Obsolete

 

.

The rose is obsolete

but each petal ends in

an edge, the double facet

cementing the grooved

columns of air--The edge

cuts without cutting

meets--nothing--renews

itself in metal or porcelain--

whither? It ends--

But if it ends

the start is begun

so that to engage roses

becomes a geometry--

Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica--
the broken plate
glazed with a rose

Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses--

The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end--of roses

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness--fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching

What

The place between the petal's
edge and the

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting
from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space


–William Carlos Williams

.

telling the bees

 .

When someone dies you are supposed to tell the bees and invite them to the funeral, give them wine and cake, hang mourning cloth over the hive.

You should tell them other things as well - of a marriage, when you are planning to rob the hive, when you are troubled by your dreams.

Tell and they will listen, tell and they will spread the word with the wind.


–Rima Staines

.

let me begin again

.

Let me begin again as a speck

of dust caught in the night winds

sweeping out to sea. Let me begin

this time knowing the world is

salt water and dark clouds, the world

is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn

comes slowly and changes nothing. Let

me go back to land after a lifetime

of going nowhere. This time lodged

in the feathers of some scavenging gull

white above the black ship that docks

and broods upon the oily waters of

your harbor. This leaking freighter

has brought a hold full of hayforks

from Spain, great jeroboams of dark

Algerian wine, and quill pens that can’t

write English. The sailors have stumbled

off toward the bars of the bright houses.

The captain closes his log and falls asleep.

1/10’28. Tonight I shall enter my life

after being at sea for ages, quietly,

in a hospital named for an automobile.

The one child of millions of children

who has flown alone by the stars

above the black wastes of moonless waters

that stretched forever, who has turned

golden in the full sun of a new day.

A tiny wise child who this time will love

his life because it is like no other.


–Philip Levine

.
In the Realm of Hokkaido
Robert van Koesveld
.

you know ...

 

.

You have been trained since infancy to direct your attention to what is temporary. Had anyone before revealed the Permanent to you, there would be no need to sit with Wu Hsin.

Most people don’t sit because they are afraid of what is revealed.

The individuals fear that they will lose their individuality, their identity. One could say that the love of Being is not yet greater than the love of being somebody … or it could be said that the fear of the not yet known is far greater than the distaste for the known.

Either way, “I’ll pay any price” is suddenly shown to be a hollow offer.
 
When you become clear that you are not this body, but that it is your instrument, then worries about death dissolve.

In essence, death dies.

 
–Wu Hsin

.

 

all is well

.

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
I am I, and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other, that we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name,
speak to me in the easy way which you always used.

Put no difference in your tone,
wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word that it always was,
let it be spoken without effect,
without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.

It is the same that it ever was;
there is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?

I am waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near, just round the corner.
And all is well.


–Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918)
Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral, London. UK 

.

Love drinks it in

.

.

As air becomes the medium for light when the sun rises,
And as wax melts from the heat of fire,
So the soul drawn to that light is resplendent,
Feels self melt away,
Its will and actions no longer its own.
So clear is the imprint of God
That the soul, conquered, is conqueror;
Annihilated, it lives in triumph.

What happens to the drop of wine

That you pour into the sea?

Does it remain itself, unchanged?

It is as if it never existed.

So it is with the soul: Love drinks it in,

It is united with Truth,

Its old nature fades away,

It is no longer master of itself.

The soul wills and yet does not will:

Its will belongs to Another.

It has eyes only for this beauty;

It no longer seeks to possess, as was its wont -

It lacks the strength to possess such sweetness.

The base of this highest of peaks

Is founded on nichil,

Shaped into nothingness, made one with the Lord.

–Jacopone da Todi
from Let Annihilation and Charity Lead

.

the sums of things

.

Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form.

The phrase “being born” is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while “dying” means ceasing to be the same. 

Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.


–Ovid
The Metamorphoses

.

no permanence is ours

.

No permanence is ours,
we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

–Hermann Hesse

.

into the strenuous briefness

 

.

into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness,friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim,sayingly;
(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses &; hello:
(of so longs and,ashes)

–E. E. Cummings

 

.
largerloves
.

they go

.

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.

–Edna St. Vincent Millay

.

 

Prayer, for Cello and Strings

.

 

the mystery of grace

.

I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.

—Anne Lamott

.

the rest between two notes

.

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.

Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:
I am only one of many mouths
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death's note wants to climb over—

but the dark interval, reconciled,

They stay here trembling.

And the song goes on, beautiful.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

.
Mark Bridger
.

Ghazal 891

 
.

one by one

our friends

filled with joy and quest

begin to arrive

one by one our friends

the worshipers of ecstasy

begin to arrive

more friends and sweethearts

filling you with love

are on their way

darlings of spring

journeying from gardens

begin to arrive

one by one

living their destiny

in this world

the ones who are gone are gone

but the ones who survived

begin to arrive

all their pockets

filled with gold

from endless treasures

bringing gifts

for the needy of the world

begin to arrive

the weak and the exhausted

the frightened by love

will be gone

the rejuvenated

the healthy and happy

begin to arrive

the pure souls

like the spectrums

of the shining sun

descending from the high heavens

to lowly earth

begin to arrive

luscious and happy

the blessed garden

whose heavenly fruits

spring forth

from the virgin winter

begin to arrive

those who are born

from the roots

of generosity and love

taking a journey

from paradise to paradise

begin to arrive

–Rumi

Translation by Nader Khalili

.

time to go

.

Now it’s high watermark

and floodtide in the heart

and time to go.

The sea-nymphs in the spray

will be the chorus now.

What’s left to say?



Suspect too much sweet-talk

but never close your mind.

It was a fortunate wind

that blew me here. I leave

half-ready to believe

that a crippled trust might walk



and the half-true rhyme is love.


–Seamus Heaney
from The Cure at Troy

.

over to you

.

Finding a Bible in an Abandoned Cabin

.

Under dust plush as a moth’s wing,
the book’s leather cover still darkly shown,
and everywhere else but this spot was sodden
beneath the roof’s unraveling shingles.
There was that back-of-the-neck lick of chill
and then, from my index finger, the book

opened like a blasted bird. In its box
of familiar and miraculous inks,
a construction of filaments and dust,
thoroughfares of worms, and a silage
of silverfish husks: in the autumn light,
eight hundred pages of perfect wordless lace.


–Robert Wrigley

.

 

the heaven of animals

.

Here they are.  The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains it is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.
 
Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open. 

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field. 

For some of these, it could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe. 

They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey 

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward:  to walk 

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain 

At the cycle's center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.


–James Dickey 

.

lines written in the days of growing darkness

 .

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that

it may resume.

And therefore

who would cry out

to the petals on the ground

to stay,

knowing as we must,

how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?

I don't say

it's easy, but

what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world

be true?

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,

this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east,

and the ponds be cold and black,

and the sweets of the year be doomed.

–Mary Oliver

.

questions

 

.

Just before Ninakawa passed away the Zen master Ikkyu visited him.
“Shall I lead you on?” Ikkyu asked.

Ninakawa replied: “I came here alone and I go alone.
What help could you be to me?” 

Ikkyu answered: “If you think you really come and go, that is
your delusion.
Let me show you the path on which there is no coming and no going.” 

With his words, Ikkyu had revealed the path so clearly
that Ninakawa smiled and passed away.


from Zen Flesh Zen Bones
compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki

.

the day we die

 

 

.

 

The day we die
the wind comes down
to take away
our footprints.
 
The wind makes dust
to cover up
the marks we left
while walking.
 

For otherwise
the thing would seem
as if we were
still living.

Therefore the wind
is he who comes
to blow away
our footprints.


—Southern Bushmen
from A Book of Luminous Things
edited by Czeslaw Milosz

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