The Waking - Theodore Roethke

Vincent van Gogh. Orchard Bloom With Poplars. 1889.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Some Assembly Required - Tim Murphy

Vincent van Gogh. Irises. 1889.

If you want bluebirds, first you have to make 
a proper house. Start with six scraps of shake, 
unpainted cedar shingles, blizzard–worn, 
torn from the hiproof of your windfall barn. 
Slant–saw the sides to make the ceiling vaulted. 
(Here in Montana big sky's are exalted.)
Then drill a door hole too snug for a flicker 
to burgle when you're famished fledglings bicker. 
Now choose a meadow with a montane view. 
For camouflage, it's flowers should be blue.

"Faith" "Hope" "Love" by Czeslaw Milosz

Faith

Faith is whenever you look 

At a dewdrop or floating leaf

And know that they are there because they have to be.

Even if you close your eyes and dream up things

The world will remain as it has always been

And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.

You have faith also when you hurt your foot

Against a sharp rock and you know

That rocks are meant to hurt feet.

See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?

We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

Hope

Hope is with you when you believe

The earth is not a dream but living flesh,

That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie, 

That all things you have ever seen here

Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there.

Could we but look more clearly and wisely

We might discover somewhere in the garden

A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Some people say we should not trust our eyes,

That there is nothing, just a seeming,

These are the ones who have no hope.

They think that the moment we turn away,

The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,

As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.

Love

Love means to learn to look at yourself

The way one looks at distant things

For you are only one 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.

The May Magnificat - Gerard Manley Hopkins

May is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—
Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?
Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?
Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.
All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.
Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.
Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry
And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—
This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

Your Face in the Depths of This Heart (Cinq Grandes Odes)

Paul Claudel

Mercy is not a lifeless gift of something we already have too much of, it is a passion like a knowledge. 
It is a discovery like the knowledge of your face in the depths of this heart which you have made. 
If all your stars are necessary to me, how much more all my brothers?
...Behold the outside world where lies our laic duty, 
Without scorn of one's fellow man, with love of one's fellow man, 
Observing the Ten Commandments better than one sees I knew how to, 
Saying my prayers morning and night and giving each person his due. 

Pope Francis embraces Vicino Riva, a man
 with a tumorous disease, at Nov. 6 Wed. audience

H/T Artur Rosman

That Strange Word Which Means Its Opposite

Cambridge, January 2001
by Sally Thomas

Seagulls surf the wet
Updrafts over roofs
 A hundred miles inland. 

Every weather's a weather
 Of gulls, a scream against
The bottle-blue or cloud-

 Mottled sky, the one
Constant besides rain
 Spittling the window: 

These birds who revel in being
 Blown off-course. If
They had any idea,

 That is, where they meant
To go in the first place.


 I was never a believer

In resolutions. What's resolve 
 But another word for wish? 
Ask the fisherman's wife

 How far she got on wishes. 
Would I resolve, say, to let
 A third child choose

Itself? What can I 
 Say I wish for? Just now
My two already-wished-for

 Children, resolved into flesh,
Gallop down the hall,
 Speaking in whinnies. 

I wrench the door open 
 And shout, Inside feet! 
What are inside feet? 

 They'd be justified in asking. 
We have the same feet
 Wherever we go. Instead

They say, Okay. They wait
 for the door to close. Gallop
gallop, neigh neigh. Does control

 End at conception? Or
Only our belief in it? 


 The rain's tsunami threatens

To wash the whole country
 Into its inhospitable
Hinterland, the sea. 

 We inhabit a culture of rain,
Learn to speak its commonplaces: 
 Wellieboots, waterproofs-as if

We needed to prove water's
 Existence. We think in a language
At once ours and not ours. 

 At breakfast, our son holds up
A spoon. What's the English
 Word for this? He won’t believe

That spoon could possibly be the answer. 


 Where does it come from, this desire
To shape-shift, to be, say, 

 A horse for the afternoon? 
Perhaps some memory
 Persists, of pre-life, 

Or not pre-life, but life
 Before it's named, flesh and blood, 
Yes, and also possibility. 
 Perhaps children remember 
Without knowing
 The call that makes them 

Step so fluidly out
 Of their bodies, though
They never entirely

 Leave-the body
Goes with them
 Through locked gates, 

Across snowy pastures
 Their hooves leave unprinted. 


Empty branches tap

 The leaded chapel window: 
Stainless daylight, white
 Walls, the unprompted

Revelation of the world
 Not watching us at prayer-
At the motions of prayer, our lips

 Moving over words
Which like our own names
 Begin to lose sense

When we overhear ourselves
 Whispering them-not watching
But with us, cold, 

 Immaculate, clear. 



We never imagined having 
 To say, Take your feet

Off the celery. Don't lick me. 
 The corkscrew is not a toy. 
What did we expect? 

 Amnesia, entropy
Extend their present-tense
 Mercies to our children who are

Not whatever we dreamed:  
 Vague, two-dimensional
Composites of our childhood

 Photographs. Quiet. Able
To play the piano. Sew. 
 Finish what they begin. 

Absolve us of ourselves. 


 After church, a friend
Offers her baby. She
 Drinks her coffee, grateful
For a minute, two hands free. 
 The baby snuffles, exhales

Warmly into my neck,
 And I think, Oh, 
It didn't hurt so much. 

 And other lies, as if I thought
Nothing of having hands
 Open to take the weight

Of a child who won't wake me
 From an hour's sleep. This
Can pass for a decision. 

 My translation of a word
Like goal. Or sane. 
 I could fit a travel cot

Between my bed and desk-
 Anything's possible. Or if
Impossible, still possibly worth doing. 


 Cot:  what the baby
Sleeps in. Crib:  what
 The manger becomes when surrounded

By plaster statuettes wearing painted
 Looks of reverence or weariness-never
Surprise, though you would think

 Someone might have been surprised. 


In bed, in the borrowed
 Time before the alarm,  

We hold each other, hoping 
 Maybe this time it won't 
Happen, the day will hang

 Back shyly at its own
Threshold. Even now
 The sky is paling, a white

Sliver between the curtains. 
 Eleven years married, are we
Any closer to knowing

 What we want? Our wedding
Vows told us precious
  Little. Not what to

Expect, only to cleave, 
 That strange word which means
Its opposite. I close

 My eyes. This could be
A stranger's body my hands

 Move across, mapping again
Desire's universal, alien terrain. 


 O for the wings-but where
Would I go? Where are you not? 

 All of you, husband, children, 
Calling my name, calling me
 Back from myself, back into

Myself. Erasable
 Only by death. This
Must be what it means,

 One flesh. I carry
Your voices in the pocket
 Of my ear. We speak

Of making vows, lovemaking, 
 As if such things didn't exist
Until we think. 

 And they occur to us. 


Morning wind hurls itself 
 Against the house, forces rain
In through the absence

 Of caulking. In watery daylight
Beached raindrops glint
 Like jellyfish along
The windowsill. Outside, 
 Birds are still free-falling
Like leaves across the housetops, 

 Blown away but never out of the sky.

"That [strange] land of tolerable flowers"

A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra

BY RICHARD WILBUR

for Dore and Adja

Under the bronze crown

Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet   

      A serpent has begun to eat,

Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down

            Past spattered mosses, breaks

On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills   

      The massive third below. It spills

In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes

            A scrim or summery tent

For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose.   

      Happy in all that ragged, loose

Collapse of water, its effortless descent

            And flatteries of spray,

The stocky god upholds the shell with ease,

      Watching, about his shaggy knees,

The goatish innocence of his babes at play;

            His fauness all the while

Leans forward, slightly, into a clambering mesh   

      Of water-lights, her sparkling flesh

In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded smile

            Bent on the sand floor

Of the trefoil pool, where ripple-shadows come

      And go in swift reticulum,

More addling to the eye than wine, and more

            Interminable to thought

Than pleasure’s calculus. Yet since this all   

      Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall,   

Must it not be too simple? Are we not

            More intricately expressed

In the plain fountains that Maderna set

      Before St. Peter’s—the main jet   

Struggling aloft until it seems at rest

            In the act of rising, until   

The very wish of water is reversed,

      That heaviness borne up to burst   

In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill

            With blaze, and then in gauze   

Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine

      Illumined version of itself, decline,

And patter on the stones its own applause?

            If that is what men are

Or should be, if those water-saints display   

      The pattern of our aretê,

What of these showered fauns in their bizarre,

            Spangled, and plunging house?

They are at rest in fulness of desire

      For what is given, they do not tire

Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse

            And riddled pool below,

Reproving our disgust and our ennui   

      With humble insatiety.

Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow

            Before the wealthy gate

Freezing and praising, might have seen in this   

      No trifle, but a shade of bliss—

That land of tolerable flowers, that state

            As near and far as grass

Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand   

      Is worthy of water: the dreamt land

Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.

h/t Simcha Fisher

Personalist Poetry - Zagajewski and Cairns

The Beauty Created by Others
Adam Zagajewski

Only in the beauty created
by others is there consolation,
in the music of others and in others’ poems. 
Only others save us,
even though solitude tastes like 
opium. The others are not hell,
if you see them early, with their 
foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams. 
That is why I wonder what 
word should be used, “he” or “you.” Every “he” 
is a betrayal of a certain “you” 
but in return someone else’s poem 
offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.

H/T Rosman at Cosmos The In Lost


The Entrance of Sin
Scott Cairns

Yes, there was a tree, and upon it, among the                         The man said, "The
wax leaves, an order of fruit which hung plen-                          woman You put at my
tifully, glazed with dew of a given morning.                               side--she gave me of the
And there had been some talk off and on--                              tree, and I ate."
nothing specific--about forgoing the inclina-                                        --Genesis 3.12
tion to eat of it. But sin had very little to do
with this or with any outright prohibition.

For sin had made its entrance long before the
serpent spoke, long before the woman and the
man had set their teeth to the pale, stringy
flesh, which was, it turns out, also quite with-
out flavor. Rather, sin had come in the midst of
an evening stroll, when the woman had
reached to take the man's hand and he with-
held it.

In this way, the beginning of our trouble came
to the garden almost without notice. And in
later days, as the man and the woman wan-
dered idly about their paradise, as they contin-
ued to enjoy the sensual pleasures of food and
drink and spirited coupling, even as they sat
marveling at the approach of evening and the
more lush approach of sleep, they found within
themselves a developing habit of resistance.

One supposes that, even then, this new taste
for turning away might have been overcome,
but that is assuming the two had found the
result unpleasant. The beginning of loss was
this: every time some manner of beauty was
offered and declined, the subsequent isolation
each conceived was irresistible.

H/T Elizabeth Duffy here and here.

Ain't A Ghost

"The word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century*. No one knows its etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff.

Question: Why was there no such word before the eighteenth century? 

... 

"Is it because the self first had the means of understanding itself through myth, albeit incorrectly, later understood itself through religion as a creature of God, and now has the means of understanding the Cosmos through positive science but not itself because the self cannot be grasped by positive science, and that therefore the self can perceive itself only as a ghost in the machine? How else can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?"

 (Walker Percy, Lost In the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book)

There's too much of everything
     books, stars, flowers.
How can one flower be precious

     in a bed of thousands?
How can a book count
     in a library of millions?
The universe is a junkyard

     burnt out meteors, busted up stars

     planetary cast offs, throwaway galaxies

     born and buried in an instant

     repeating, repeating

Yet something remains
     the dream of fewness
     one woman, one man.

(Untitled, The Thomas Merton Poems, J.S. Porter. Moonstone Press, 1998)

Dying

Adam and Eve laid death 
at the roots of the Tree of Life 
Adam donned a hard hat 
and the motto, "Safety First," 
while Eve snuck off 
to the Cinema Paradiso 
every afternoon for repeat 
bargain matinee viewings of 
the Bergman film in black & white-- 
that famous chess game with death. 

"The Grim Reaper" became little 
Cain and Abel's favorite 
Saturday morning cartoon 
when they moved out to the suburbs 
and could afford cable TV 
now that Adam had landed 
a sweet promotion to 
a management level position. 

A little death goes a long way-- 
the sterile hospital smell, 
the clinical distance, 
the rubber gloves, 
the pain, 
the indignity of various 
procedures, the cancer 
with its claws inside you, 
your life stretched out and nailed down 
like a man on a cross 

You regret the fear, the caution 
that cut you off from things. 
But then you see and smell 
and taste and feel 
the substance of your life. 
And your mind, Lazarus-like, 
shakes off its shroud and walks 
in the wonder of it all.

Adam and Eve wake up
from their long sleep.
Drudgery and repetition turn the corner
and learn to be a funeral march
Dixieland style down Bourbon St.
to the gardens of the dead
where these bones lie waiting to be
refashioned for a new
and never ending dance.

(House of Words, J. Potter. Korrektiv Press, 2010)

*that was when people realized that they didn't have Mario Kart.