1031. Block - Linda Pastan

.

I place one word slowly

in front of the other.,

like learning to walk again

after an illness.

But the blank page

with its hospital corners

tempts me.

I want to lie down

in its whiteness

and let myself drift

all the way back

to silence.

1030. EXERCISE - W. S. Merwin

.

First forget what time it is

for an hour

do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is

do this regularly for a week

then forget what country you are in

and practice doing it in company

for a week

then do them together

for a week

with a few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting how to add

or to subtract

it makes no difference 

you can change them around

after a week

both will help you later

to forget how to count

forget how to count

starting with your own age

starting with how to count backward

starting with even numbers

starting with Roman numerals

starting with fractions of Roman numerals

starting with the old calendar

going on to the old alphabet

going on to the alphabet

until everything is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements

starting with water

proceeding to earth

rising in fire  

forget fire

1029. Swift Things Are Beautiful - Elizabeth Coatsworth

.

Swift things are beautiful:

Swallows and deer,

And lightning that falls

Bright-veined and clear,

Rivers and meteors,

Wind in the wheat,

The strong-withered horse,

And runner’s sure feet.

And slow things are beautiful:

The closing of day,

The pause of the wave

That curves downward to spray,

The ember that crumbles,

The opening flower,

And the ox that moves on

In the quiet of power.

1028. For The Traveler - John O'Donohue

.

Every time you leave home,

another road takes you

into a world you were never in.

New strangers on other paths await.

new places that have never seen you

will startle a little at your entry.

Old places that you know well

will pretend nothing

changed since your last visit.

When you travel, you find yourself

alone in a different way,

more attentive now

to the self you bring along,

Your more subtle eye watching

you abroad; and how what meets you

touches that part of the heart

that lies low at home:

How you unexpectedly attune

to the timbre in some voice,

opening a conversation

you want to take in

to where your longing

has pressed hard enough

inward, on some unsaid dark,

to create a crystal of insight

you could not have known

you needed 

to illuminate 

your way.

When you travel,

a new silence

goes with you,

and if you listen,

you will hear

what your heart would

love to say.

A journey can become a sacred thing:

make sure, before you go,

to take the time

to bless your going forth,

to free your heart of ballast

so that the compass of your soul

might direct you toward

the territories of spirit

where you will discover

more of your hidden life,

and the urgencies

that deserve to claim you.

May you travel 

in an awakened way,

gathered wisely 

into your inner ground; 

that you may not waste 

the invitations which 

wait along the way 

to transform you.

May you travel safely, 

arrive refreshed, 

and live your time away 

to its fullest; 

return home more enriched, 

and free to balance 

the gift of days 

which call you. 

From: To Bless the Space Between Us

1027. Song For The First People - David Wagoner

.

When you learned that men were coming, you changed into rocks.

Into fish and birds, into flowers and rivers in despair of us.

The tree under which I bend may be you,

That stone by the fire, the nighthawk swooping

And crying out over the swamp reeds, the reeds themselves.

Have I held you too lightly all my mornings?

I have broken your silence, dipped you up

Carelessly in by hands and drunk you, burnt you,

Carved you, slit your calm throat and danced on your skin,

Made charms of your bones. You have endured

All of it, suffering my foolishness

As the old wait quietly among clumsy children.

Now others are coming, neither like you nor like men.

I must change, First People. How do I change myself?

If no one can teach me the long will of the cedar,

Let me become Water Dog, Bitteroot, or Shut Beak.

Change me. Forgive me. I will learn to crawl, stand, or fly

Anyshere among you, forever, as though among great elders.

1026. Photograph - Cynthia Rylant

From: Something Permanent 

Photo by Walker Evans

He washed his feet for the picture,

even his knees,

and wondered about that man

who cared enough to want him to sit there

for a photograph

even though he didn’t have

nothing good to hold in his hands,

nor even a dog to sit by his chair.

It gave him, briefly,

some sort of feeling

of just being

enough.

1025. The Old Poets of China - Mary Oliver

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.

It offers me its busyness. It does not believe

that I do not want it. Now I understand

why the old poets of China went so far and high

into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

1024. A Small Eternity - Robert Penn Warren

.

The time comes when you count the names—whether

dim or flaming in the head’s dark, or whether

In stone cut, time-crumbling or moss-glutted.

You count the names to reconstruct yourself.

But a face remembered may blur, even as you stare

At a headstone. Or sometimes a face, as though from air,

Will stare at you with a boyish smile—but, not

Stone-moored, blows away like dandelion fuzz.

It is very disturbing. It is as though you were

The idiot boy who ventures out on pond-ice

Too thin and hears here—hears there—the creak

And crackling spread. That is the sound Reality

Makes as it gives beneath your metaphysical

Poundage. Memory dies. Or lies. Time

Is a wind that never shifts air. Pray only

That, in the midst of selfishness, some

Small act of careless kindness, half-unconscious, some

Unwitting smile or brush of lips, may glow

In some other mind’s dark that’s lost your name, but stumbles

Upon that momentary Eternity.

1023. A Cup Of Coffee - Gene Fowler

From: A Solo In Tom-Toms - Gene Fowler

Such a small and homely and peasant-like thing

seems a cup of coffee.

Still, some of us know that nothing really is small

and nothing actually large, but of an entity,

and of no dimensions whatsoever except as our

imaginations make it seem large or small.

For everything is one thing and of one thing.

And the thing is not a thing at all, but an idea.

Perhaps this idea is both the creator and the created, 

Timeless, endless, and inscrutable.

1022. Harvey Ellis - Harvey Ellis

Harvey Ellis - Harvey Ellis

my ancestors surround me

like walls of a canyon

quiet

stone hard

their ideas drift over me

like breezes at sunset

we gather sticks

and make settlements

what we do is only partly

our own

and partly continuation

down through the chromosomes

my son

my baby sleeps behind me

stirring in the night

for the touch

that lets him continue

he is arranging 

in his small form the furniture

and windows of his home

it will be a lot like mine

it will be a lot like theirs

1021. To The Son - Jorge Luis Borges

Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid

It was not I who begot you. It was the dead—

my father, and his father, and their forebears,

all those who through a labyrinth of loves

descend from Adam and the desert wastes

of Cain and Abel, in a dawn so ancient

it has become mythology by now,

to arrive, blood and marrow, at this day

in the future, in which I now beget you.

I feed their multitudes. They are who we are,

and you among us, you and the the sons to come

that you will beget. The latest in the line

and in red Adam’s line. I too am those others.

Eternity is present in the things

of time and its impatient happenings

1020. The Bed by the Window - Robinson Jeffers

.

I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed

When we built the house, it is ready waiting.

Unused unless by some guest in a a twelvemonth, who hardly  suspects

Its later purpose. I often regard it,

With neither dislike nor desire; rather with both, so equaled

That they kill each other and a crystalline interest

Remains alone. We are safe to finish what we have to finish,

And then it will sound rather like music

When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock and sky

Thrumps with his staff, and calls thrice: “Come,  Jeffers

1019. Figment at the Beginning of Something. . . - David Watts

My son brings me a stone and asks

which star it fell from,

he is serious

and so I must be careful, even though

I know he will place it

among those things that will leave him

someday, and he

will go on gathering. For this

is one of those moments

that turns suddenly towards you, opening

as it turns, as if for a moment

we paused on the edge

of a heart beat, conscious

of the fear that runs beside us

and how lovely it is to be with each other

in the long resilient mornings.

1018. Poema - Maria Teresa Horta

Poema by Maria Teresa Horta

Translated from the Portuguese by Lesley Saunders

I let him come.

He sneaks on tiptoe

right up to my ear;

under its ribs my heart

quivers, quickens

as the excitement mounts:

first the forest appears,

then the woodland-sequel,

more mist than snow to the touch –

from the new poem’s

very first line the paper sucks up

every waif-word

and an ugliness steals in,

a cunning hungry thing

crouching there incognito,

pretending to be tame and yet so wolfish

that he’s the kernel of light

and then the noise of its cracking;

he’s lithe on the path,

doubling back on himself,

running with the pack, loping alone;

pussy-footing through the night

he trails moonlight behind him

like a mink coat.

I feel him when the hairs on my skin

lift, and in the delicious dizziness

of my private pulse –

in the midst of my writing, in my dream-life,

I slip all his clothes slowly off

and slide him down beside me.

1017. Marks - Linda Pastan

.

My husband gives me an A

for lasts nights’s supper

an incomplete for my ironing,

a B plus in bed.

My son says I am average,

an average mother, but if

I put my mind to it

I could improve.

My daughter believes

in Pass/Fail and tells me

I pass. Wait ‘till they learn

I’m dropping out.

1016. Epitaph For "Poet's Tomb" - Shuntaro Tankawa

“I, infinite silence, will grant you words”

[God Contemplates Man]　　—Jules Supervielle

When I was born

I was nameless

like a water molecule

But right away I was fed vowels mouth-to-mouth

consonants tickled my ears

I was called and

pulled away from the cosmos

Oscillating the atmosphere

carved onto clay tablets

inscribed on bamboo

recorded on sand

words are onion skins

If I keep on peeling

I will not find the cosmos

I would have loved to lose words

to be a tree singing in the wind

I would have loved to be a cloud from a hundred thousand years ago

I would have loved to be a whale’s song

Now I go back to being nameless

with dirt over my eyes, my ears and my mouth

with stars leading me by the fingers

1015. To John Keats (1795 - 1821) -Jorge Luis Borges

Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler

From the beginning to your early death

a terrible beauty lay in wait for you

as good or bad luck lay in wait for others.

That beauty waited for you in the dawns

of London, or by chance in the pages of

a dictionary of mythology,

in the ordinary gifts of a normal day,

or in a face, a voice, the mortal lips

of Fanny Brawne. O posthumous Keats

snatched away from earth, blinded by time,

the nightingale on high and the Greek urn

are your eternity, o fleeting one.

You were the fire. In panic memory

you are not ashes now. You are glory.

1014. Low Tide At St Andrews - Emily Pauline Johnson

(New Brunswick)

The long red flats stretch open to the sky,

Breathing their moisture on the August air.

The seaweeds cling with flesh-like fingers where

The rocks give shelter that the sands deny;

And wrapped in all her summer harmonies 

St Andrews sleeps beside her sleeping seas.

The far-off shores swim blue and indistinct,

Like half-lost memories of some old dream.

The listless waves that catch each sunny gleam

Are idling up the waterways land-linked,

And, yellowing along the harbour’s breast,

The light is leaping shoreward from the west.

And naked-footed children, tripping down,

Light with young laughter, daily come at eve

To gather dulse and sea clams and then heave

Their loads, returning laden to the town,

Leaving a strange grey silence when they go, 

The silence of the sands when tides are low.

1013. Emily Dickinson - Linda Pastan

.

We think of her hidden in a white dress

among the folded linens and sachets

of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight

sending jellies and notes with no address

to all the wondering Amherst neighbors.

Eccentric as New England weather

the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle,

blew two half-imagined lovers off.

Yet legend won’t explain the sheer sanity

of vision, the serious mischief

of language, the economy of pain.

1012. Nikos Kazantzakis - The Mind Of Man

From: The Saviors of God. translated by Kimon Friar

The mind of man can perceive appearances only

 and never the essence of things

And not all appearances but only the appearance of matter.

And not even these appearances of matter

 but only relationships between them.

And these relationships are not real and independent

 of man for even these are his creations.

And they are not the only ones humanly possible but simply

 the most convenient for his practical and perceptive needs.