I love this place beneath the cliff.
The sun does not shine here all winter.
The water flows and the water
stops itself in the cold and the water
finds a new way. I remember
how quiet it was when I told you
what you did not want to hear.
Perhaps the clock kept keeping time
but the moon stopped.
I think of how much has changed
since then. And how much
life is the same. The silence
here is beautifully made. It is more than
the small sound of the moving
river. It is more than memory.
Suffering is not the only truth.
There is joy. There is grace.
There is peace.
Archive for January, 2013
Walking on the River Ice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ice, joy, love, poem, poetry, silence on January 21, 2013| 3 Comments »
When I Told Her What I Told Her
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hurt, love, pain, poem, poetry, relationships on January 20, 2013| 2 Comments »
She said it to me in her kitchen, she said it,
the water rushing from the tap into the pot
for tea, she said, You know what people do,
she said, we hurt each other. She said it
with no snarl on her tongue, her face lit
by the sun spilling in through her window.
Her shoulders were soft, though her eyes
were ablaze. She said it as if she were saying,
It’s Tuesday. Or, The salt shaker’s empty.
Or any other careless fact that has no ability
to shatter a world. I did not want to believe
her, but as she spoke the words, I knew them
as glass, and I swallowed them whole and they
cut every surface they touched. I tasted in my throat
not just my own blood, but yours.
Please, Now
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged now, poem, poetry, quatrain, the present on January 19, 2013| 2 Comments »
(after reading Before by Yehuda Amichai)
Before the frost
has left the pane
before the dawn
has come again,
before the bell
has stopped its ring,
before we think
we know something,
before the spring,
before the gasp,
before the time
for sowing’s past,
before the gap
cannot be leapt,
before the final
tears are wept,
before the honey’s
crystallized,
before the kitchen’s
sterilized,
before we remember,
before the signs,
before we think
we have more time.
Reading the Book of Hours
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged perception, poem, reality, Rilke on January 19, 2013| 2 Comments »
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, poem I,1 from “Book of a Monastic Life”)
We are lonely,
the tea and me
and nine o’clock.
So I ask Rilke
to join us. He tells me,
just as the sun
leaps over the mesa
and enters the window,
that nothing has ever
been real without
my beholding it.
I sit a long,
long time considering
his words. Not the sun?
Not the tea? Not
the gray moth?
The Holocaust?
He tells me this:
All becoming
has needed me.
Looking over the white field
to the blue spruce in the grove
I do not hear
one of them fall.
Wu Wei
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, Non doing, personification, poem, wu wei on January 17, 2013| 2 Comments »
Love wakes up in the dark.
She does not make you waffles.
She does not light a candle.
She does not wake you
with a wild symphony of kisses.
She does not sing .
She does not paint you art.
She sits on the couch and
watches outside as the sun
does not yet give any hints
of rising. If someone were
to walk by, they might say,
this is Love? I thought
it looked different.
She does not bake your
favorite cake today,
nor your favorite bread.
She does not whisper to you. Come noon,
she does not catch you by the hand
and rush you into the middle
of the field where it’s whiter
and wider and warm. She does not
wish on any of the evening’s
glittering stars. She does not
offer you chocolates nor wine.
And all day, quietly, listening
to your heart, she deepens in her work,
which is no work at all,
who could explain it, (have you watched
the way a lily opens?)
loving you.
Three Small Lives
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, haiku, life, Regret on January 16, 2013| 3 Comments »
doing it all again
I’d do it the same only
this time no regret
*
I told her
I only sing songs—she said
save me
*
little brown mouse
on the road, I swerve uncertain
which of us should live
Uplifting
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cold, light, love, poem, poetry, spectrum, winter on January 15, 2013| 2 Comments »
Twenty below
this morning
and I gasp
at the air,
part shock
and part delight
in the pure cold chill of it.
And though the sun
is barely warm
on the cheek
it is light
and getting lighter—
and that is just
the light we see.
There is more,
they say,
and I feel it,
some vaster spectrum,
they way I feel
the love I cannot
see, how it blesses me
like the sun,
blesses me
even like
the cold.
You Won’t Want to Read This
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ego, maggots, poem, pretense, reality on January 14, 2013| 3 Comments »
My current contemplation is how universal it is for all of us to want to feel good about ourselves and how we edit the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves to that end.
—Sally Estes
Covered in maggots, white and grey,
and tiny granules of poison. No one
wants to remember it this way. It doesn’t
matter if they were real or metaphorical.
The maggots did not wing into butterflies.
The poison was poison. You groveled
and cried. If we can’t be the hero,
we sometimes thrive on becoming
the narrator. It suits our pride. Say:
It happened in someone else’s staircase.
Say: I was younger then. Say: No, they
were ladybugs. Say: It was sand.
But you remember. They were white
and gray, the color of snow on the side
of the highway. Their bodies were soft.
And the poison, it pitted like small stones
into your knees, your bare knees.
Our Names Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, change, love, poem, poetry, sky on January 13, 2013| 2 Comments »
The way the sky
changes in the morning,
so swiftly from rose billow
to long gray brush strokes,
that is the way we love.
One moment we think
we know something—a contour,
a hue, a silhouette. We say,
I love this. We say it fiercely
or tenderly, it doesn’t much matter,
it changes. There is no sadness
in this, though we weave sadness
out of our longing. Blush, it will come
again, only different, a gift
offered and offered, endlessly.
Oh fools who think we prefer
it one way or another, when
at every moment the sky
comes alive for us, even in
darkness, sweet sweet darkness,
even in whatever shade
and shape we see right now.
Three Definitions of Happiness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haiku, happiness, poems on January 12, 2013| 4 Comments »
standing in the snow
dreaming of standing
in the snow
*
my daggers
letting them gather dust
regardless who walks in
*
starting a fire
remembering even good logs
need space to burn