The sun shines not on us but in us. The river flows not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love. -John Muir
___________________
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-Wendell Berry
___________________
The plum you're going to eat next summer
doesnt exist yet: its potential
lives inside a tree you'll never see
in an orchard you'll never see, will be touched
by a certain number of water droplets
before it reaches you, by certain angles
of light, by a finite amount of bugs
and dust motes and hands
you'll never know. The plum you are
going to eat next summer will gather
sugar, gather mass, will harden
at its center so it can soften toward
your mouth. The plum
you're going to eat next
summer doesn't know
you exist. The plum you are
going to eat next summer
is growing just for you.
-Gayle Brandeis
___________________
78
Basked in the sun,
listened to birds,
licked off raindrops,
and only in flight
the leaf saw the tree
and grasped
what it had been.
-Vera Pavlova
___________________
something dull folds open like a fan inside of me,
and i radiate every shade of who i used to be.
so i decide to go on a walk,
and dance on the skin of june,
and feel the warmth of its body on my feet.
i am in harmony with the moving world again.
i want to stitch myself into
every beautiful person,
and every beautiful place,
because who doesn't love beautiful things,
and everything is now becoming rich and visceral,
and i feel a shooting pain in my chest,
and my eyes are spilling out and down my cheek and neck,
and i'm losing shape,
and i'm finally learning that maybe i've never really lived,
that maybe the scaffolding of my life has been crashing since i was little
that maybe everything beautiful is actually hollow and futile,
that maybe the cause of all my dread is how deeply i know this,
and yet how deeply i want to be swallowed
by everything beautiful and hollow and futile.
somewhere i between this knowingness
and this obsession
is where everything dull
folds open,
and radiates
-tali nesbitt
___________________
The Dream Keeper (From the Weary Blues)
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers.
Bring me all of your
Heart Melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too rough fingers
Of the world.
-Langson Hughes
___________________
insomnia
the almost disturbing scent
of peonies presses through the screens,and I know without looking how
those heavy white heads lean down
under the moon's light. a cricket chafes
and pauses, chafes and pauses,
as if distracted or preoccupied.
when I open my eyes to document
my sleeplessness by the clock, a point
of greenish light pulses near the ceiling.
a firefly…in childhood I ran out
at dusk, a jar in one hand, lid
pierced with airholes in the other,
getting soaked to the knees
in the long wet grass.
the light moves unsteadily, like someone
whose balance is uncertain after traveling
many hours, coming a long way.
get up. get up and let it out.
but I leave it hovering overhead, in case
it's my father, come back from the dead
to ask, "why are you still awake? You can
put grass in their jar in the morning."
- jane kenyon
___________________
for there are No new ideas. there are only
new ways of making them felt - of examining
what those ideas feel like being lived on
Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch,
during wild love, making war, giving birth,
mourning our dead - while we suffer the old
longings, battle the old warnings and fears
of being silent and impotent and alone,
while we taste new possibilities and strengths.
-Audre Lorde
___________________
title: unknown
it is saturday afternoon.
i realize that my life is less about
living and more about sitting in a chair on
my back porch, watching words blow in
the wind, hang like laundry on a clothesline.
it is saturday afternoon and i realize that my
life is less about living and more about
watching words move through the air in
every shade of pastel pink and blue
and green, with streaks of sunlight slashing through them.
it is saturday afternoon and i realize
all i want to do is pluck the words off that clothesline one by one,
drape them over my forearm, and go back to the chair to fold them into sentences,
all while hearing the people
bustling about in the streets on the other side of the fence.
all of this to say, it is saturday afternoon
and i realize that my life is less about living and
more about writing about living.
right here ___ in this crack ___in this gap,
in this _ absence of word, yet space ___
surrounded by word, is where i begin.
it is here ___ where a match strikes and
the heart and mind speak. it is here ___ where the arm
outstretches to the clothesline and tugs on a sweater.
it is here ___ where everything becomes possible. it is
here ___ where life begins.
it is
here ___ where every thing of the dimensional world,
melts and the child’s world becomes tactile again.
it is here ___ where there is breath, movement.
it is here ___ where sparks fly from the fingertips.
it is here ___ where i stop caring, about everything, about
if this is a good poem, a bad poem, or an okay poem.
it is here ___ where life begins.”
- unnamed
___________________
“sometimes a thumbprint on a page means: we were here, we touched this, we pressed into this life, and it pressed back.”
ocean vuong — on earth we’re briefly gorgeous
___________________
“we look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.” - louise glück (meadowlands)
___________________
The number
of hours
we have
together is
actually not
so large.
Please linger
near the
door uncomfortably
instead of
just leaving.
Please forget
your scarf
in my
life and
come back
later for
it.
- Mikko Harvey
___________________
For The Hardest Days, by Clint Smith
Some evenings, after days when the world feels
like it has poured out all its despair onto me,
when I am awash with burdens that rests atop
my body like a burlap of jostling shadows,
I find a place to watch the sun set. I dig
my feet into a soil that has rebirthed itself
a millions times over. I listen to the sound
of leaves as they decide whether or not
it is time to descend from their branches.
It is hard to describe the comfort one feels
in sittings with something you trust will always be
there, something you can count on to remain
familiar when all else seems awry. How remarkable
it is to know that so many have watched the same
sun set before you. How the wind can carry
pollen and drop it somewhere it has never been.
How the leaves have always become the soil
that then become the leaves again. How maybe
we are not so different than the leaves.
How maybe we are also always being reborn
to be something more then we once were.
How maybe that’s what waking up each morning is.
A reminder that we are born
of the same atoms as every plant and bird
and mountain and ocean around us.
___________________
Wild geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
-Mary Oliver
___________________
getting there
the mind says:
this river has No bottom
the heart says:
we can build a bridge there
-cleo wade
___________________
the thing is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
-ellen bass
___________________
Waiting For My Life
Linda Pastan
I waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.
Sometimes my life coughed and coughed:
a stalled car about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like bird song
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life.
___________________
"Waking at Night"
Jack Gilbert
The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
___________________
everywhere
the stream
of life goes on,
and i try to
go with it,
non-swimmer,
paddler in a leaky
canoe. - linda pastan
___________________
The Presence in Absence
by Linda Gregg
Poetry is not made of words.
I can say it’s January when
it’s August. I can say, “The scent
of wisteria on the second floor
of my grandmother’s house
with the door open onto the porch
in Petaluma,” while I’m living
an hour’s drive from the Mexican
border town of Ojinaga.
It is possible to be with someone
who is gone. Like the silence which
continues here in the desert while
the night train passes through Marfa
louder and louder, like the dogs whining
and barking after the train is gone.
___________________
Ancient World - W.S. Merwin
Orange sunset
in the deep shell of summer
a long silence reaching
across the dry pastures
in the distance a dog barks
at the sound of a door closing
and at once I am older.
___________________
Praying - Mary Oliver
It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
___________________
"i thank You God for this amazing"
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
E. E. Cummings
___________________
How I go into the Woods by Mary Oliver
Ordinarily I go to the woods alone,
with not a single friend,
for they are all smilers and talkers
and therefore unsuitable.
I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree.
I have my ways of praying,
as you no doubt have yours.
Besides, when I am alone
I can become invisible.
I can sit on the top of a dune
as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned.
I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me,
I must love you very much.
___________________
Why Bother?
Because right now, there is someone
out there with
a wound in the exact shape
of your words.
- Sean Thomas Dougherty
___________________
To love yourself
is
to love
the world
and find
a place
to live
in
it. - Kate Baer
___________________
morning in bed, then
three hours apart. i carry you
in the sudden twitch
of my shoulders - Donald Hall
___________________
Hope
Hope has holes
in its pockets.
It leaves little
crumb trails
so that we,
when anxious,
can follow it.
Hope's secret:
it doesn't know
the destination --
it knows only that all roads
begin with one
foot in front
of the other.
-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
___________________
I am out with lanterns looking for myself - Emily Dickinson
___________________
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances
-Robert Hass
___________________
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
___________________
There are Poems
There are poems,
that are never written,
that simply move across the mind
like skywriting
on a still day:
slowly the first word
drifts west,
the last letters dissolve
on the tongue,
and what is left
in the pure blue
of insight, without cloud
or comfort. -Linda Pastan
___________________
"when did i forget that all i care about are
blood oranges, because they remind me of
last summer, when you and I opened our
shutters every morning at 7am and ate
fruit on the balcony. la dolce vita. when did i
forget that all i care about are blackberry stained lips, because they remind me of when you and i
got sugar high off the fruit nectar and laid in the sun the whole month of June. how languid, how
perfect. when did i forget that all i care about the little mason jar next to your sink that holds lavender branches, because it reminds me of the
life that has lingered behind my eyelids for decades,
the life that is and has always beckoned me, the life that is of me resting between the weeds near a lake in a faraway place. how peaceful.
when did i forget that all i care about is the look of a black turtleneck clasped around your frail body, that is a little dead looking
but perfect to me, because it reminds me of
the winters during childhood when my
mom would bundle me up in layers of clothes
and sit me on the couch while she read to me
and sang me soft lullabies. and i would watch
the snow fall outside the window until i fell
asleep comfortably in her arms. how lucky i am.
when did i forget that all i care about is a
slow life, a fruitful life, the type of life we
are all worthy of but somehow forget to live.
the life you reminded me i deserve, the
life you granted back to me. this is all
that matters to me. i long for nothing else.
-tali nesbitt
___________________
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
___________________
Adrift
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
by Mark Nepo
___________________
10
Today is yesterday and tomorrow in another place,
Nothing's farther away, nor nearer
than your being here.
-Homero Aridjis
___________________
If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
sing songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot
-Nanao Sakaki
1966 Kyoto
___________________
Hope and Love
All winter
the blue heron
slepy among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one-
not knowing even
that was what he did
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that hope is the hardest
love we carry,
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.
-Jane Hirshfield
___________________
It Isn't Gentleness
It isnt' gentleness
that you and I are looking for
in the hills and valleys,
it is the cliff, the gorge,
the scraped ocher on the knees
of the slopes
and the red crevie in which the land
shows too, the brilliance of its wound.
-Francisco Segovia
___________________
IV
The things I know:
how the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them
So that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it
and in the spring the rabbits find it
and build their nest inside
and have their young
and their young will live safely
inside the dead tree
So that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love. -Laura Gilpin
___________________
Let Evening Come
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
-Jane Kenyon
___________________
I don't want to live a small life
I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes,
open your hands. I have just come
from the berry fields, the sun
kissing me with its golden mouth all the way
(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds
following along thinking perhaps I might
feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes
only to you. Look how many small
but so sweet and maybe the last gift
I will bring to anyone in this
world of hope and risk, so do
Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.
-Mary Oliver
___________________
To see it
We need to separate
to see the life we’ve made,
to leave our house
where someone waits, patiently,
warm beneath the sheets;
to don layers of armor,
sweater, coat, mittens, scarf,
to stride down the frozen road,
putting distance between us,
this cold winter morning,
to look back and see,
on the hilltop, our life,
lit from inside.
-Laura Foley
___________________
There are moments when
the past ceases to be a form
of the present.
Rain and tears
Look alike. - Etel Adnan
___________________
I am running into a new year
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and what
i leave to forgive me
-Lucille Clifton
___________________
Reasons to Live Through the Apocalypse
by Nikita Gill
Sunrises. People you have still to meet and laugh with. Songs about love, peace, anger, and revolution. Walks in the woods. The smile you exchange with a stranger when you experience beauty accidentally together. Butterflies. Seeing your grandparents again. The moon in all her forms, whether half or full. Dogs. Birthdays and half-birthdays. That feeling of floating in love. Watching birds eat from bird feeders. The waves of happiness that follow the end of sadness. Brown eyes. Watching a boat cross an empty sea. Sunsets. Dipping your feet in the river. Balconies. Cake. The wind in your face when you roll the car window down on an open highway. Falling asleep to the sound of a steady heartbeat. Warm cups of tea on cold days. Hugs. Night skies. Art museums. Books filled with everything you do not yet know. Long conversations. Long-lost friends. Poetry.
___________________
April Morning
You are living the life
you wanted as if you'd known
what that was but of course
you didn't so you'd groped
toward it feeling for what
you couldn't imagine, what
your hands couldn't tell you,
for what that shape could be.
This Sunday the rain turns cold
again and steady but the window
is slightly open and there is the vaguest
sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps
between the buildings because it's spring
the calendar says and the room where
you are reading is empty yet full
of what loves you and this is the day
that you were born.
- Jonathan Wells
___________________
Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
-Frank O' Hara
___________________
Going Home
It was the middle of the day.
Early September. Light skirting
out from under the leaves. I was
taking the compost to the edge of
the yard when I saw you pinching a
pot on the old bench near the bird
bath we'd lugged from Albany. Mira
was lying in the grass, sun closing her
eyes. Something in the quiet light
made me realize that we were now,
in this moment, all we'd hoped for.
I put the can down and sat next to
you. Watched your hands shape
the clay. I wanted to run my fingers
through your hair. A small cloud
bowed and the sun warmed my
hand on your knee.
-Mark Nepo
___________________
Passage
Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place--
someone's hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isnt' that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?
-Victoria Chang
