifty-nine, she left a gathering of poems from which this is taken.
It speaks of a disturbing inner wind, a change of seasons gale that touches everything, leaving no settled thing the same.
Best,
Sam

The Wind Blows Through The Doors Of My Heart

The wind blows
through the doors of my heart.
It scatters my sheet music
that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.
Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,
flattened against the screens.
The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds' nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through the rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love. And my dresses
they are lifted like brides come to rest
on the bedstead, crucifixes,
dresses tangled in trees in the rooms
of my heart. To save them
I've thrown flowers to fields,
so that someone would pick them up
and know where they came from.
Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.
Off with the clothesline pinning anything, my mother's trousseau.
It is not for me to say what is this wind
or how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.
Wing after wing, through the rooms of the dead
the wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,
no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.
It is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.
But we will never lie down again.

by Deborah Digges, from The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart, 2010

Envoy, by Billy Collins

2010-10-25T14:53:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
I'm not a writer, but if I was, my first book would be sent out into the dark world with similar feelings.
Billy Collins, thanks goodness, is an exceptional writer. This was the last poem in his 2008 collection, Ballistics.
Best,
Sam

Envoy

Go, little book,
out of this house and into the world,

carriage made of paper rolling toward town
bearing a single passenger
beyond the reach of this jitter pen,
far from the desk and the nosy gooseneck lamp.

It is time to decamp,
put on a jacket and venture outside,
time to be regarded by other eyes,
bound to be held in foreign hands.

So, off you go, infants of the brain,
with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice:

stay out a late as you like,
don’t bother to call or write
and talk to as many strangers as you can.

by Billy Collins, from Ballistics, 2008

Towards A New Renaissance, by Rachael Boast

2010-10-11T10:16:00.001-07:00

Hello Poets,
The remarkable ~~Scottish~~ English poet Rachael Boast writes a note to a friend.
How many such seekers do we know?
Best,
Sam

Towards A New Renaissance

Dear Friend with a crescent moon above your door,
I have heard that you are overcome by poetry,

that you are afloat somewhere inside the world’s great
sorrow, with the language of love as your compass.

You have been gone a long time, a white sail
full of clear sky, and no land in sight.

One such as you will become an ocean unto itself
because you learn and live your craft well.

Don’t forget to report back to us - I have a feeling
the universal winds are sensitive to words.

by Rachael Boast, from The Heart as Origami, 2005

Miracles, Walt Whitman

2010-09-27T15:56:00.000-07:00

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge
      of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at
      night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer
       forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining
       so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in
     spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread
       with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim — the rocks — the motion of the
      waves — the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

      by Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892 (death bed edition)

A Hand, by Jane Hirschfield

2010-09-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

A Hand

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping-
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink.

The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

by Jane Hirschfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001

Four Poems In One, by Anne Porter

2010-08-30T22:35:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
Anne Porter finds dread certainty in an uncertain world. This is the last stanza.
Best,
Sam

Four Poems In One

We know little
We can tell less
But one thing I know
One thing I can tell
I will see you again in Jerusalem
Which is of such beauty
No matter what country you come from
You will be more at home there
Than ever with father or mother
Than even with lover or friend
And once we’re within her borders
Death will hunt us in vain.

by Anne Porter, from An Altogether Different Language, 1994

2010-08-24T10:48:00.001-07:00

Hello Poets,
Let's not press strangers to explain themselves. Naomi Shihab Nye says serve tea and wait.
We have much to learn about hospitality from Arab culture.
Best,
Sam

Red Brocade

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.

Let’s go back to that.
Rice? Pine Nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.

by Naomi Shihab Nye, from 19 Varieties of Gazelle, 2005

A Sane Revolution, by D.H. Lawrence

2010-08-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
D.H. Lawrence had it right. Revolutions are about having fun.
Enough of this stony-faced, sober seriousness. Stop working so hard and things will change radically.
Best,
Sam

A Sane Revolution

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.

Don't do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.

Don't do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.

Don't do it for equality,
do it because we've got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.

Don't do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.

Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let's abolish labour, let's have done with laboring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.
Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!

by D.H. Lawrence, from Selected Poems, edited by Keith Sagar, 1972

The Real Work, by Wendell Berry

2010-08-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck

2010-08-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
Louise Gluck's poems seem to come from the direct center, shimming but grounded, prophetic and real, a genuine voice for our times.
Best,
Sam

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

by Louise Gluck, from The Wild Iris, 1993.

Letting Go Of What Cannot Be Held Back - Bill Holm

2010-07-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
We lost Bill Holm, the great Minnesota poet, last year. I still miss him, his love of islands, music and the dark prairie earth. Here's a poem he would want us to remember.
Best,
Sam

Letting Go Of What Cannot Be Held Back

Let go of the dead now.
The rope in the water,
the cleat on the cliff,
do them no good anymore.
Let them fall, sink, go away,
become invisible as they tried
so hard to do in their own dying.
We needed to bother them
with what we call help.
We were the needy ones.
The dying do their own work with
tidiness, just the right speed,
sometimes even a little
satisfaction. So quiet down.
Let them go. Practice
your own song. Now.

by Bill Holm, from Playing the Black Piano, 2004

The Summer Day, Mary Oliver

2010-07-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

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?

by Mary Oliver, from House of Light, 1990

Hafiz: Absolutely Clear

2010-07-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

Absolutely Clear

Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

by Hafiz, from The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz,
translated from the Persian by Daniel Ladinsky

Tune, by Kay Ryan

2010-06-28T12:33:00.001-07:00

Hello Poets,
Few ask as compelling questions as Kay Ryan. Here's one on the endless passings, big, blue and deep.
Best,
Sam

Tune

Imagine a sea
of ultramarine
suspending a
million jellyfish
as soft as moons.
Imagine the
interlocking uninsistent
tunes of drifting things.
This is the deep machine
that powers the lamps
of dreams and accounts
for their bluish tint.
How can something
so grand and serene
vanish again and again
without a hint?

by Kay Ryan, from The Niagara River, 2005

Cottonmouth Country, Louise Gluck

2010-06-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
As yet no poems lament the death and destruction on-going in the Gulf. No poems illuminate the oily mysteries of life and death in deep water. Now isn't NYC post 9-11 when poems where taped to lamp posts.
This poem, from Louise Gluck's first book of poetry, may point the way.
Best,
Sam

Cottonmouth Country

Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras.
And there were other signs
That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us
By land: among the pines
An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss
Reared in the polluted air.
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
I know. I also left a skin there.

by Louise Gluck, from The First Four Books of Poems, 1995

'Dust' by Dorianne Laux

2010-06-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

Dust

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor -
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes -
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

by Dorianne Laux, from What We Carry, 1994

Rebus by Jane Hirshfield

2010-06-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
Jane Hirshfield works life's damp clay, taking up our many shortcomings, piecing together its colors and tastes, seeking out its obscure language with a question.
A rebus is one those puzzles in which words are represented by pictures and letters.
Best,
Sam

Rebus

You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus- slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life-
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

by Jane Hirshfield, from Given Salt, Given Sugar, 2001

The Dance - C.K. Williams

2010-05-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
C.K. Williams spins a yarn from one of those roadside places, catching a gesture in the fading light that embraces unconscious desire, mending what we didn't think was broken and connecting us to the wide, sad world.
Best,
Sam

The Dance

A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and
   somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man
   she’s with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained
   but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and
   moving him with effortless grace
into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all
   rhythmically solid music in this second rate cafe,

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some
   sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,
nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be
   admired or be repentant for,
but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we misbe-
   lieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which
   sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

by C.K. Williams from Repair, 1999

Never To Forget - Arundhati Roy

2010-05-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

To love.
To be loved.
To never forget your own insignificance,
To never get used to the unspeakable violence
and the vulgar disparity of life around you.
To seek joy in the saddest places.
To pursue beauty to its lair.
To never simplify what is complicated
or complicate what is simple.
To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch.
To try and understand.
To never look away.
And never, never to forget.

Arundhati Roy, from The End of Imagination, 1998

Trapeze by Deborah Diggs

2010-05-10T11:05:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
This dark and captivating poem by the late Deborah Diggs paints a cloudy picture one is not likely to forget, of life at the edge and everything timelessly flying by.
Best,
Sam

Trapeze

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must a take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum from eternity to evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don’t call them back, don’t call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

by Deborah Diggs, from Trapeze, 2005

A Dharma Story

2010-05-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
Deep time pushes consciousness to its limits, demanding a true account of what's before our eyes. Thus when walking in the woods, two poets are better than one, with the second reminding the first that unknowing is the source of wisdom.
The following story is told by Dharma teacher Wes Nisker.
Best,
Sam

A Dharma Story
"Gary Snyder was once camping with fellow poet Lew Welch in the Mendocino redwoods.
As they looked up at trees that were hundreds of years old, Snyder said,
"I’ll bet the trees are thinking that we humans are just passing through."
Welch looked around and replied,
"And the rocks around here must be thinking that those trees are just passing through."

Wes Nisker, from Inquiring Mind, Vol. 26 No. 2, Spring 2010

Mark Strand: The Night, The Porch

2010-04-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
if we can find sacred distance from our troubling minds, Mark Strand seems to be saying, doors open and what we seek vanishes as quickly as it appears.
So let the spring wind blow you about, as it has me the past few days.
Best,
Sam

The Night, The Porch

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing --
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

by Mark Strand, from New Selected Poems, 2007

Marge Piercy: To Have Without Holding

2010-04-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
Marge Piercy on the difficult dance of love. Keep dancing, moment by moment.
Best,
Sam

To Have Without Holding

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

by Marge Piercy, from The Moon is Always Female, 1980

Bird (by Pablo Neruda)

2010-04-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
As I prepare to do battle with birds this spring - Canyon Towhees, House Finches, Curved Billed Thrashers, Shrub Jays - making meals of tender seedlings and ripening fruits, I remember what Alan Chadwick once insisted, "You miss the whole point of the garden if you fail to notice the birds."
Pablo Neruda becomes bird, sings as a bird, views the world from above and gives us this poem.
Best,
Sam

Bird

It was passed from one bird to another,
the whole gift of the day.
The day went from flute to flute,
went dressed in vegetation,
in flights which opened a tunnel
through which the wind would pass
to where birds were breaking open
the dense blue air –
and there, night came in.

When I returned from so many journeys,
I stayed suspended and green
between sun and geography –
I saw how wings worked,
how perfumes are transmitted
by feathery telegraph,
and from above I saw the path,
the springs and the roof tiles,
the fishermen at their trades,
the trousers of the foam;
I saw it all from my green sky.
I had no more alphabet
than the swallows in their courses,
the tiny, shining water
of the small bird on fire
which dances out of the pollen.

by Pablo Neruda, from Fully Empowered, 1962
translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid

Watching Dogwood Blossoms Fall In A Parking Lot Off Route 46

2010-04-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,

August Kleinzahler is not easy to read. He jumps around celebrating the mundane weird world with a gentle hand that leaves the both reader and the poet on the side lines.

As Stephen Burt in the New York Times Book Review wrote ". . . he never says more than he should, rarely repeats himself and keeps his focus not on the man who speaks the poems (and whose personality comes across anyway) but on what that man sees and on what he can hear.”

Maybe that's what we need, crystal clear egoless comprehension as the first step to wise action.

Full disclosure: I spent my high school years off Route 46, smelling those same benzene fumes.

Best,

Sam

Watching Dogwood Blossoms Fall In A Parking Lot Off Route 46

Dogwood blossoms drift down at evening
   as semis pound past Phoenix Seafood
and the Savarin plant, west to the Turnpike,
   Paterson or hills beyond.
The adulterated, pearly light and bleak perfume
   of benzene and exhaust
make this solitary tree and the last of its bloom
as stirring somehow after another day
at the hospital with Mother and the ashen old ladies
lost to TV reruns flickering overhead
as that shower of peach blossoms Tu Fu watched
   fall on the riverbank
from the shadows of the Jade Pavilion,
   while ghosts and the music
of yellow orioles found out the seam of him
   and slowly cut along it.
by August Kleinzahler, from Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, 2008

Prayer Is An Egg - Rumi

2010-03-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
It's spring, the spade stands ready, the seeds are waiting.
Rumi warns of the danger of delay and denial.
Best,
Sam

Prayer Is An Egg

On Resurrection Day God will say, “What did you do with
the strength and energy

your food gave you on earth? How did you use your eyes?
What did you make with

your five senses while they were dimming and playing out?
I gave you hands and feet

as tools for preparing the ground for planting. Did you,
in the health I gave,

do the plowing?” You will not be able to stand when you
hear those questions. You

will bend double, and finally acknowledge the glory. God
will say, “Lift

your head and answer the questions.” Your head will rise
a little, then slump

again. “Look at me! Tell what you’ve done.” You try,
but you fall back flat

as a snake. “I want every detail. Say!” Eventually you
will be able to get to

a sitting position. “Be plain and clear. I have given you
such gifts. What did

you do with them?” You turn to the right looking to the
prophets for help, as

though to say, I am stuck in the mud of my life. Help me
out of this! They

will answer, those kings, “The time for helping is past.
The plow stands there in

the field. You should have used it.” Then you turn to
the left, where your family

is, and they will say, “Don’t look at us? This conversation
is between you and your

creator.” Then you pray the prayer that is the essence
of every ritual: God,

I have no hope. I am torn to shreds. You are my first and
last and only refuge.

Don’t do daily prayers like a bird pecking, moving its head
up and down. Prayer is an egg.

Hatch out the total helplessness inside.

by Rumi, from The Soul of Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, 2001

Shakespeare's Fifteenth Sonnet

2010-03-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

Hello Poets,
Shakespeare's Fifteenth Sonnet was tacked to the wall where master gardener Alan Chadwick died 30 years ago, amid spring bouquets at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in California.
Alan's spade and digging fork were placed on either side of the doorway.
(From Gardening at the Dragon's Gate, Wendy Johnson's superb garden guide and memoir.)
Best,
Sam
- - -

Sonnet 15

When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and check’d even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

by William Shakespeare
from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 1936