[Sven2]

And Now it's October


the golden hour of the clock of the year. Everything that can run
to fruit has already done so: round apples, oval plums, bottom-heavy
pears, black walnuts and hickory nuts annealed in their shells,
the woodchuck with his overcoat of fat. Flowers that were once bright
as a box of crayons are now seed heads and thistle down. All the feathery
grasses shine in the slanted light. It's time to bring in the lawn chairs
and wind chimes, time to draw the drapes against the wind, time to hunker
down. Summer's fruits are preserved in syrup, but nothing can stopper time.
No way to seal it in wax or amber; it slides though our hands like a rope
of silk. At night, the moon's restless searchlight sweeps across the sky.

--Barbara Crooker

[Sven2]

Song of Myself
         
             after Issa

I think it's enough just to sit and meditate, heedless
of the needs of others close to us and of
their perpetual demands that seem to sap the
strength from us. My doorway and the morning dew
are all I need to make my day, and that
is where I'll plan to be. And if that marks
me misanthropic, if that threatens to end our
relationship, I say that is not my problem, closing
my door. Thoreau knew how to spend the day
alone with his peas and beans and ledgers, and we
can do the same. So much for the ties that bind.
"We must find our occasions in ourselves,"
said self-reliant Thoreau. And so I'm going to sing to
myself. And the birds. And you. And one or two others.

Note
"Song of Myself" and the other sonnets spread throughout For Dear Life, designated by the presence of epigraphs such as "after Basho" and "after Issa" and so on, are built on haiku. The last words of each line of each poem, read vertically from top to bottom, form a haiku by a classical Japanese master.


--Ronald Wallace

[Sven2]

Early Darkness

How can you say
earth should give me joy? Each thing
born is my burden; I cannot succeed
with all of you.

And you would like to dictate to me,
you would like to tell me
who among you is most valuable,
who most resembles me.
And you hold up as an example
the pure life, the detachment
you struggle to achieve--

How can you understand me
when you cannot understand yourselves?
Your memory is not
powerful enough, it will not
reach back far enough--

Never forget you are my children.
You are not suffering because you touched each other,
but because you were born,
because you required life
separate from me.


--Louise Gluck

[Sven2]

I'm not a religious person but


God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in
Lemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties,
unpaid interning. Proficient in fetching coffee, sending super
vague emails. It got so bad God personally had to speak to me.
This was annoying because I'm not a religious person. I thought
I'd made this clear to God by reading Harry Potter & not attending
church except for gay weddings. God did not listen to me. God is
not a good listener. I said Stop it please, I'll give you wedding cake,
money, candy, marijuana. Go talk to married people, politicians,
children, reality TV stars. I'll even set up a booth for you,
then everyone who wants to talk to you can do so
without the stuffy house of worship, the stuffier middlemen,
& the football blimps that accidentally intercept prayers
on their way to heaven. I'll keep the booth decorations simple
but attractive: stickers of angels & cats, because I'm not religious
but didn't people worship cats? Thing is, God couldn't take a hint.
My doctor said to eat an apple every day. My best friend said to stop
sleeping with guys with messiah complexes. My mother said she is
pretty sure she had sex with my father so I can't be some new
Asian Jesus. I tried to enrage God by saying things like When I asked
my mother about you, she was in the middle of making dinner
so she just said Too busy. I tried to confuse God by saying I am
a made-up dinosaur & a real dinosaur & who knows maybe
I love you, but then God ended up relating to me. God said I am
a good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one.
It rained & we stayed inside. Played a few rounds of backgammon.
We used our indoor voices. It got so quiet I asked God
about the afterlife. Its existence, human continued existence.
He said Oh. That. Then sent his angel again. Who said Ummmmmmm.
I never heard from God or his rookie angel after that. I miss them.
Like creatures I made up or found in a book, then got to know a bit.


--Chen Chen

[Sven2]

Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace


I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.


--Richard Brautigan

[Sven2]

Last Day on Earth


If it's the title of a movie you expect
everything to become important—a kiss,
a shrug, a glass of wine, a walk with the dog.
But if the day is real, life is only
as significant as yesterday—the kiss
hurried, the shrug forgotten, and now,
on the path by the river, you don't notice
the sky darkening beyond the pines because
you're imagining what you'll say at dinner,
swirling the wine in your glass.
You don't notice the birds growing silent
or the cold towers of clouds moving in,
because you're explaining how lovely
and cool it was in the woods. And the dog
had stopped limping!—she seemed
her old self again, sniffing the air and alert,
the way dogs are to whatever we can't see.
And I was happy, you hear yourself saying,
because it felt as if I'd been allowed
to choose my last day on earth,
and this was the one I chose.

--Lawrence Raab 

[Sven2]

Surviving Love

I work hard at managing, grateful
and spare. I try to forgive all trespasses
and give thanks for the desert. Rejoice
in being alive here in my simple world.
Each evening I walk for an hour, paying
attention to real things. The plover
sweeping at my face to get me away from
its ground nest. An ant carrying the wing
of a butterfly like a flag in the wind.
A grasshopper eating a dead grasshopper.
The antelope close up, just staring at me.
Back in the house, I lie down in the heat
for a nap, realizing forgiveness is hard
for the wounded. Near the border,
between this country and the next one.


--Linda Gregg 

[Sven2]

Rain Falling in the Far West
                                         
                                         I

I am standing, old and self-absorbed as Lear,
out on bogland, where I started;
there are skylarks, pipits, black-monk crows
and plover, secret in the heathers, calling; dried blood
on the scraws, gnawed gristle,
furred creatures cowering, the raptor hawk;
where have I been, all these years, far from myself?
Soft rains drift in mist-shapes
shading everything to grey; I would hear the voices
of those I have loved and lost, I standing now on the brink.
Of Aquinas at the last they said
that he was laying down the instruments
of his writing; what I have done
feels like turf-dust. What is there left, but spirit?

                                             II

Rain is falling in the far west, as it has ever fallen.
Easy to miss the star against the city lights
and shoppers; here, on bogland, is a side-aisle quiet, where nothing extraordinary happens, where you may accept
emptiness and the cotton-quivering
of a solitary self; here, too, the harrier is close, what is eternal
hovers, it is the dread festival of God's descent
into the flesh, his presence
in the ongoing history, heart in hiding, forever
beginning. The night is still and clear under frost, great clouds
passing, slow, relentless; an ocean-full
of stars, a cradle moon, and in the windows of the houses
candles lighting; sweet shiver-glass of ice
on the bogpools, and one great light reflecting.

                                             III

Wild honey hides among the combed roots, in the dark
it scents the air. Childheart,
I was told the bleak mythologies of black-bog waters: the giant otter in the pools, black-souled goblin with his storm lamp,
and Clovenhoof himself, ready to reach
a leathery claw out of mud to take your ankle; there would be
fear, and fascination, there would be danger, stumbling, a fall.
In the far west rain is falling; there is epiphany
in the movement of a fox, long-fellow, sleek, a languid
lovely-loping, orange-brown body slipping through
brown-orange growth; in the soft
dew-gentled dawn, the spread-out jewellery of gossamer webs
shivers silver in destructibility;
the heathers, too, ripple in the breeze, like water.

                                             IV

I put my ear down close to the bog-earth
roots, to hear
the heartbeat of the magma; there are no hard edges in the peatland,
no table-corners,
cupboard-doors, car-boot-sharpness; I am in love
with earth, the various, the lovely, though
it is not home: for it is written—
God so loved the world ... I stand
on the wallow-surface of belief, winds from the sea
taking my breath away;
the paths across the bog lead always on
further into bog, then
stop. Nowhere. Where God is.

                                                 V

Here is no locked tabernacle; God exults, in frochan,
bilberry root. Here is no church, stone-built,
no steeple proud in its piercing of the skies; sometimes a dragonfly, its rainbow gossamer wings, passes by
low over the cottons; I can kneel
on sphagnum moss, its soft green sponge, to ask forgiveness
because resurrection is ongoing; curlew calls, alleluia; and still
all of the bogland is in motion, bleached bones
of elk and wolf and hare, rising inexorably towards the surface.
Bell rings for angelus, the stooping figures rise and stand a while
in the transept of eternity. Rain
is falling in the far west, as it has ever fallen; in the windows
candles lighting;
what is there left, now, but spirit?


--John F. Deane

[Sven2]

The Fish Answers

My school saw the Red Sea parted—you speak
to me only in North Sea everyday English
or Cape Cod American—why not ancient Greek?
I speak the languages of all those who fish
for me, and I speak Frog, Turtle, and Crocodile.
The waters are calm, come swim with me a while.
Look, the little fish will inherit the earth
and seas. Fish as you would have others fish for you!
Swallow the hook of happiness and mirth,
baited with poetry, the miraculous rescue.
I read drowned books. The Lord is many.
I heard this gossip in Long Island Sound:
Three days before he died, one Ezra Pound
told a friend, "Go with God, if you can stand the company."


--Stanley Moss

[Sven2]

House Special After the Storm Has Passed

Day after day, I've talked to no one,
but am not lonely,
as if I've gone mute with a begging bowl
into the streets and everyone was television.
A small helping of chow mein,
a sip of sweet and sour soup.
What more do I need?
Mindfulness,
the Buddha said over and over,
each segment of a tangerine,
every glance or taste.
Everything I own, owns me,
the view of Spring as it merges into summer,
the silence of it,
the rock, the heron, the bamboo hut
with no one about to call out in my seeing.

--Dick Allen

[Sven2]

Looking For A Monk And Not Finding Him

I took a small path leading
up a hill valley, finding there
a temple, its gate covered
with moss, and in front of
the door but tracks of birds;
in the room of the old monk
no one was living, and I
staring through the window
saw but a hair duster hanging
on the wall, itself covered
with dust; emptily I sighed
thinking to go, but then
turning back several times,
seeing how the mist on
the hills was flying, and then
a light rain fell as if it
were flowers falling from
the sky, making a music of
its own; away in the distance
came the cry of a monkey, and
for me the cares of the world
slipped away, and I was filled
with the beauty around me.

--Li Po

[Sven2]

from The Prophet

Forget not that I shall come back to you.
A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body.
A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.
Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you.
It was but yesterday we met in a dream.
You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky.
But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn.
The noontide is upon us and our half-waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part.
If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.
And if our hands should meet in another dream we shall build another tower in the sky.

--Kahlil Gibran

[Sven2]

The Right Thing

Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -
The right thing happens to the happy man.

The bird flies out, the bird flies back again;
The hill becomes the valley, and is still;
Let others delve that mystery if they can.

God bless the roots! - Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Child of the dark, he can outleap the sun,
His being single, and that being all:
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Or he sits still, a solid figure when
The self-destructive shake the common wall;
Takes to himself what mystery he can,

And, praising change as the slow night comes on,
Wills what he could, surrendering his will
Till mystery is no more: No more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man.

--Theodore Roethke

[Sven2]

In the Midnight Hour

This, too, is an old story, yet
It is not death. Still,


The waters of darkness are in us.
In fact, they are rising,


And rising toward our eyes.
And will wash against those windows


Until they have stilled, until,
Utterly calm, they have cleansed.


And then our lives will take substance,
And rise themselves.


And not like water, and not like darkness, but
Like smoke, like prayer.



--Charles Wright

[Sven2]

Prologue to a Text

We humans once lived in the moment,
The moment being all there was. Stuffing our mouths
With berries, we collapsed on the ground to make
An early forerunner of love. Then wind
Brought the stink of a predator's haunch, panic
Ensuing. How divine it must have seemed
When, at last, we had time to ponder clouds
As they built their chateaus. Grunts into words,
Words into the updraft of questions—
A miracle to carry the world
On the tongue: "world." Even the heart at last
Consigning itself to syllables: Ah, thee....
The numbers tidying things up, the numbers
Knitting things to equations, the theorems
Proposing, revising, secreting, each
Tool-in-theory awaiting our genius,
Our heartache, until damp and wood-colored,
This morning dawned, the smell of burning leaves
Drifting across my sepia mood,
Every doorway in the house yawning empty.
You, elsewhere, lift a screen in the air (Got it!)
Then send an image toward the chill
Draughts of space. It flickers through a satellite, free-
Falls back to the planet
—Let's pause for a moment, behold earth
Cloud-swaddled, gamboling around our star....
Somewhere in New Jersey, a tower corrals
Your cache of photons, beams them on
To the privacy of my circuits, which are roused
By your elation: Check out this sunset,
Love! A finger to the warm flesh of glass,
And my screen goes bronze with a Roman dusk.

--Clare Rossini