Monday, January 1, 2024

the dance


At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;
At the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
And there is only the dance.


T. S. Eliot




...we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.


Wendell Berry
excerpt: Healing
Photo:  Peter Bowers







Sunday, December 31, 2023

lute music



The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—

Here at the year’s end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.






Kenneth Rexroth
Photo:  Peter Bowers






Thursday, December 28, 2023

precious gift


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


Naomi Shihab Nye
excerpt: Red Brocade





The most precious gift you can give
to the one you love is your true presence. 

Do you have enough time to love?

My dear, I am here for you.  


Thich Nhat Hanh
True Love 





... Why not become the one who lives
with the full moon in each eye
that is always saying
with that sweet moon language 
what every other eye in this
world is dying to hear.


Hafiz
Photo:  Peter Bowers











Tuesday, December 19, 2023

between going and staying



Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters.  Motionless,
I stay and go:  I am a pause.





Octavio Paz
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Photo: Peter Bowers





 

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

the last verse


not pretending to know
not pretending to not know
with no place to stand
she steps into her shoes





tushti
photo: Peter Bowers






recognition


They were like two mirrors facing each other.  
Who sees, who is seen?
Seeing each other like this, 
they experienced the recognition everyone craves  - 
to be seen exactly as we are, 
nothing more, 
and nothing less.
Seen like this, 
all the many forms in the world 
are the same 
as one's own hand,
one's own face.






the iron grinder, Liu Tiemo (780-859)
Women of the Way
 Sallie Tisdale

Photo:  Peter Bowers






Saturday, October 7, 2023

transition


for WCW

I wish I understood the beauty
in leaves falling. To whom
are we beautiful
as we go?

I lie in the field
still, absorbing the stars
and silently throwing off
their presence. Silently
I breathe and die
by turns.

He was ripe 
and fell to the ground
from a bough
out where the wind
is free
of the branches





David Ignatow


---


Attempting to answer David Ignatow's question

I wish I understood the beauty
in leaves falling. To whom 
are we beautiful
as we go?

We are beautiful to the Mother as we go.
There are mysterious roads in jade that
Old men follow,
Routes that migratory birds walk on,
The circle dances
Iron filings do,
The things we cannot say.
Salmon find their way to old beds;
Sleeping bodies are not alone.





Robert Bly
thank you beauty we love 






Tuesday, September 19, 2023

whatever happens


 
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.


Galway Kinnell










Tuesday, September 5, 2023

a song on the end of the world


On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now...





Czeslaw Milosz
The Collected Poems 1931-1987







Thursday, July 20, 2023

the life of a day



Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.






Tom Hennen
from Darkness Sticks to Everything:
Collected and New Poems
Photo: Peter Bowers





barriers



Your task is not to seek for love, 

but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself

that you have built against it.





Rumi
Photo:  Peter Bowers







Friday, April 7, 2023

everything that happens


Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna - a dish
aimed at stars - and they themselves are its message, 
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom, 
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear - suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath - 

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts.  The message is the world."





William Stafford
Photo:  Peter Bowers