1058. Am I Not Lucky - James Laughlin

 .

that you decided to love me

what if you decided to love

a cat or a dog or dresses

or even Paul Newman    Ive

never quite understood how

it happened     I was having my

life you yours and each

seemed content    we knew each

other slightly but only as

friends    then suddenly with-

out warning or expectation

you decided to love me (and

I you) & my life was changed

1057. Culture and the Universe - Simon J. Ortiz

 Culture and the Universe

BY SIMON J. ORTIZ

Two nights ago

in the canyon darkness,

only the half-moon and stars,

only mere men.

Prayer, faith, love,

existence.

                       We are measured

by vastness beyond ourselves.

Dark is light.

Stone is rising.

I don’t know

if humankind understands

culture: the act

of being human

is not easy knowledge.

With painted wooden sticks

and feathers, we journey

into the canyon toward stone,

a massive presence

in midwinter.

We stop.

                       Lean into me.

                       The universe

sings in quiet meditation.

We are wordless:

                       I am in you.

Without knowing why

culture needs our knowledge,

we are one self in the canyon.

                                                                    And the stone wall

I lean upon spins me

wordless and silent

to the reach of stars

and to the heavens within.

It’s not humankind after all

nor is it culture

that limits us.

It is the vastness

we do not enter.

It is the stars

we do not let own us.

1056. From Here To There - David Wagoner

.

Though you can see in the distance, outlined precisely

With speechless clarity, the place you must go,

The problem remains

Judging how far away you are and getting there safely.

Distant objects often seem close at hand

When looked at grimly.

But between you and those broken hills (so sharply in focus

You have to believe in them with all your senses)

Lies a host of mirages:

Water put out like fire, the shimmer of flying islands,

The unbalancing act of mountains upside down

Passing through too much air,

Light shifts, fidgets, and veers in ways clearly beyond you,

Confusing its weights and measures with your own

Which are far simpler:

A man on foot can suffer only one guiding principle

Next to his shadow: One Damm Thing After Another,

Meaning his substance

In the shape of his footsoles against the unyielding ground.

When you take a step, whatever you ask to bear you

Is bearing your life:

Sound earth may rest on hollow earth, and stones too solid

To budge in one direction may be ready

To gather no moss

With you, end over end, in another. You’ve been foolhardy

Enough already to make this slewfooted journey

Through a place without pathways

Where looking back seems a disheartening as relearning

The whole mad lay of the land by heart

After an earthquake.

At last, watching your step, having shrugged off most illusions,

And stumbling close enough to rap your knuckles

Against the reality

Of those unlikely rocks you’ve stared at through thick and thin

Air and the dumb-shows of light, your hope should be,

As a hardened traveller,

Not to see your trembling hands passing through cloud-stuff, 

Some flimsy mock-up of a world spun out of vapor.

1055. On Taking the Measure of Your Book - Fran Claggett-Holland

For Michael Franco

there must be a way

to enter your poetry

the way your words turn

into meaning after meaning

into the depths of memory

into the silence of the beach

which of course is never silent

but it seems so when I an there alone

and then the birds come

over the dunes

the tiny sandpipers,

silent in sand

creating the rhythm

of your poem

and far out beyond my eyes

the great white pelicans

and as I watch them I see

how I must enter your poetry

wings folded against the wind

as I slice again and again

into the measure of your ocean

there where silence is translated

into language

1054. Franz Marc's Blue Horses - Mary Oliver

 Franz Marc’s Blue Horses - Mary Oliver

I step into the painting of the four blue horses. 

I am not even surprised that I can do this.

One of the horses walks toward me.

His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm

over his blue mane, not holding on, just 

commingling.

He allows me my pleasure.

Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain.

I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses 

what war is.

They would either faint in horror, or simply

find it impossible to believe.

I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful

is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Now all four horses have come closer,

are bending their faces toward me

as if they have secrets to tell.

I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t.

If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what

could they possibly say?

1053. The Panther - Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Robert Bly

Jardin des Plantes, Paris

From seeing and seeing the seeing has become so exhausted

it no longer sees anything anymore.

The world is made of bars, a hundred thousand

bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride

that slowly circles down to a single point

is like a dance of energy around a hub,

in which a great will stands stunned and numbed.

At times the curtains of the eye lift

without a sound—then a shape enters,

slips through the tightened silence fo the shoulders,

reaches the heart and dies.

1052. For Those Who Would Govern - Joy Harjo

 For Those Who Would Govern - Joy Harjo (A member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation

( I know this is not a poem but......)

First question: Can you first govern yourself?

Second question: What is the state of your own household?

Third question: Do you have a proven record of community service

and compassionate acts?

Fourth question: Do you know the history and laws of your principalities?

Fifth question: Do you follow sound principles? Look for fresh vision to lift all the inhabitants of the land, including animals, plants, 

elements, all who share this earth?

Sixth question: Are you owned by lawyers, bankers, insurance agents,

lobbyists, or other politicians, anyone else who would unfairly

profit by your decisions?

Seventh question: Do you have authority by the original keepers of

the lands, those who obey natural law and are in the service of 

the lands on which you stand.

1051. Singing Everything - Joy Harjo (A member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation)

 Singing Everything - Joy Harjo (A member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation)

Once there were songs for everything,

Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting,

For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep,

For sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war.

For death (those are the heaviest songs and they

Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief)

Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and

Falling apart after falling in love songs.

The earth is leaning sideways

And a song is emerging from the floods

And fires. Urgent tendrils lift toward the sun.

You must be friends with silence to hear.

The songs of the guardians of silence are the most powerful—

They are the most rare.

1050. For The Conjunction Of Two Planets - Adrienne Rich

.

We smile at astrological hopes

And leave the sky to expert men

Who do not reckon horoscopes

But painfully extend their ken

In mathematical debate

With slide and photographic plate.

And yet, protest it if we will,

Some corner of the mind retains

The medieval man, who still

Keeps watch upon those starry skeins

And drives us out of doors at night

To gaze at anagrams of light.

Whatever register or law

Is drawn in digits for these two,

Venus and Jupiter keep their awe,

Wardens of brilliance, as they do

Their dual circuit of the west—

The brightest planet and her guest.

Is any light so proudly thrust

From darkness on our lifted faces.

A sign of something we can trust,

Or is it that in starry places

We see the things we long to see

In fiery iconography?

1049. Books And Thoughts - Walter Rinder

.

books and thoughts clean the mind

of restrictions built by time

through the pages we discover

all the feelings held from each other

we read the words, think the thoughts

the author expresses to be taught

books to me are like a friend

whose knowledge helps my hurts to mend

1048. Arrivals - David Whyte

.

Imagine the confines of a long grey corridor

just before immigration at Washington Dulles

airport. Imagine two Ethiopian women amid

a sea of familiar international plastic blandness

entering America for the first time. Think of

their undulating multi-colored turbans raised

atop graceful heads, transforming us, 

a grey line of travelers behind them, into followers

and mendicants, mere drab, impatient, moneyed

and perplexed attendants to their bright,

excited, chattering arrival..

Imagine a sharp plexi-glass turn left and suddenly

before them, in biblical astonishment, like a vertical

Red Sea churning, like the waters barring Moses from

The Promised Land, like Jacob standing before his ladder,

a moving escalator, a mode of rising, a form of ascension,

a way to go up they’d never seen before, its steel gray

movement, an interlocking on and up invitation

that brought them and everyone behind them,

to a bemused, complete, and utter standstill.

So that you saw it for the first time as they saw it

and for what it was, a grated river of lifting steel,

in involuntary, moving ascension into who knows what.

An incredible surprise. And you knew even through

your tiredness, why it made them raise their hands

to their mouths, why it made them low breathy

screams of surprise and delighted terror. You saw it

as they saw it, a staircase of invisible interlocking

beckoning hands asking them to rise up

independent of their history, their legs or their wills.

And we stopped as we knew we had to now

and watched the first delighted be-turbaned

woman put a sandaled foot on the flat grey

plain at the foot of the moving stair and

straightway withdraw it with a strangled scream,

leaving her sandal to ascend strangely without her

into heaven, into America, into her new life.

Then, holding her friend away, who tried to grab

her, to save her, to hold her back, who pointed

and shouted, telling her not to risk herself,

not to be foolish, she silently watched her shoe,

that willful child, running ahead, its sole intent

to enter the country oblivious to visas and immigration,

above the need for a job, uncaring of healthcare,

pointing toward some horizon she had never dreamt,

intent on leaving only its winged footprint

for her to follow, like a comet’s tail, like an omen

of necessity, like a signaled courage, like an uncaring

invitation, to make her entrance with soul and style.

Because she looked up at this orphaned, onward

messenger with her eyes a-blaze, threw off the panicked

clamoring arms of her friend, raised her chin

to noble profile, and with all that other hurrying

clamor of the world behind her, with a busy,

unknowing, corporate crowd at her back and questions

beginning to be asked out loud, she lifted her arms,

to queenly unbidden grace, strode on the the ascending

heaven bound steel like a newly struck film star,

singing the old, high pitched song her children

would hear when she told the story again.

And as her friend below sang,

applauded , danced on the spot

and undulated her companion’s arrival,

we stood there behind her,

transfixed, travel weary,

and crammed into the corridor

like extras from some

miraculous scene in the Bible.

While

she ascended,

her arms straight out,

wide eyed and singing.

Into America.

1047. Then And Now - James Laughlin

.

The Rain

is speaking it pelts

against the windows

and on the roof

in the night

it makes thousands

of little words

which confuse the child

who does not understand

such a language

what is the rain

trying to tell him

should he be afraid

is there a message

of danger to be escaped

or can he be lulled 

by the sound of the rain

and go back to sleep?

The Poem

is moving by itself

it proceeds of its

own accord

the writer of the poem

has no idea where

it will lead him

he cannot control it

because it has

its own life

separate from his own

what if it carries him off

from his safe life

from his accustomed loves

should he fear harm

from the poem and tear up

the page or simply put it

aside and go back to sleep?

1046. Breaking Camp - David Wagoner

.

Having spent a hard-earned sleep, you must break camp in the mountains

At the break of day, pulling up stakes and packing,

Scattering your ashes,

And burying everything human you can’t carry. Lifting

Your world now on your shoulders, you should turn

To look back once

At a place as welcoming to a later dead-tired stranger

As it was to your eyes only the other evening,

As the place you’ve never seen

But must hope for now at the end of a day’s rough journey:

You must head for another campsite, maybe no nearer

Wherever you’re going

Than where you’ve already been, but deeply, starkly appealing

Like a lost home: with water, the wind lying down

On a stretch of level earth,

And the makings of a fire to flicker against the night

Which you, traveling light, can’t bring along

But must always search for.

1045. Oh, Lovely Rock - Robinson Jeffers

(How nice to find a poem written long ago that we have lived.)

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up

  the east fork.

The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest

  above our heads, maple and redwood,

Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian

  firs that stare up the cataracts

Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.

We lay on gravel and kept a little camp fire

  for warmth.

Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling

  darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay leaves

On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay

  down again. The revived flame

Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the

  vertical face of the great gorge-wall

Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s

  breath, tree-trucks were seen: it was the rock wall

That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray

  diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,

Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no

  fern nor lichen, pure naked rock … as if I were

Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the

  flame-lit surface into the real and bodily

And living rock. Nothing strange … I cannot

Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and

  childlike loveliness: this fate going on

Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave

  smiling child. I shall die, and my boys

Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid

  agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,

And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem:

  this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies

That are atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain

  above: and I, many packed centuries ago,

Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

1044. Sometimes - Hermann Hesse

Translated by Robert Bly

Sometimes, when a bird cries out,

Or the wind sweeps through the tree,

Or a dog howls in a far off farm,

I hold still and listen a long time.

My soul turns and goes back to the place

Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,

The bird and the blowing wind

Were like me, and were my brothers.

My soul turns into a tree,

And an animal, and a cloud bank.

Then changed and odd it comes home

And asks me questions. What should I reply?

1043. Live the Question - Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to ask you, as clearly as I can,  to bear with patience
all that is unresolved in your heart,
and try to love the questions themselves,
as if they were rooms yet to enter
or books written in a foreign language.
Don't dig for answers that can't be given you yet:
you cannot live them now.
perhaps then, someday,
you will gradually,
without noticing,
live into the answer. 

1042. At The Zoo - Linda Pastan

at the Children’s Zoo

The children holding the python

all along its ten-foot mottled body

are like the blind men with the elephant—

what can they know

of what they hold beneath their fingers,

these not quite babies

still in the Eden of preschool,

sloughing off their winter jackets now

in the steamy weather

of the reptile house

And this creature they dare

to carry, this undulating river

of muscle, supple and curving and

thick as the arm of its keeper,

what does it know of sin

or apples, wanting only to follow the flick

of its two-pronged tongue

(like those blind men following

their tapping canes) to any place

its hunger takes it.