A Cranefly in September

.

She is struggling through grass-mesh - not flying,
Her wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of limbs
Rocking, like an antique wain, a top-heavy ceremonial cart
Across mountain summits
(Not planing over water, dipping her tail)
But blundering with long strides, long reachings, reelings
And ginger-glistening wings
From collision to collision.

Aimless in no particular direction,
Just exerting her last to escape out of the overwhelming
Of whatever it is, legs, grass,
The garden, the county, the country, the world -
 
Sometimes she rests long minutes in the grass forest
Like a fairytale hero, only a marvel can help her.
She cannot fathom the mystery of this forest
In which, for instance, this giant watches -
The giant who knows she cannot be helped in any way.
 
Her jointed bamboo fuselage,
Her lobster shoulders, and her face
Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache,
And the simple colourless church windows of her wings
Will come to an end, in mid-search, quite soon.

Everything about her, every perfected vestment
Is already superfluous.
The monstrous excess of her legs and curly feet
Are a problem beyond her.
The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate
To plot her through the infinities of the stems.

The frayed apple leaves, the grunting raven, the defunct tractor
Sunk in nettles, wait with their multiplications
Like other galaxies.
The sky's Northward September procession, the vast
soft armistice,
Like an Empire on the move,
Abandons her, tinily embattled
With her cumbering limbs and cumbered brain.


–Ted Hughes

.
John Crongeyer

.








 

A Dream Within a Dream

 

.

 

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?


—Edgar Allan Poe

 

.

fablesofthereconstruction 

thehollowsquare 

.

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

.

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy

to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again
in a new way
on the earth!

That’s what it said
as it dropped,
smelling of iron,
and vanished

like a dream of the ocean
into the branches
and the grass below.

Then it was over.

The sky cleared.
I was standing
under a tree.

The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.


—Mary Oliver

.
datura
vivre !
.

Late August, Lasting Words

.

It's as if we're always preparing
for something, the endless  roll of the earth
ripening us.
Even on the most tranquil
late August afternoon when heavy heads
of phlox bow in the garden
and the hummingbird sits still for a moment
on a branch of an apple tree—
even on such a day,
evening approaches sooner
than yesterday, and we cannot help
noticing whole families of birds
arrive together in the enclosure,
young blue birds molted a misty grey,
colored through no will of their own
for a journey.
On such an evening
I ache for what I cannot keep—the birds,
the phlox, the late-flying bees—
though I would not forbid the frost,
even if I could. There will be more to love
and lose in what's to come and this too: desire
to see it clear before it's gone.


–Mary Chivers 
from Claire B. Willis
Lasting Words: A Guide to Finding Meaning Toward the Close of Life
© Green Writers Press, 2014

.
ayearofbeinghere
.

Breathing for a Living

.

“I’m a typical college student, if there is such a thing,” Laura wrote as a freshman at Brown University. “Except that I won’t be able to look back at my life from old age.” The sentences became part of a larger project during her sophomore year, when she became so ill that she withdrew from college to undergo the double lung transplant that ultimately failed to prolong her life. Weaving together essays, diary entries, poems, and emails to and from her many friends—dispatches from the shifting battlefields of CF and its treatment—Laura created a chronicle of her life as she lived it. She wrote with unadorned honesty and wry understatement, refusing to indulge in even a hint of false hope or sentimentality. Yet her voice resisted identification with an illness. 

What shines through Breathing for a Living is the sense that there is something in us that is not limited, that can seek and speak and be the truth. The reader comes away with the inkling that our greatest human power may not be our capacity to defend ourselves, to be unassailably strong and independent, but to be defenseless. The life of Laura proved that opening to our experience in its raw state without hope of escape makes us capable of opening to others as well. 


–Tracy Cochran
Living as Spiritual Practice:
The life and death of Laura Rothenberg

 .

parabola-magazine
from new Fall Issue on the theme of spiritual practice

.

for your Sunday

 

 

 

 

.

 

 

 

 

 

 

the kingfisher

. 

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world -- so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?

There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.

When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.

I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.


–Mary Oliver

.

ripeness

.

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.

And however sharply
you are tested —
this sorrow, that great love —
it too will leave on that clean knife.


–Jane Hirshfield
The October Palace

Aya Despacho, a shamanic ceremony for the end of life

. 

see also
dyingconsciously 
.

According to Garp

.

Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.


—John Irving
The World According to Garp

 

.
fablesofthereconstruction
.

air

.

Naturally it is night.

Under the overturned lute with its

One string I am going my way

Which has a strange sound.

This way the dust, that way the dust.

I listen to both sides

But I keep right on.

I remember the leaves sitting in judgment

And then winter.

I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.

The rain taking all its roads.

Nowhere.

Young as I am, old as I am,

I forget tomorrow, the blind man.

I forget the life among the buried windows.

The eyes in the curtains.

The wall

Growing through the immortelles.

I forget silence

The owner of the smile.

This must be what I wanted to be doing,

Walking at night between the two deserts,

Singing.


–W. S. Merwin

.

A Letter to Ruth Stone

.

 

Now that you have caught sight
of the other side of darkness
the invisible side
so that you can tell
it is rising
first thing in the morning
and know it is there
all through the day
another sky
clear and unseen
has begun to loom
in your words
and another light is growing
out of their shadows
you can hear it
now you will be able
to envisage beyond
any words of mine
the color of these leaves
that you never saw
awake above the still valley
in the small hours
under the moon
three nights past the full
you know there was never
a name for that color


–W. S. Merwin
The Shadow Of Sirius

.
fablesofthereconstruction
wait - what? 
.

holy ghost

.