Are you breathing just a little and calling it life?

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
     of other lives --
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
     hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
     feel like?
   
Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?
   
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
     with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
     the dark acorn of your heart!
   
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
     that something is missing from your life!
   
   
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
     in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
     continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
     with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
   
   
Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.
   
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
     from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
   
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
     the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
     not be afraid!
   
To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!
   
To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
     god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,

nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
     present hour,

to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,

to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened
     in the night
   
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
   

                   *
    
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
   
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
 and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep. 

                   *       
   
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
     to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
   
I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

*
   
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
     caution and prudence?

Fall in! Fall in! 

*

   
A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
     is coming with its own heave and grace.

*

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
     upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.
   
That was then, which hasn't ended yet.
   
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.
   
I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

~ Mary Oliver ~

          (West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems)

The Soul

Bone

Mary Oliver

1.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out

what the soul is,

and where hidden,

and what shape

and so, last week,

when I found on the beach

the ear bone

of a pilot whale that may have died

hundreds of years ago, I thought

maybe I was close

to discovering something

for the ear bone

2.

is the portion that lasts longest

in any of us, man or whale; shaped

like a squat spoon

with a pink scoop where

once, in the lively swimmer's head,

it joined its two sisters

in the house of hearing,

it was only

two inches long

and thought: the soul

might be like this

so hard, so necessary

3.

yet almost nothing.

Beside me

the gray sea

was opening and shutting its wave-doors,

unfolding over and over

its time-ridiculing roar;

I looked but I couldn't see anything

through its dark-knit glare;

yet don't we all know, the golden sand

is there at the bottom,

though our eyes have never seen it,

nor can our hands ever catch it

4.

lest we would sift it down

into fractions, and facts

certainties

and what the soul is, also

I believe I will never quite know.

Though I play at the edges of knowing,

truly I know

our part is not knowing,

but looking, and touching, and loving,

which is the way I walked on,

softly,

through the pale-pink morning light.

from Why I Wake Early (2004)

On the Existence of Soul

Pattiann Rogers

How confident I am it is there. Don’t I bring it,   

As if it were enclosed in a fine leather case,   

To particular places solely for its own sake?   

Haven’t I set it down before the variegated canyon   

And the undeviating bald salt dome?   

Don’t I feed it on ivory calcium and ruffled   

Shell bellies, shore boulders, on the sight   

Of the petrel motionless over the sea, its splayed   

Feet hanging? Don’t I make sure it apprehends   

The invisibly fine spray more than once?

I have seen that it takes in every detail

I can manage concerning the garden wall and its borders.

I have listed for it the comings and goings

Of one hundred species of insects explicitly described.

I have named the chartreuse stripe

And the fimbriated antenna, the bulbed thorax   

And the multiple eye. I have sketched

The brilliant wings of the trumpet vine and invented

New vocabularies describing the interchanges between rocks   

And their crevices, between the holly lip   

And its concept of itself.

And if not for its sake, why would I go

Out into the night alone and stare deliberately   

Straight up into 15 billion years ago and more?

I have cherished it. I have named it.   

By my own solicitations   

I have proof of its presence.

Pattiann Rogers, “On the Existence of the Soul”

from Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems.

Poetry is also .....

THE SECRET

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.


~ Denise Levertov
from Poems 1960-1967, New Directions Publishing Corp.

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996
University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.

Poetry is......

I got into an interesting discussion last Sunday.  The question was, why don't poets just clearly state what they want to say.  Why the mystery?  Why the indirect hints and ambiguous language that require us to think and perhaps disagree on the point being made? So, because I cannot think of the words to directly explain my opinions on this, I thought I'd post some poems about what poetry is and why poets write poems.  If you'd like to suggest a poem that is effective in demonstrating this, send it to me. The first is long, but well worth it.

What He Thought

Heather McHugh

For Fabbio Doplicher

We were supposed to do a job in Italy

and, full of our feeling for

ourselves (our sense of being

Poets from America) we went

from Rome to Fano, met

the Mayor, mulled a couple

matters over. The Italian literati seemed

bewildered by the language of America: they asked us

what does "flat drink" mean? and the mysterious

"cheap date" (no explanation lessened

this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we

could recognize our counterparts: the academic,

the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,

the brazen and the glib. And there was one

administrator (The Conservative), in suit

of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide

with measured pace and uninflected tone

narrated sights and histories

the hired van hauled us past.

Of all he was most politic--

and least poetic-- so

it seemed. Our last

few days in Rome

I found a book of poems this

unprepossessing one had written: it was there

in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)

where it must have been abandoned by

the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom

he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't

read Italian either, so I put the book

back in the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans

were due to leave

tomorrow. For our parting evening then

our host chose something in a family restaurant,

and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,

sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make

our mark, one of us asked

"What's poetry?

Is it the fruits and vegetables

and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori

or the statue there?" Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer

instantly, I didn't have to think-- "The truth

is both, it's both!" I blurted out. But that

was easy. That was easiest

to say. What followed taught me something

about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out

all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents

Giordano Bruno, brought

to be burned in the public square

because of his offence against authority, which was to say

the Church. His crime was his belief

the universe does not revolve around

the human being: God is no

fixed point or central government

but rather is poured in waves, through

all things: all things

move. "If God is not the soul itself,

he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world." Such was

his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man

was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors

placed upon his face

an iron mask

in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him.

That is how he died,

without a word,

in front of everyone. And poetry--

(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to

the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry

is what he thought, but did not say.

Here's another:

Poetry

Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know,                                                                               
I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

click here to hear Kim Rosen speak this poem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqZGNbbEMro

What was her sin?

Lot’s Wife

They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now--every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on,
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It's possible I fell facing the city.

Wislawa Szymborska

 

For all the trouble she went through, Lot’s wife didn’t even get her name mentioned in the Bible.  She might be happy to know that some several thousand years later she made the top “the top ten bad women in the Bible.”

http://www.bible-topten.com/bad_women.htm

Sometimes when I read a poem I wonder where in the world the poet got the idea to write a poem about this topic and what her interntions were. This poem makes me think about the penalty Lot’s wife paid for being disobedient, for being human, for clinging to the past…. if indeed that is what she was doing.  I really like Symborska's poetry,  very clever, ironic, thought provoking. Szymborska gives us “lots” (pun intended) to think about. Szymborska is a Polish poet, 88 years old. I love her face. I will be posting more from her.

Our Strange Culture

After Reading There Might Be an Infinite Number of Dimensions

                          Martha Silano 

I'm thinking today of how we hold it together,
arrive on time with the bottle of Zinfandel, a six-pack

of Scuttlebutt beer, how we cover our wrinkles
with Visible Lift, shove the mashed winter squash

into the baby's mouth, how we hold it all together
despite clogged rain gutters, cracked

transmissions, a new explanation for gravity's
half-hearted hold. I'm wondering how we do it,

comb the tangles from our hair, trim the unwieldy
camellia, speak to packed crowds about weight loss

or fractals. I'm wondering how we don't
fall to our knees, knowing a hardened pea,

lodged in the throat, can kill, knowing
liquids are banned on all commercial flights.

Leaves fall. The baby sucks her middle fingers.
Meanwhile, the refrigerator acquires

an unexplainable leak. Meanwhile, we call
the plumber, open wide for the dental hygienist,

check each month, with tentative circlings,
our aging breasts. Somehow, each morning,

the coffee gets made. Somehow, each evening,
the crossing guard lifts fluorescent orange flag,

and a child and her father cross the glistening street.

"After Reading There Might Be an Infinite Number of Dimensions" by Martha Silano,

from The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception. © Saturnalia Books, 2011.

 We do indeed live in a challenging society.  These poems make me think about what life actually is here in America .....and to reconsider what life should be.

The Esquimos Have No Word For War

Trying to explain it to them
Leaves one feeling ridiculous and obscene
Their houses, like white bowls,
Sit on a prairie of ancient snowfalls
Caught beyond thaw or the swift changes
Of night and day.
They listen politely, and stride away
With spears and sleds and barking dogs
To hunt for food. The women wait
Chewing on skins or singing songs,
Knowing that they have hours to spend,
That the luck of the hunter is often late.
Later, by fires and boiling bones
In steaming kettles, they welcome me,
Far kin, pale brother,
To share what they have in a hungry time
In a difficult land. While I talk on
Of the southern kingdoms, cannon, armies,
Shifting alliances, airplanes, power,
They chew their bones, and smile at one another.

Mary Oliver

New and Selected Poems Volume One. Beacon Press, 1992