Breaking The Cold Morning Silence

Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, 

clearer and happier — than being in one place, 

absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. 

It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: 

it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 

“that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

~ Pico Iyer

. . . . .

Everything becomes.

Temperatures transition.

Possibilities proliferate.

A Soul Rising Toward Its Devotion

We get older.

Fresh layers of insight

in the afternoon of a life appear.

Parts of ourselves transitioning

from one phase to another.

Accepting it, something

new is born.

Silence, For All Purposes, Still Remains

Small pieces borrowed from Spring.

Slowly I recall again their faces,

perpetually anchored to this silence.

How Vigorous The Warm Air

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life––

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

~ William Stafford

We Move Along In Our Own Way

Do Not Expect

Do not expect that if your book falls open

to a certain page, that any phrase

you read will make a difference today,

or that the voices you might overhear

when the wind moves through the yellow-green

and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the

dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon

your shadow walks beside you on the wall,

and the days stay long and heavy underneath

the distant rumor of the harvest. One

more summer gone,

and one way or another you survive,

dull or regretful, never learning that

nothing is hidden in the obvious

changes of the world, that even the dim

reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass

is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then

you touch, you see, you press against

the surface of impenetrable things.

~ Dana Gioia

An Illusion Of Stillness

Above a wooden bench

an accommodating sky

composes itself into

something as beautiful

as an abstract idea.

Bereft of darkness,

at this bright hour.

time quietly dismantles

an adequate distance away, 

fading from my concern.

Drawing From Herself

She is in 

search of a 

language that 

is tactile, 

palatial,

and self-im

molating—

a language

that will cor

respond to 

her latent 

desire to 

disinte

grate and ex

pand. To be

come the room.

~ Jackie Wang, A Stain on Silence

Fragmented Surfaces

Slight  and still

pieces of it weakening,

deteriorating there.

Properties of it 

scattering before passing

into nothingness.

. . . . .

I imagine its fragile impression splintering there in the light. However brief its wreckage, the eyes walking into its mystery can get lost in the sweet fragmentation of its lessening. Time all the while presses on, possessing an architecture all its own. Each second always at work emitting a steady pulse with an impeccable regularity.

Out Of Nothing, It Appears

Out of nothing it appears, the lucidity of yellow 

unfurling here in this placid spill of white.

Unconscious of the delicate silence that holds them – 

absently enough, flowers hang, suffused to a faint scent of air 

where a curious tone full of breath is deflected.

If One Could Watch It Moment By Moment

The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Colour is 

a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, 

the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions and his pleasures.

~ Frenand Leger

Already Pictured

What you can do, or dream 

you can, begin it; boldness has genius, 

power and magic in it.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

. . . . .

What is now proved was once only imagined.

~ William Blake

Exquisite Precision

Always at work,

the nature of things.

Take for instance

the shadow cast 

by flowers at rest

in a golden vase.

Inevitably balanced,

the symmetry of their

recognized silhouette.

Perhaps a poem 

soon to be written

will expound on the

complicated mystery

surrounding the

placement of things.

. . . . .

Slaked by the fulfillment of another's 

hospitable gaze, the moment is captured.

In And Out Of Light And Dark, The Poet Rises

Sympathetic to the landscape, your concentration stretches far and wide mapping its affecting geographies. Your words speak humbly of its people passing. Individuals – some heartsick and wistful, others a little scared, existing on the mere surface of things. Everything for them coming down to getting by on self-imposed perception's of emptiness. With hands clenched to the sill of a window, their eyes fix to the harsh weather transpiring outside, while inside, their souls cling to the conventional day-after-day-ness of the hours. Almost invisible, loneliness becomes their story, to tell it is your thing. 

I'll never forget the look of clemency I found in your eyes when you told me that a single minute is enough time, if it is your desire to want to change things. Proud and vulnerable with their talent for love and forgiveness, your eyes catch me still a little off-guard as I try following your mind to no end. Nameless, the stranger part of you always writing down the details in the pages of your spiral-bound book as if half-expecting to catch up with the scheme of things before it all slips away into the silence, like those faint whispers that arise then all too suddenly disappear, resonating from a thousand naked stones.

Moved by words, your mind longingly searches for something to clutch – a spark to light the dark, to guide you back into another day that you might fit again into its chanced flame. Initiating their harmony, you and your words become so much more than just an ambiguous ambition. With purpose your soul quietly discovers a place to talk. Your mind, in a meaningful way, elicits further, its process of thought. Without exception it is fated to become something to be listened to.

. . . . .

You there;

Come with me into

the world of light

and be whole,

For the love you thought had been

dead a thousand years

Is back in town

and asking for you.

~ Mark Strand

(from a suite entitled "Five Dogs," 

from the book Blizzard of One)

Impeccable Its Glow, Reminiscent Of The Sun

I know not enough about this weedy composite plant

to tell everything of its persistence, its enduring will.

Newly born, from the inside it cheerfully travels out,

connected to a happy, impressionable landscape.

Clutching a few, their bright, polished yellow gives me

something to embrace, something to arc my spirit around.

All, All Is One

Humbly the figure stood

listening like a stone

to the loneliness of the moon.

In a languishing voice

a gentle echo emerged,

yet nothing did it answer

of the questions floating

in the dark of the abyss.

Night with its moon and stars

hung spectacular and finite

in the midnight of that hour.

Stopping For A Second

Recently I came back around to imagining it once again –

a strand of coarse binder twine cleverly knotted to a tree,

wanting to write something of its messed up expression,

visible in the light where initially I tried to sketch its amber.

Not Conscious Of It, Until

If at night, settled into your pillow, whirs of a life dramatically begin to unfurl,

in the silence of the morning try to unbind in the mind the memory of it,

as if to confirm the sense of things, as if something depended on it.


. . . . .


A Morning Offering

 I bless the night that nourished my heart

To set the ghosts of longing free

Into the flow and figure of dream

That went to harvest from the dark

Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me

Welcome the wonder of this day,

The field of brightness it creates

Offering time for each thing

To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:

The quiet loyalty of breath,

The tent of thought where I shelter,

Wave of desire I am shore to

And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today

To the invisible geography

That invites me to new frontiers,

To break the dead shell of yesterdays,

To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today

To live the life that I would love,

To postpone my dream no longer

But do at last what I came here for

And waste my heart on fear no more.

by John O'Donohue

In That Interim

As a way of life

the hours pass.

 naturally 

like shafts of sunlight 

radiantly projected from the sky,

 silently 

like the formation of clouds

pushed ever so gently by the wind.

 . . . . .

Yet, just yesterday 

 long shadows stretched 

with such heaviness 

across the surface

of four empty walls –

inky illusions playing

silhouette against

another day passing by.

. . . . .

Out of breath, 

you stop!

 Mouth agape, 

the heart stutters

 a   n   t   i   c   i   p   a   t   i   n   g

a way of life

as the hours pass.

Early Arrangements: Flowers Almost Flame

The beautiful spring came; 

and when Nature resumes her loveliness, 

the human soul is apt to revive also.

~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

. . . . .

Beauty is an all-pervading presence. It unfolds to the numberless flowers of the Spring; it waves in the branches of the trees and in the green blades of grass; it haunts the depths of the earth and the sea, and gleams out in the hues of the shell and the precious stone. And not only these minute objects, but the ocean, the mountains, the clouds, the heavens, the stars, the rising and the setting sun all overflow with beauty. The universe is its temple; and those people who are alive to it can not lift their eyes without feeling themselves encompassed with it on every side.

~ William Ellery Channing

Looking Forward, Glancing Back

The  c o n t e m p l a t i o n  of beauty, 

whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, 

a radiant face, or a work of art, 

makes us glance back unwittingly 

at our personal past and juxtapose 

ourselves and our inner being with the

utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Hour On Hour, Without End

Time, as it flows, 

wears down and destroys 

that which is temporal.

~ Simone Weil

. . . . .

tem·po·ral1

[tem-per-uhl, tem-pruhl]

adjective

1.

of or pertaining to time.

2.

pertaining to or concerned with the present life

or this world; worldly: temporal joys.

3.

enduring for a time only; temporary; 

transitory (opposed to eternal).

Inside Ourselves

A sip of tea helps draw out words planted deep within. The soul, having slipped away from the outside world, listens intently to the heart where diverse vocabularies lay hidden until seen. Curiously moving inside the dimensions of each word, observations find resonance in the mind, which gradually develops a better understanding and appreciating of their worth. Without portentousness, a poetry naturally unfolds as something between the mind and heart begins to brew.

For a while, the ink openly flows.

As she completes her last sip of tea, the poet lays down her pen and slips briefly away. But for an instant, prior to her leaving, she hesitates for a moment to dwell on a hope – something promising that the words she's just penned might be opened again by somebody else’s mind. And that it might produce in them, a sweet twitch to the heart as her words, once again, come alive.

The Eye Drifts, Searching For ARTiculation

Come forth into the light of things, 
let nature be your teacher.

~ William Wordsworth

. . . . .

A New Poet
.
Finding a new poet
is like finding a new wildflower
out in the woods. You don't see

its name in the flower books, and
nobody you tell believes
in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows
down the whole length of the page. In fact
the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea
on a foggy day - the odor of truth
and of lying.

And the words are so familiar,
so strangely new, words
you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil
or a pen or even a paintbrush,
if only there had been a flower.

~ Linda Pastan

Ways Of Seeing

Rounding a corner, light steps in,

neatly casting its mystery.

Pieces, perhaps blown in from a forgotten poem,

reassemble, prompting the motion of thought.

Not by accident at all, there is an uproar, 

the eyes hold fast to a myriad of colours and forms.

In time there is an echo, everything sits quiet,

the active imagination secretly disappears.

. . . . .

It is true that I can trip over anything and nothing – a speck of dust, a patch of sunlight, 
an idea. I move through life like a person with one eye, through a landscape that looks 
flat, but is really tricked out with hidden depths and shallows. It didn’t use to be so, but 
no matter. I navigate the world well enough in my own way.

~ Franny Billingsley, The Folk Keeper