Browsing Category "Poems"
12 Apr
2016
Posted in: Poems, Retreats
By    Comments Off on Those Few Minutes

Those Few Minutes

Sleeping-dogIt’s mysterious, what happens on retreats. Or at least, what can happen.
Mysterious.
Fleeting.
Unforgettable.
But almost impossible to describe.

Unless you’re a poet:

The Promise
by Jane Hirshfield

Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.

Mysteriously, they left.

As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,

who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.

It was not any awakening of the large, not so
much as that,

only a stepping back from the petty.

I gazed at the range of blue mountains,

I drank from the stream. Tossed in a small
stone from the bank.

Whatever direction the fates of my life might
travel, I trusted.

Even the greedy direction, even the grieving,
trusted.

There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss
nor danger.

The dog’s tail wagged a little in his dream.

23 Feb
2016
Posted in: Poems
By    Comments Off on I Ask This

I Ask This

keeps-coming-backThe Woodpecker Keeps Returning
by Jane Hirshfield

The woodpecker keeps returning

to drill the house wall.

Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another.

 

There is nothing good to eat there:

he has found in the house

a resonant billboard to post his intentions,

his voluble strength as provider.

 

But where is the female he drums for? Where?

 

I ask this, who am myself the ruined siding,

the handsome red-capped bird, the missing

mate.

 

16 Feb
2016
Posted in: Poems
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Extravagant Gesture

gestureI’m not quite sure why this poem speaks to me today. But it does. So I offer it to you. This is not an extravagant gesture, I know, but generous I hope, and not wasted.

Wasteful Gesture Only Not
by Tony Hoagland

Ruth visits her mother’s grave in the California hills.
She knows her mother isn’t there but the rectangle of grass
marks off the place where the memories are kept,

like a library book named Dorothy.
Some of the chapters might be: Dorothy:
Better Bird-Watcher Than Cook; 

Dorothy, Wife and Atheist;
Passionate Recycler Dorothy, Here Lies But Not.
In the summer hills, where the tall tough grass

reminds you of persistence
and the endless wind
reminds you of indifference,

Ruth brings batches of white roses,
extravagant gesture not entirely wasteful
because as soon as she is gone she knows
the deer come out of the woods to eat them.

What was made for the eye
goes into the mouth,
thinks Ruth to herself as she drives away,
and in bed when she tries to remember her mother,

she drifts instead to the roses,
and when she thinks about the roses she
sees instead the deer chewing them–

the pale petals of the roses in the dark
warm bellies of the sleeping deer–
that’s what going to sleep is like.

11 Feb
2016
Posted in: Poems, Talks
By    Comments Off on In the Garden

In the Garden

in-the-gardenI’ll be sitting the March month-long retreat at Spirit Rock and have been “getting into the groove” by listening to talks from the February month-long retreat going on right now. The talk I listened to last night was particularly lovely. It was given by Guy Armstrong and the title is The Power of Lovingkindness. In it, he quotes this poem by Shams of Tabriz:

I, You, He, She, We….
In the garden of mystic lovers,
These are not true distinctions.

10 Feb
2016
Posted in: Poems
By    Comments Off on Thank the Steady Effort

Thank the Steady Effort

steady-effortFor today:

How Rarely I Have Stopped to Thank the Steady Effort
by Jane Hirshfield

A person speaking
pauses, lets in
a little silence-portion with the words.
It is like an hour.
Any hour. This one.
Something happens, much does not.
Or as always, everything happens:
the standing walls keep standing with their whole attention.
A noisy crow call lowers and lifts its branch,
the crow scent enters the leaves, enters the bark,
like stirred-in honey gone into the tea.
How rarely I have stopped to thank
the steady effort of the world to stay the world.
To thank the furnish of green
and the abandon of yellow. The ancient Sumerians
called the beloved ‘Honey’, as we do.
Said also, ‘Borrowed bread is not returned.’
Like them, we pay love’s tax to bees,
we go on arranging the old notes in different orders.
Desire inside ACAGGAT.
Forgiveness in GTACTT.
In a world of space and time, arrangement matters.
An hour has no front or back,
except to those whose eyes face forward,
whose tears blur thought and stars.
Five genes, in a certain arrangement,
will spend this life unrooted, grazing.
It has to do with how the animal body comes into being,
the same whether ant or camel.
What then does such unfolded code understand,
if it finds in its mouth the word important
the thing that can be carried, or the thing that cannot,
or the way they keep trading places,
grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living.
Last night, the big Sumerian moon
clambered into the house empty-handed
and left empty-handed,
not thief, not lover, not tortoise, just looking around,
shuffling its soft, blind slippers over the floor.
This felt, to me, important, and so I looked back with both hands
open, palms unblinking.
What caused the fire, we ask, meaning,
lightning, wiring, matches.
How precisely and unbidden
oxygen slips itself into, between those thick words.

8 Feb
2016
Posted in: Poems
By    Comments Off on Instead, Stand Still and Listen

Instead, Stand Still and Listen

garden-partyI can’t seem to get enough Tony Hoagland these days. Like this excerpt from Social Life:

What I like about trees is how
they do not talk about the failure of their parents
and what I like about grasses is that
they are not grasses in recovery

and what I like about the flowers is
that they are not flowers in need of
empowerment or validation. They sway

upon their thorny stems
as if whatever was about to happen next tonight
was sure to be completely interesting–

the moon rising like an ivory tusk,
a few sextillion molecules of skunk
strolling through the air
to mingle with the aura of a honeysuckle bush,

and when they bump together in my nose,
I want to raise my head and sing,
I’m a child in paradise again
when you touch me like that, baby,

but instead, I stand still and listen
to the breeze streaming through the upper story of a tree
and the hum of insects in the field,
letting everything else have a word,

and then another word–
because silence is always good manners
and often a clever thing to say
when you are at a party.

4 Feb
2016
Posted in: Poems
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What to Bring Home

what-to-carryUpdate:
All went well yesterday with mom’s cataract surgery. Her memory of it this morning was a little crazy….first she said she’d been awake the whole time, then she said they kept her waiting under a blanket for “hours” (the whole procedure took 45 minutes), then she said she didn’t think they’d done anything at all….but still she was in great spirits, delighted and amazed at all the things she can see!!!

***

For today:

My Memory
by Jane Hirshfield

Like the small soaps and shampoos
a traveler brings home
then won’t use,
you, memory,
almost weightless
this morning inside me.

1 Feb
2016
Posted in: Poems
By    Comments Off on Behind the Counter

Behind the Counter

Corner-Store-BlueI went to the post office today to fill out forms, get my picture taken, and send in a surprising amount of money to get my passport renewed. There was a long line. It wasn’t moving. I watched myself starting to get tangled up in a lot of “it shouldn’t be like this”….and then I relaxed and looked a little more carefully…and I noticed how the woman behind the counter was really trying to be helpful — and caring — to the woman at the head of the line who was clearly having a difficult time of it. And then, all of a sudden, the waiting wasn’t all that much of a problem.

In tribute, I offer this poem for today:

At the Corner Store
by Alison Luterman

He was a new old man behind the counter,
Skinny and eager.
He greeted me like a long-lost daughter,
As if we both came from the same world,
Someplace warmer and more gracious than this cold city.
I was thirsty and alone. Sick at heart, grief-soiled,
And his face lit up as if I were his prodigal daughter
Returning,
Coming back to the freezer bins in front of the register
Which were still and always filled
With the same old Cable Car ice cream sandwiches and cheap frozen greens.
Back to the knobs of beef and packages of hotdogs,
These familiar shelves strung with potato chips and corn chips,
Stacked-up beer boxes and immortal Jim Beam.
I lumbered to the case and bought my precious bottled water
And he returned my change, beaming
As if I were the  bright new buds on the just-bursting-open cherry trees,
As if I were everything beautiful struggling to grow,
And he was blessing me as he handed me my dime
Over the counter and the plastic tub of red licorice whips.
This old man who didn’t speak English
Beamed out love to me in the iron week after my mother’s death
So that when I emerged from his store
My whole cock-eyed life —
What a beautiful failure —
Glowed gold like a sunset after rain.
Frustrated city dogs were yelping in their yards,
Mad with passion behind their chain-link fences,
And in the driveway of a peeling-paint house
A woman and a girl danced to contagious reggae.
Praise Allah! Jah! The Buddha! Kwan Yin,
Jesus, Mary, and even jealous old Jehovah!
For eyes, hands,
Of the divine, everywhere.

28 Jan
2016
Posted in: Poems
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Pursuit of Happiness

happiness-isI’m in the mood for a little Tony Hoagland today…something from his collection of poems: What Narcissism Means to Me.

How It Adds Up
by Tony Hoagland

There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean.
And the day I quit the job my father got me.
And the day I stood outside a door,
and listened to my girlfriend making love
to someone obviously not me, inside,

and I felt strange because I didn’t care.

There was the morning I was born,
the year I was a loser,
and the night I was the winner of the prize
for which the audience applauded.

Then there was someone else I met,
whose face and voice I can’t forget,
and the memory of her
is like a jail I’m trapped inside,

or maybe she is something I just use
to hold my real life at a distance.

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower
plucked from a river of lava

and held aloft on a tightrope
strung between two scrawny trees
above a canyon
in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it–,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it
everywhere, for years,
while right behind you,
the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes

of a crazy song.

 

26 Jan
2016
Posted in: Poems, Sampler Retreat, Talks
By    Comments Off on Never Any More Than There Is Right Now

Never Any More Than There Is Right Now

right-nowIn the first talk our little “Sampler” group will listen to next month, Lila Wheeler offers this quote from Walt Whitman, which I pass on here to you:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems…

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand….

nor look through the eyes of the dead….

There will never be any more perfection than there is right now;

any more heaven or hell than there is right now.

***

The title of Lila’s talk is Joy and Gladdening. You can listen to it here.