1198. North of San Francisco - Yehuda Amichai

 

    Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Blochr

Here the soft hills touch the ocean

like one eternity touching another

and the cows grazing on them

ignore us, like angels.

Even the scent of ripe melon in the cellar

is a prophecy of peace. 

The darkness does not war against the light,

it carries forward

to another light, and the only pain

is the pain of not staying. 

In my land, called holy,

they wont’t let eternity be:

they’ve divided it into little religions

zoned it for god-zones,

broken it into fragments of history,

sharp and wounding until death.

and they’ve turned in tranquil distances

into a closeness convulsing with the pain of the present.

On the beach at Bolinas, at the foot of the wooden steps,

I saw some girls lying in the sand bare-bottomed.

their heads bowed, drunk

on the kingdom everlasting,

their souls like doors

closing and opening inside them

to the rhythm of the surf.

1197. A Man and a Woman Sit Near Each Other - Robert Bly

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long

at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born

in any other nation, or time, or 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 make a promise 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.

1196. Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (Excerpt) - William Wordsworth

                                        And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

and rolls through all things.

1195. My True Home Is Cold Mountain - Han Shan

The Tientai Mountains are my home

mist-shrouded cloud paths keep guests away 

thousand-meter cliffs make hiding easy

above a rocky ledge among ten thousand streams

with bark hat and wooden clogs I walk along the banks

with hemp robe and pigweed staff I circumambulate the peaks

once you see through transience and illusion

the joys of roaming free are wonderful indeed 

1194. The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune - William Stafford

Wisdom is having things right in your life 

and knowing why.

If you do not have things right in your life

you will be overwhelmed:

you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.

If you have things right in your life

but do not know why,

you are just lucky, and you will not move

in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

The saddest are those not right in their lives

who are acting to make things right for others:

They act only from the self—

and that self will never be right:

no luck, no help, no wisdom.

1193. New Mexican Mountain - Robinson Jeffers, 1932

 I watch the Indians dancing to help the young corn at Taos Pueblo.

The old men squat in a ring

And make the song, the young women with fat bare arms, and a

few shame-faces young men shuffle the dance.

The lean-muscled young men are naked to the narrow loins, their

breasts and backs daubed with white clay,

Two eagle-feathers plume the black heads. They dance with

reluctance, they are growing civilized; the old men persuade them.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed, the

beating heart, the simplest of rhythms,

It thinks the world has not changed at all; it is only a dreamer, a

branchless heart, the drum has no eyes.

These tourists have eyes, the hundred watching the dance, white

Americans, hungrily too, with reverence, not laughter;

Pilgrims from civilization, anxiously seeking beauty, religion, poetry;

pilgrims from the vacuum.

People from cities, anxious to be human again. Poor show how they

suck you empty! The Indians are emptied,

And certainly there was never religion enough, nor beauty nor

poetry here… to fill Americans.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed.

Apparently only myself and the strong

Tribal drum, and the rockhead of Taos mountain, remember that

civilization is a transient sickness.

1192. Poem For Dan's Departure - Kate Farrell

So much do we love

Talking to people we love

About ideas we love

That thinking becomes a conversation

With people we love about ideas we love.

Being your mother

Became a conversation

Where your quiet ideas furthered

The attachment  first fastened

In the far configurations

Of destiny.

I am honored that the universe

Loaned your childhood to me,

Adding such a bright star

To the constellation of conversations

That I am becoming,

For, however far apart we are,

Your considerate voice stays with me,

Enlightening my thinking.

I wish I could give you

A small package of whatever I know

That is worth knowing

To take with you wherever you go.

I wish you would call me from time to time

And tell the part of me that is you

Where your part of the conversation

Is going.

1191. In The Sierras - Al Young

Way up here, where sky comes close

to calling all the shots, where

photographers, geographers and gopher-

loathing golfers and creature-comfort joggers,

where bikers, hikers, wrecking crews and

hoarse writers alike mount slow invasions;

here, where whole fields, whole hills heal

and mountains make big money mean,

peace speaks its native tongue.

Way up here, where sky comes close,

where stakes grow vast, where the last

and first run neck and neck, where loveliness

lays herself on every line at once;

up here, where far and close dissolve.

where the Sierras do not err and terror

cheapens. Sleeplessness like formlessness

must nest at midnight-lighted height.

Peace gets and takes its chances.

1190. Axe Handles - Gary Snyder

One afternoon the last week in April

showing Kai how to throw a hatchet

One half turn and it sticks in a stump.

He recalls the hatchet head

Without a handle, in the shop

And go gets it, and take it for his own.

A broken-off axe handle behind the door

Is long enough for a hatchet,

We cut it to length and take it

With the hatchet head

And working hatchet, to the wood block.

There I begin to shape the old handle

With the hatchet, and the phrase

First learned from Ezra Pound

Rings in my ears!

“When making an axe handle

the pattern is to far off”

And I say this to Kai

“Look we’ll shape the handle

By checking the handle

Of the axe we cut with—“

The sees. And I hear it again

It’s in Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, fourth century

A.D.  “Essay on Literature”—in the 

Preface ‘In making the handle

Of an axe

By cutting wood and axe

The model is indeed near at hand”

My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

Translated that and taught it years ago

and I see: Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an axe

And my son a handle, soon

To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture

How we go on.