[Sven2]

Days We Would Rather Know


There are days we would rather know
than these, as there is always, later,
a wife we would rather have married
than whom we did, in that severe nowness
time pushed, imperfectly, to then. Whether,
standing in the museum before Rembrandt's "Juno,"
we stand before beauty, or only before a consensus
about beauty, is a question that makes all beauty
suspect ... and all marriages. Last night,
leaves circled the base of the ginkgo as if
the sun had shattered during the night
into a million gold coins no one had the sense
to claim. And now, there are days we would
rather know than these, days when to stand
before beauty and before "Juno" are, convincingly,
the same, days when the shattered sunlight
seeps through the trees and the women we marry
stay interesting and beautiful both at once,
and their men. And though there are days
we would rather know than now, I am,
at heart, a scared and simple man. So I tighten
my arms around the woman I love, now
and imperfectly, stand before "Juno" whispering
beautiful beautiful until I believe it, and—
when I come home at night—I run out
into the day's pale dusk with my broom
and my dustpan, sweeping the coins from the base
of the ginkgo, something to keep for a better tomorrow:
days we would rather know that never come.

--Michael Blumenthal

[Water Lily]

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

[Sven2]

Light, At Thirty-Two


It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it
wasn't she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.

And now, I'd like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
this morning when we woke—God,
it was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
waiting at the window ... they too are right.
All things lovely there. As that first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.

--Michael Blumenthal

[Sven2]

Autumn Night


The dew falls, the sky is a long way up, the brimming waters are quiet.
On the empty mountain in a companionless night doubtless the
                       wandering spirits are stirring.
Alone in the distance the ship's lantern lights up one motionless sail.
The new moon is moored to the sky, the sound of the beetles comes to
                      an end.
The chrysanthemums are flowered, men are lulling their sorrows
                     to sleep.
Step by step along the veranda, propped on my stick, I keep my eyes on
                     the Great Bear.
In the distance the celestial river leads to the town.

--Tu Fu
(717-770 A.D.)
translated by W.S.Merwin

[Sven2]

November Fifth, Riverside Drive


The sky a shock, the ginkgoes yellow fever,
I wear the day out walking. November, and still
light stuns the big bay windows on West End
Avenue, the park brims over with light like a bowl
and on the river
a sailboat quivers like a white leaf in the wind.

How like an eighteenth-century painting, this
year 's decorous decline: the sun
still warms the aging marble porticos
and scrolled pavilions past which an old man,
black-coated apparition of Voltaire,
flaps on his constitutional. "Clear air,
clear mind" -as if he could outpace
darkness scything home like a flock of crows.


--Katha Pollitt

[Water Lily]

Measured By The Soul

The size of one's heaven is the exact dimensions of his soul.  
Happiness is a matter of appetite and capacity.  
As well prepare dinner for a corpse as Heaven for a soul whose spiritual functions are dead.

The problem of the hereafter is not the matter of a celestial climate and a city beautiful.
It is the problem of the eternal in man.  The kingdom is within him.  The greatest concern of a human being
therefore should be to feel God's presence, to be stirred by His message, to have faith in the invisible, and to follow aspirations
which leap over the boundaries of time and seek satisfaction in the infinite.
For to be devoid of all this is to fall a victim to the disease that destroys character, paralyses progress,
and forbids happiness.

James Isaac Vance

[Water Lily]

Speak to Us


For all of my years, I've read only living signs—

bodies in jealousy, bodies in battle,

bodies growing disease like mushroom coral.

It is tiresome, tiresome, describing

fir cones waiting for fires to catch their human ribs

into some slow, future forest.


My beloved, he tires of me, and he should—

my complaints the same, his recourse

the same, invoking the broad, cool sheet suffering drapes

over the living freeze of heart after heart,

and never by that heart's fault—the heart did not make itself,

the face did not fashion its jutting jawbone

to wail across the plains or beg the bare city.


I will no longer tally the broken, ospreyed oceans,

the figs that outlived summer

or the tedious mineral angles and

their suction of light.


Have you died? Then speak.

You must see the living

are too small as they are,

lonesome for more

and in varieties of pain

only you can bring into right view.

Katie Ford   

[Sven2]

When I Am Old

I'll have dewlaps and a hump and say 'What?' all the time
in a cross voice: on every one of my bony crony fingers
a ring. My lips painted with a slash of bright fuchsia,
I'll drink margaritas by the tumbler full and if my dealer
dies before I do, I'll just have to look for younger suppliers.
I can't imagine not being interested in sex, but if it happens,
so be it, really I could do with a rest, complete hormonelessness.
I may forget who I am and how to find my way home, but be
patient, remember I've always been more than a little confused
and never did have much of a sense of direction. If I'm completely
demented, I'm depending on friends: you know who you are.

--Moyra Donaldson

[Sven2]

Moment


Before the adults we call our children arrive with their children in tow
for Thanksgiving,

we take our morning walk down the lane of oaks and hemlocks, mist
a smell of rain by nightfall—underfoot,

the crunch of leathery leaves released by yesterday's big wind.

You're ahead of me, striding into the arch of oaks that opens onto the fields
and stone walls of the road—

as a V of geese honk a path overhead, and you stop—

in an instant, without thought, raising your arms toward sky, your hands
flapping from the wrists,

and I can read in the echo your body makes of these wild geese going
where they must,

such joy, such wordless unity and delight, you are once again the child
who knows by instinct, by birthright,

just to be is a blessing. In a fictional present, I write the moment down.
You embodied it.


--Margaret Gibson

[sven]

Not Yet


Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened, with milk.

Out the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch—
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured; not-yet-

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.


--Jane Hirshfield

[Sven2]

Misha and the Grave


Dug out the deep hole
with rock bars and shovels
along the shade tree path
while the herd was in lower
fields, and left the rifle in the truck
because people believed
horses know intentions,
and the ancient Paso Fino,
too sick for the molasses
we dripped on grain and in water,
came and stood over the grave
when it was still morning,
waited there past lunch,
like a blinking statue,
never swatting a fly,
never pawing the fill dirt
mounded above the hole
we had left open to sun
in case that warmth
touched him when he fell.

--Aaron Ballance

[Sven2]

The Winter Traveler


Once more the earth is old enough

for snow: a crooked posture of cold

grasses, a white sky sighing down

bare branches, a freeze tightening

each liquid into stone. Tomorrow

and tomorrow and tomorrow

I'll be anchored by a sinking

of my bones into the air

I carry in my clothes, walking

roadside with my wrists exposed

to the horizon. Dear Passerby:

Since I am nothing, I am whole.

I'll be lifted by the wind's edge

and borne home—the day

after the day after tomorrow.


--Malachi Black

[Sven2]

What Is To Come


What is to come we know not. But we know
That what has been was good--was good to show,
Better to hide, and best of all to bear.
We are the masters of the days that were;
We have lived, we have loved, we have suffered...even so.

Shall we not take the ebb who had the flow?
Life was our friend? Now, if it be our foe--
Dear, though it spoil and break us! --need we care
    What is to come?
     
Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow,
Or the gold weather round us mellow slow;
We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare
And we can conquer, though we may not share
In the rich quiet of the afterglow
    What is to come.


--William Ernest Henley

[Sven2]

To the New Year

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible.

--W. S. Merwin

[Sven2]

Field Flowers

What are you saying? That you want
eternal life? Are your thoughts really
as compelling as all that? Certainly
you don't look at us, don't listen to us,
on your skin
stain of sun, dust
of yellow buttercups: I'm talking
to you, you staring through
bars of high grass shaking
your little rattle -- O
the soul! the soul! Is it enough
only to look inward? Contempt
for humanity is one thing, but why
disdain the expansive
field, your gaze raising over the clear heads
of the wild buttercups into what? Your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change. Better than earth? How
would you know, who are neither
here nor there, standing in our midst?

--Louise Gluck