What the Thunder Said.

The Man Watching.

2012-02-08T13:41:00.000-08:00

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Excerpt from "The Waste Land"

2012-01-03T12:14:00.001-08:00

My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

--T.S. Eliot

Enlightened.

2011-12-17T18:47:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I can remain friends with her. I've thought and thought about it--she'll never know how much. I gave it one last try. I called her, after a year. But I didn't like the way the conversation went. The problem is that she is not very enlightened. Or I should say, she is not enlightened enough for me. She is nearly fifty years old and no more enlightened, as far as I can see, than when I first knew her twenty years ago, when we talked mainly about men. I did not mind how unenlightened she was then, maybe because I was not so enlightened myself. I believe I am more enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she is, although I know it's not very enlightened to say that. But I want to say it, so I am willing to postpone being more enlightened myself so that I can still say a thing like that about a friend.

--Lydia Davis

Head, Heart

2011-10-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help, heart.

--Lydia Davis

The Saddest Gown in the World.

2011-09-21T10:44:00.001-07:00

“I do not give anymore,” said Walter B., “a fig about you.” “Are you sure?” asked Beatrice. “Absolutely,” said Walter B. “Not a fig?” asked Beatrice. “Not a fig,” said Walter B. “Promise?” asked Beatrice. “Promise,” said Walter B. “When do you suppose,” asked Beatrice, “you will give about me a fig again?” Walter B. looked up at the sky. “Probably not for many years,” said Walter B. “Oh,” said Beatrice. “Should I wait?” “Of course,” said Walter B., “you should wait.” “I’d be very happy,” said Beatrice, “if you joined me while I waited.” Walter B. squeezed her hand. “One day,” said Walter B., “I will make for you a sewing of all the figs I never gave about you.” And one day Walter B. would. He would sew all the figs together. It would not be easy, but he would do it. If he could promise Beatrice anything he could promise her this. He would make for Beatrice a perfect sewing of all the figs he never gave about her. She could wear it, thought Walter B., like a gown. And everyone would applaud.

--Sabrina Orah Mark

Care II

2011-08-18T06:49:00.000-07:00

I've sent you a poem; your first glimpse
of how, in that other world, I speak.
It is a life-line thrown to you, since
things have changed between us. Though I feel weak
wondering how you will be struck by this,
I'm strong with the sense of this new thing, this freak
version of me; because the poem, "Care", is
one that came in a kind of trance--
which means I don't know where it came from, or how
it moved itself from thought to thought, sequenced
without help of logic. All I did was allow
it. Yet it says what I know I want
to say to you: love's a specter which haunts
the living back to life. You see, the peak
of it is not in the couplet ending,
the rhyme, the period; but in the sending.

--Kate Light

Care

2011-07-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

is a painting you return to every day;
to add another stroke, to follow another line;
to make it real by the way
you consider; to make me yours, to make you mine.
...is a sculpture peeled from the nothingness,
marble, clay; here a fingerprint, here a swirl.
Here--(I need your eyes to look at this--)
a questionmark; what is it now? A girl?
A dream, a weight? A body watched and pressed
into life? You watch and press, breathe
me back--sometimes barely touched, sometimes caressed.
Carefully circling, you gradually unsheath
(it, her, me). For all this labor, love, in the end,
will be the prize; love of an art, love of a friend.

--Kate Light

A House to Live In.

2011-06-23T04:25:00.000-07:00

Someone walks out a door
that opens on a word.
The word is you.

When I say a name
it is yours
and now I can't imagine
life without you.

From your smell,
your touch, the taste
of your skin

I build a house
to live in
all the doors
swinging wide.

--Lorna Crozier

Attention.

2011-04-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

Those who come by me passing,
I will remember them,
and those who come heavy and overbearing,
I will forget.
This is why
when air gushes between mountins
we describe the wind
and forget the rocks.

--Saadi Youssef

Poem Without Forgiveness.

2011-02-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly,
but nothing can be taken back,
not the leaves by the trees, the rain
by the clouds. You want to take back
the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel
remains in the wound, some mud.
Night after night Tybalt’s stabbed
so the lovers are ground in mechanical
aftermath. Think of the gunk that never
comes off the roasting pan, the goofs
of a diamond cutter. But wasn’t it
electricity’s blunder into inert clay
that started this whole mess, the I-
echo in the head, a marriage begun
with a fender bender, a sneeze,
a mutation, a raid, an irrevocable
fuckup. So in the meantime: epoxy,
the dog barking at who knows what,
signals mixed up like a dumped-out tray
of printer’s type. Some piece of you
stays in me and I’ll never give it back.
The heart hoards its thorns
just as the rose profligates.
Just because you’ve had enough
doesn’t mean you wanted too much.

--Dean Young

Nocturne.

2011-01-03T18:24:00.000-08:00

There is a blue city in mind
constructed slantways

along a rippling canal,
clean and unpeopled but for a musician

who plays a harp without strings.
The city has one chair

where he sits by the broad strokes of water.
A lone streetlamp tends

its blue arc of light.
A Persian door. A zeppelin sky.

The world filters through
his empty frame as he plucks the air.

Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don't.
That is the choice we are always making.

--Jennifer K. Sweeney

Totally.

2010-11-18T19:14:00.000-08:00

I'm raking leaves and singing in my off-key voice
a mangled version of Madonna's "Like a Virgin,"
a song I thought I hated;

that's how it goes when your head and heart
are in different time zones--
you often don't find out till tomorrow
what you felt today.

I know I do not understand the principles
of leaf removal; I pile them up
in glowing heaps of cadmium and orange,

but I identify so much more
with the entropic gusts of wind
that knock them all apart again.
Is it natural to be scattered?

When I look to the sky I am often dreaming
of a television program that I saw some months ago;
when I walk into a dinner party

I am thinking of the book I mean to read when I get home--you might say
my here is disconnected to my now,
so never am I entirely anywhere,

or anyone. But I won't speak cruelly
of myself: this dividedness is just what
makes our species great: possible for Darwin

to figure out his theory of selection
while playing five-card stud,
for surgeon Keats to find a perfect rhyme

wrist-deep in the disorder
of an open abdomen

For example, it is autumn here.
The defoliated trees look frightened
at the edge of town,

as if the train they missed
had taken all their clothes.
The whole world in unison is turning
toward a zone of nakedness and cold.

But me, I have this strange conviction
that I am going to be born.

--Tony Hoagland

Blogger's Note: Thank-you YKW (You Know Who)

Disappointment.

2010-10-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

I was feeling pretty religious
standing on the bridge on my winter coat
looking down at the gray water:
the sharp little waves dusted with snow,
fish in their tin armor.

That's what I like about disappointment:
the way it slows you down,
when the querulous insistent chatter of desire goes dead calm

and the minor roadside flowers
pronounce their quiet colors,
and the red dirt of the hillside glows.

She played the flute, he played the fiddle
and the moon came up over the barn.
Then he didn't get the job,--
or her father died before she told him that one, most important thing.

and everything got still.

It was February or October
It was July
I remember it so clear
You don't have to pursue anything ever again
It's over
You're free
You're unemployed

You just have to stand there
looking out on the water
in your trench coat of solitude
with your scarf of resignation lifting in the wind.

--Tony Hoagland

(This Blogger would like to dedicate this poem to MGK for her fastidiousness and dedication to the Blogsphere. Thank-you, MGK, for your vigilance and patronage over this Blogsphere. Without readers like yourself, it would only be I, reading and posting, posting and reading, a very lonely feeling in this vast emptiness of the world wide web. As Angelina Jolie has it tattooed on her left kneecap: Amicitiae Nostrae Memoriam Spero Sempiternam Fore.)

Yes.

2010-09-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

It's about the blood
banging in the body,
and the brain
lolling in its bed
like a happy baby.
At your touch, the nerve,
that volatile spook tree,
vibrates. The lungs
take up their work
with a giddy vigor.
Tremors in the joints
and tympani,
dust storms
in the canister of sugar.
The coil of ribs
heats up, begins
to glow. Come
here.

--Catherine Doty

The Consolation of Apricots.

2010-08-23T18:47:00.000-07:00

Especially in early spring,
when the sun offers a thin treacle of warmth,
I love to sit outdoors
and eat sense-ravishing apricots.

Born on sun-drenched trees in Morocco,
the apricots have flown the Atlantic
like small comets, and I can taste
broiling North Africa in their flesh.

Somewhere between a peach and a prayer,
they taste of well water
and butterscotch and dried apples
and desert simooms and lust.

Sweet with a twang of spice,
a ripe apricot is small enough to devour
as two hemispheres.
Ambiguity is its hallmark.

How to eat an apricot:
first warm its continuous curve
in cupped hands, holding it
as you might a brandy snifter,

then caress the velvety sheen
with one thumb, and run your fingertips
over its nap which is shorter
than peach fuzz, closer to chamois.

Tawny gold with a blush on its cheeks,
an apricot is the color of shame and dawn.
One should not expect to drink wine
at mid-winter, Boethius warned.

What could be more thrilling
than ripe apricots out of season,
a gush of taboo sweetness
to offset the savage wistfulness of early spring?

Always eat apricots at twilight,
preferably while sitting in a sunset park,
with valley lights starting to flicker on
and the lake spangled like a shield.

Then, while a trail of bright ink tattoos the sky,
notice how the sun washes the earth
like a woman pouring her gaze
along her lover's naked body,

each cell receiving the tattoo of her glance.
Wait for that moment
of arousal and revelation,
then sink your teeth into the flesh of an apricot.

--Diane Ackerman

From Blossoms.

2010-07-22T21:03:00.000-07:00

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

--Li Young Lee

Gentleness.

2010-06-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

Summer. The boys splash in the lake. Time
holds gracefully some quiet note of
youth. I watch the surface and search for

some tension, but everything breaks so
easily all we do is fill it
with things we want it to hold. Some form

replies. And now the sky turns toward
an atmospheric bend to absorb
the sun whose rays grant all a shadow.

--Jay Miller

Love.

2010-05-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
without knowing it, from various ills--
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

--Czeslaw Milosz

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

2010-04-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

somewhere i have never travelled, 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 skilfully, 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

--e.e.cummings

Ecclesiastes 11:1

2010-03-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

We must cast our bread
Upon the waters, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River's flooded shore,

Helps us to believe
That it's no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive,

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

--Richard Wilbur

Red Gets Her Into Trouble.

2010-02-09T19:39:00.000-08:00

She ate too many cinnamon hearts
as a little girl. They stained her hands red
gave her tongue a pleasant burn.

She took her mother's lipstick once
and smeared it all over her mouth
then dragged a jagged line
on every wall in the house.

She later had a habit
of getting lipstick on her teeth.
Unaware, she smiled constantly
at her first interview.

Red wine is a problem too.
Always stumbling onto white
blouses, plush carpets.

She was wearing a long red coat
the first time that they met.
Two strangers walking
through a January storm.

She blushed when he stopped her to
talk and touched her arm.

--Robyn Jeffrey

Over Easy.

2010-01-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

I am moved by morning
As the egg is moved
By skillet's heat

Crackling out of bed
Before we begin to eat
It's over, easy

--Loren Goodman

...

2009-12-28T11:19:00.000-08:00

May my enemy be assuaged by these waves
because they are beautiful even to his evil,
may the drizzle be a benediction to his heart
even as it is to mine; they say here that the devil
is beating his wife when the sun shines through the wires
of fine, fine rain. It is not my heart that forgives
my enemy his obscene material desires
but the flare of a leaf, the dart of a mottled dove,
the processional surplices of breakers entering the cove
as penitents enter the dome to the lace of an altar;
beauty so shaping neither condemns nor saves
like the tenets of my enemy's church, the basilicas
of tumbling cherubs and agonised saints
and riots of purpureal cloud; though I have cause
I will share the world's beauty with my enemies
even though their greed destroys the innocence
of my Adamic island. My enemy is a serpent
as much as he is in a fresco, and he in all his
scales and venom and glittering head is
part of the island's beauty; he need not repent.

--Derek Walcott.

When They Sleep.

2009-11-23T17:32:00.001-08:00

All people are children when they sleep.
There's no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.

They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.

If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
-God, teach me the language of sleep.

--Rolf Jacobsen

Something Other.

2009-10-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

I imagine my last moments,
when the body gives up
and becomes something other.

Otter.

A muddy slide,
the rilling light,
the sound of being
swallowed into glossy water—

slipping deeply away.

We all do something different
when we die.
I hope I get tricky,
slice open the surface,
go beautifully missing.

--Allison Blythe

Poetry of Departures.

2009-09-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It's specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

--Philip Larkin

Harrowing.

2009-08-02T05:39:00.000-07:00

The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
Last year's growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way
Turned over a while history
Looking for the roots of what went wrong
Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.

Enough. The job is done.
Whatever's been uprooted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that's to come.
I plowed to unearth last year's reasons--

The farmer plows to plant a greening season.

--Parker J. Palmer

Domestic Version.

2009-07-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

Sun first appears
as a spot on the kitchen wall.

Then a branch from the back yard breaks in
every inch lit by dew.

Despite us, hunched shadows,
our dust rises sparkling.

Quick!
The wet negative dries.

--Muriel Nelson

Survivorman.

2009-06-12T08:00:00.001-07:00

Here's a fact: Some people want to live more
Than others do. Some can withstand any horror

While others will easily surrender
To thirst, hunger, and extremes of weather.

In Utah, one man carried another
Man on his back like a conjoined brother

And crossed twenty-five miles of desert
To safety. Can you imagine the hurt?

Do you think you could be that good and strong?
Yes, yes, you think, but you're probably wrong.

--Sherman Alexie

The Trees.

2009-05-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

--Philip Larkin

Ignatz Oasis.

2009-04-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

When you have left me
the sky drains of color

like the skin of a tightening fist.

The sun begins
its gold prowl

swatting at tinsel streamers
on the electric fan.

Crouching I hide
in the coolness I had stolen

from the brass rods of your bed.

--Monica Youn.

The World Still Needs.

2009-03-31T11:04:00.001-07:00

Frivolity is out of season.
Yet, in this poetry, let it be admitted
The world still needs piano-tuners
And has fewer, and more of these
Grey fellows prone to liquor
On an unlikely Tuesday, gritty with wind,
When somewhere behind windows,
A housewife stays for him until the
Hour of the uneasy bridge-club cocktails
And the office rush at the groceteria
And the vesper-bell and lit-up buses passing
And the supper trays along the hospital corridor,
Suffering from
Sore throat and dusty curtains.

Not all alone on the deserted boathouse
Or even on the prairie freight
(The engineer leaned out, watchful and blank
And had no Christmas worries
Mainly because it was the eve of April),
Is like the moment
When the piano in the concert-hall
Finds texture absolute, a single solitude
For those hundreds in rows, half out of overcoats,
Their eyes swimming with sleep.

From this communal cramp of understanding
Springs up suburbia, where every man would build
A clapboard in a well of Russian forest
With yard enough for a high clothesline strung
To a small balcony ...
A woman whose eyes shine like evening's star
Takes in the freshblown linen
While sky a lonely wash of pink is still
reflected in brown mud
Where lettuces will grow, another spring.

--Margaret Avison

Notes on Longing.

2009-01-07T18:14:00.000-08:00

It smells of after-rain tonight.
Duck bones, a wounded egg on rice.
On the corner, there is a shop
that makes keys, keys that open
human doors, doors that lead
to rooms that hold families
of four or seven who sit at a table.
There is a mother who brings
sizzling flounder on a wide platter
for the family whose ordinary
mouths have been made to sing.

--Tina Chang.

What We Need is Here.

2008-11-13T05:05:00.001-08:00

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

--Wendell Berry

The Motive for Metaphor.

2008-10-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon--

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were not quite yourself,
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound--
Steel against intimation--the sharp flash,

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

--Wallace Stevens

Autumn Day.

2008-09-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

Lord, it is time. The summer was too long.
Lay now thy shadow over the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds blow strong.

Bid the last fruit to ripen on the vine;
allow them still two friendly southern days
to bring them to perfection and to force
the final sweetness in the heavy wine.

Who has no house now will not build him one.
Who is alone now will be long alone,
will waken, read, and write long letters
and through the barren pathways up and down
restlessly wander when dead leaves are blown.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

In Praise of Solid People.

2008-08-30T21:27:00.001-07:00

Thank God that there are solid folk
Who water flowers and roll the lawn,
And sit and sew and talk and smoke,
And snore all through the summer dawn.

Who pass untroubled nights and days
Full-fed and sleepily content,
Rejoicing in each other’s praise,
Respectable and innocent.

Who feel the things that all men feel,
And think in well-worn grooves of thought,
Whose honest spirits never reel
Before man’s mystery, overwrought.

Yet not unfaithful nor unkind,
with work-day virtues surely staid,
Theirs is the sane and humble mind,
And dull affections undismayed.

O happy people! I have seen
No verse yet written in your praise,
And, truth to tell, the time has been
I would have scorned your easy ways.

But now thro’ weariness and strife
I learn your worthiness indeed,
The world is better for such life
As stout suburban people lead.

Too often have I sat alone
When the wet night falls heavily,
And fretting winds around me moan,
And homeless longing vexes me

For lore that I shall never know,
And visions none can hope to see,
Till brooding works upon me so
A childish fear steals over me.

I look around the empty room,
The clock still ticking in its place,
And all else silent as the tomb,
Till suddenly, I think, a face

Grows from the darkness just beside.
I turn, and lo! it fades away,
And soon another phantom tide
Of shifting dreams begins to play,

And dusky galleys past me sail,
Full freighted on a faerie sea;
I hear the silken merchants hail
Across the ringing waves to me

—Then suddenly, again, the room,
Familiar books about me piled,
And I alone amid the gloom,
By one more mocking dream beguiled.

And still no neared to the Light,
And still no further from myself,
Alone and lost in clinging night
—(The clock’s still ticking on the shelf).

Then do I envy solid folk
Who sit of evenings by the fire,
After their work and doze and smoke,
And are not fretted by desire.

--C.S. Lewis

Buying the Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis.

2008-07-23T14:52:00.001-07:00

Lost friend, I never knew you
when you crouched like a cricket
in fields of tawny sedge,
hymns tumbling from your mouth,
your lips pursed in a silent Wow.

You are as dead to me as grain.
I chaff your book in my palms,
its leaves fragile: pinned butterflies:
and, in a store, browse your thoughts
for less than a penny--

how you wrestled with physics,
feared the atom bomb, wooed nature,
and never saw a meteorite fall
without the wide canopy of your mind opening.
Like chalk, your poems light all they touch.

At the heart of things, dust moves
I'm told; yet I'll never join you for chat,
or tea to dim the auroras of fatigue,
An unupholstered voice, a life in outline:
death makes quick work of a half-quenched mind.

--Diane Ackerman

Summer Storm.

2008-06-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride.

We hugged the brownstone wall behind us
To keep our dress clothes dry
And watched the sudden summer storm
Floodlit against the sky.

The rain was like a waterfall
Of brilliant beaded light,
Cool and silent as the stars
The storm hid from the night.

To my surprise, you took my arm--
A gesture you didn't explain--
And we spoke in whispers, as if we two
Might imitate the rain.

Then suddenly the storm receded
As swiftly as it came.
The doors behind us opened up.
The hostess called your name.

I watched you merge into the group,
Aloof and yet polite.
We didn't speak another word
Except to say goodnight.

Why does that evening's memory
Return with this night's storm--
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointments warm?

There are so many might have beens,
What ifs that won't stay buried,
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.

And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.

--Dana Gioia.

Sonnet 29.

2008-05-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee--and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

For they sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

--Bill the Bard.

Note: This is a poem to read outloud. It sounds better spoken than read.

After the Storm.

2008-04-04T04:01:00.000-07:00

We used to call what ruined us the storm,
Though that suggests we could have seen it break
And barred the door. But it was multiform:
It got inside, it made a teacup shake,
It sought us out where we lay half awake.
Now it was here, what would it make us do?
When we were thrown together, then we knew.

It sometimes hit us even while we fought.
One sideways look, and soon the skin and hair
Were flying in a different sense. I thought
The consequences too extreme to bear:
This was the lion's den, the dragon's lair,
The storm. You used to say you felt the same,
When you could speak again, and spoke my name.

When the storm raged, I tried to hide in you.
Your only refuge was to cling to me.
The way we rode it out was why it grew
In fury, until you began to see
Your only chance to live was liberty.
So now you have the life you should have had,
And I am glad. No, I am very glad.

Visiting you, I see that it was worth
My loss. A family picnic on the beach.
Your beauty, still like nothing else on earth,
Here shows its purpose. No regrets. Yet each
Of us is well aware that your sweet speech
Is only tender, my glance merely warm.
This is just love. It's nothing like the storm.

--Clive James

Choices.

2008-03-24T20:26:00.000-07:00

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain would be.

-Tess Gallagher

Thomas Merton Quotes.

2008-02-28T20:35:00.001-08:00

I love the words that pour forth from his mouth.

"It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair."

"If our desires reach out for the things that we were created to have and to make and to become, then we will develop into what we were truly meant to be.

But if our desires reach out for things that have no meaning for the growth of our spirit, if they lose themselves in dreams or passions or illusions, we will be false to ourselves and in the end our lives will proclaim that we have lied to ourselves and to other men and to God. We will judge ourselves as aliens and exiles from ourselves and from God.

In hell, there is no recollection. The damned are exiled not only from God and from other men, but even from themselves."

Unsaid.

2008-02-04T14:16:00.000-08:00

So much of what we live goes on inside--
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

--Dana Gioia.

School Prayer.

2008-01-29T19:08:00.000-08:00

In the name of the daybreak

and the eyelids of morning

and the wayfaring moon

and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor

my soul with hatred,

but offer myself humbly

as a guardian of nature,

as a healer of misery,

as a messenger of wonder,

as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors

and the day that embraces it

and the cloud veils drawn over it

and the uttermost night

and the male and the female

and the plants bursting with seed

and the crowning seasons

of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life

--wherever and in whatever form

it may dwell--on Earth my home,

and in the mansions of the stars.

--Diane Ackerman

First Entry.

2007-09-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

Suddenly, I am a bit at a loss for words in this bizarre space where, probably, a part of me wants whoever to read this to read this. These are poems that I've come across, that have somehow, stirred something inside of me. May it similarly move something inside of you, which you never knew could be stirred.