The Fire, Franz Wright

The Fire

 

Listen, I've light

in my eyes

and on my skin

the warmth of a star, so strange

is this

that I

can barely comprehend it:

I think

I'll lift my face to it, and then

I lift my face,

and don't even know how

this is done.  And

everything alive

(and everything's

alive) is turning

into something else

as at the heart

of some annihilating

or is it creating

fire

that's burning, unseeably, always

burning at such speeds

as eyes cannot

detect, just try

to observe your own face

growing old

in the mirror, or

is it beginning

to be born?

 

~ Franz Wright ~

 

 

(God's Silence)

At The Lake, Mary Oliver

At the Lake

 

A fish leaps

like a black pin --

then -- when the starlight

strikes its side --

 

like a silver pin.

In an instant

the fish's spine

alters the fierce line of rising

 

and it curls a little --

the head, like scalloped tin,

plunges back,

and it's gone.

 

This is, I think,

what holiness is:

the natural world,

where every moment is full

 

of the passion to keep moving.

Inside every mind

there's a hermit's cave

full of light,

 

full of snow,

full of concentration.

I've knelt there,

and so have you,

 

hanging on

to what you love,

to what is lovely.

The lake's

 

shining sheets

don't make a ripple now,

and the stars

are going off to their blue sleep,

 

but the words are in place --

and the fish leaps, and leaps again

from the black plush of the poem,

that breathless space.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

(White Pine)

Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

 then walks with us silently out of the night.

 

 These are words we dimly hear:

 

 You, sent out beyond your recall,

 go to the limits of your longing.

 Embody me.

 

 Flare up like flame

 and make big shadows I can move in.

 

 Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

 Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

 Don't let yourself lose me.

 

 Nearby is the country they call life.

 You will know it by its seriousnes.

 

 Give me your hand.

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

 

(Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Prayer, Philip Metres

Prayer   Philip Metres

Wither me to within me: Welt me to weal me common again: Withdraw to wear me weary: Over me to hover and lover again: Before me to form and perform me: Round me to rill me liquid incisions: Behind me to hunt and haunt me: Down me to drown indecision: Bury me to seed me: bloom me In loam me: grind me to meal me Knead me to rise: raise me to your mouth Rive me to river me: End me to unmend me: Rend me to render me:       About This Poem   “During a struggle of chronic pain years ago, I began searching restlessly for prayers that might reach past my own resistance to prayers I’d inherited in my own faith tradition, and to write my own—often through the rhetoric or language of other prayers. This poem is born from an old prayer by Lancelot Andrewes, and plays with the paradox embedded in prayers of petition—that we are trying to reach outside of ourselves, but for something of ourselves.” —Philip Metres

The Best People, Ernest Hemingway

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”

― Ernest Hemingway

I Think Continually Of Those, Stephen Spender

I Think Continually of Those

 

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history

Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

 

What is precious is never to forget

The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;

Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,

Nor its grave evening demand for love;

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

 

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass,

And by the streamers of white cloud,

And whispers of wind in the listening sky;

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

 

 

~ Stephen Spender ~

 

(Collected Poems)

 

 

A Word For Joy, Franz Wright

A Word For Joy

 

I am happy among children's eyes

I am very worried and happy

among the crazy and the hopeless

they recognize me, right away

I'm home

And there is nowhere I would rather be

alive or dead

than in this world

Inside this skull I hold and ponder

unending space expanding if I understand correctly

at an accelerating rate, meanwhile

housing perpetual births and disappearances of its numberless

deafening nuclear furnaces unheard,

I consider the voices, identically soundless, in every

mind, behind each face I pass

and as I've been instructed each morning

on rising I obliterate the print of my body

and am glad (the wind is blowing, it is written, adore

the wind)

and am speechlessly grateful and glad and afraid

I don't mind saying that I am scared

to death of God: I am

afraid and blind and ignorant and naked and

I'll take it!

I have been happy here

among all the suffering eyes: why they were brought here

and exactly what it was they were expected

to take a good close look at,

I can't grasp it, but I am so very glad.

 

~ Franz Wright ~

 

(God's Silence)

 

Life Whike You Wait,

Life While-You-Wait

 

Life While-You-Wait.

Performance without rehearsal.

Body without alterations.

Head without premeditation.

 

I know nothing of the role I play.

I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it.

 

I have to guess on the spot

just what this play's all about.

 

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,

I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.

I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.

I trip at every step over my own ignorance.

I can't conceal my hayseed manners.

My instincts are for happy histrionics.

Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.

Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

 

Words and impulses you can't take back,

stars you'll never get counted,

your character like a raincoat you button on the run ?

the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

 

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,

or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!

But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.

Is it fair, I ask

(my voice a little hoarse,

since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).

 

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz

taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.

I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.

The props are surprisingly precise.

The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.

The farthest galaxies have been turned on.

Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.

And whatever I do

will become forever what I've done.

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

 

 

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997,

trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

Love Should Grow Up Like A Wild Iris In The Fields, Susan Griffin

Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields

 

Love should grow up like a wild iris in the fields,

unexpected, after a terrible storm, opening a purple

mouth to the rain, with not a thought to the future,

ignorant of the grass and the graveyard of leaves

around, forgetting its own beginning.

Love should grow like a wild iris

but does not.

Love more often is to be found in kitchens at the dinner hour,

tired out and hungry, lingers over tables in houses where

the walls record movements, while the cook is probably angry,

and the ingredients of the meal are budgeted, while

a child cries feed me now and her mother not quite

hysterical says over and over, wait just a bit, just a bit,

love should grow up in the fields like a wild iris

but never does

really startle anyone, was to be expected, was to be

predicted, is almost absurd, goes on from day to day, not quite

blindly, gets taken to the cleaners every fall, sings old

songs over and over, and falls on the same piece of rug that

never gets tacked down, gives up, wants to hide, is not

brave, knows too much, is not like an

iris growing wild but more like

staring into space

in the street

not quite sure

which door it was, annoyed about the sidewalk being

slippery, trying all the doors, thinking

if love wished the world to be well, it would be well.

Love should

grow up like a wild iris, but doesn't, it comes from

the midst of everything else, sees like the iris

of an eye, when the light is right,

feels in blindness and when there is nothing else is

tender, blinks, and opens

face up to the skies.

 

~ Susan Griffin ~

 

(Like the Iris of an Eye)

 

Mothers and Daughters, Jo McDougall

Mothers and Daughters
by Jo McDougall


When I was a child
my mother and I traveled the long miles
to see her mother, once a year.
That hillside farm was mostly gravel,
the kitchen smelled like a churn,
guineas and chickens strutted the porch.
When we left,
my grandmother would stand
in her garden and wave.
I’d watch her a long time,
leaning out the window of the car.
My mother would say little on the way home,
her eyes now and then filling with tears.
Perhaps she was thinking of that garden,
the one she tried to replicate year after year,
every last pole bean and zinnia,
the one she left to me.

"Mothers and Daughters" by Jo McDougall from In the Home of the Famous Dead.

It Is I Who Must Begin, Vaclav Havel

It Is I Who Must Begin

 

It is I who must begin.

Once I begin, once I try --

here and now,

right where I am,

not excusing myself

by saying things

would be easier elsewhere,

without grand speeches and

ostentatious gestures,

but all the more persistently

-- to live in harmony

with the "voice of Being," as I

understand it within myself

-- as soon as I begin that,

I suddenly discover,

to my surprise, that

I am neither the only one,

nor the first,

nor the most important one

to have set out

upon that road.

 

Whether all is really lost

or not depends entirely on

whether or not I am lost.

 

~ Vaclav Havel ~

 

(Teaching With Fire, ed. by S.M. Intrator and M. Scribner)

Prayer, Jorje Graham

 Prayer

BY JORIE GRAHAM

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl   

themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the   

way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-

                                                                      infolding,

entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a   

visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by   

minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the   

dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where   

they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into   

itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly   

invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing

                                    motion that forces change—

this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets   

what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing

is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by

each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,   

also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something   

at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through   

in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is   

what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen   

now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only   

something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.   

I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.   

It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Jorie Graham, "Prayer" from Never. 

In The Library, Charkes Simic

In the Library
by Charles Simic

Listen Online

There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.
She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

"In the Library" by Charles Simic from The Voice at 3:00am. 

74, Stephen Mitchell

74

 

If you realize that all things change, 

there is nothing you will try to hold on to. 

If you aren't afraid of dying, 

there is nothing you can't achieve.

 

Trying to control the future

is like trying to take the master carpenter's place. 

When you handle the master carpenter's tools,

chances are that you'll cut yourself. 

 

(Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

Then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

Go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame

And make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

1,59 from Rilke’s Book of a Monastic Life.

Your first word of all was light,

and time began.  Then for long you were silent.

Your second word was man, and fear began,

which grips us still.

Are you about to speak again?

I don’t want your third word.

Sometimes I pray:  Please don’t talk.

Let all your doing be by gesture only.

Go on writing in faces and stone

what your silence means.

Be our refuge from the wrath

That drove us out of Paradise.

Be our shepherd, but never call us –

We can’t bear to know what’s ahead.

1,44 same book as above.

All who seek you

test you.

And those who find you

bind you to image and gesture.

I would rather sense you

as the earth senses you.

In my ripening

ripens

what you are.

I need from you no tricks

to prove you exist.

Time, I know,

is other than you.

No miracles, please.

Just let your laws

become clearer

from generation to generation.

11,15 Rilke’s Book of Pilgrimage.

Sometimes a man rises from the supper table

and goes outside.  And he keeps on going

because somewhere to the east there’s a church.

His children bless his name as if he were dead.

Another man stays at home until he dies,

stays with plates and glasses.

So then it is his children who go out

into the world, seeking the church that he forgot.

11,19 Rilke’s Book of Pilgrimage

Unpacking A Globe, Arthur Sze

Unpacking a Globe   Arthur Sze

I gaze at the Pacific and don’t expect to ever see the heads on Easter Island, though I guess at sunlight rippling the yellow grasses sloping to shore; yesterday a doe ate grass in the orchard: it lifted its ears and stopped eating when it sensed us watching from a glass hallway—in his sleep, a veteran sweats, defusing a land mine. On the globe, I mark the Battle of the Coral Sea—no one frets at that now. A poem can never be too dark, I nod and, staring at the Kenai, hear ice breaking up along an inlet; yesterday a coyote trotted across my headlights and turned his head but didn’t break stride; that’s how I want to live on this planet: alive to a rabbit at a glass door— and flower where there is no flower.

By The Stream, Paul Laurence Dunbar

By the Stream   Paul Laurence Dunbar

By the stream I dream in calm delight, and watch as in a glass, How the clouds like crowds of snowy-hued and white-robed maidens             pass, And the water into ripples breaks and sparkles as it spreads, Like a host of armored knights with silver helmets on their heads. And I deem the stream an emblem fit of human life may go, For I find a mind may sparkle much and yet but shallows show, And a soul may glow with myriad lights and wondrous mysteries, When it only lies a dormant thing and mirrors what it sees.