Otherwise

 

Gratefulness is a gift and ordinary an undervalued blessing. 

Otherwise (Jane Kenyon)

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

The Bird Hour

 

Littlefoot 19 (This is the Bird Hour) - Charles Wright

This is the bird hour, peony blossoms falling bigger than wren hearts
On the cutting border's railroad ties,
Sparrows and other feathery things
Homing from one hedge to the next,
late May, gnat-floating evening.

Is love stronger than unlove?
Only the unloved know.
And the mockingbird, whose heart is cloned and colorless.

And who's this tiny chirper,
lost in the loose leaves of the weeping cherry tree?
His song is not more than three feet off the ground, and singular,
And going nowhere.
Listen. It sounds a lot like you, hermane.
It sounds like me.

Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way

Love :)

Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way - Mary Oliver

If you're John Muir you want trees to

live among. If you're Emily, a garden

will do.

Try to find the right place for yourself.

If you can't find it, at least dream of it.

                                             •

When one is alone and lonely, the body

gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,

or splashes into the cold river, or

pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

Anything that touches.

                                             •

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite

understandable. But holiness is visible,

entirely.

                                             •

Some words will never leave God's mouth,

no matter how hard you listen. 

                                             •

In all the works of Beethoven, you will

not find a single lie.

                                             •

All important ideas must include the trees,

the mountains, and the rivers.

                                             •

To understand many things you must reach out

of your own condition.

                                             •

For how many years did I wander slowly

through the forest. What wonder and

glory I would have missed had I ever been

in a hurry!

                                             •

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still

it explains nothing.

                                             •

The point is, you're you, and that's for keeps.

May Poems

 

"The sun comes and finds your face,           

  Remembering all..."

May, the month of endless possibilities shimmering on the horizon. Verdant month of trees and what all that leafing symbolizes. 



Uplands in May - Carl Sandburg

Wonder as of old things
Fresh and fair come back
Hangs over pasture and road.
Lush in the lowland grasses rise
And upland beckons to upland.
The great strong hills are humble.



Follies - Carl Sandburg 

Shaken,
The blossoms of lilac,
And shattered,
The atoms of purple.
Green dip the leaves,
Darker the bark,
Longer the shadows.

Sheer lines of poplar
Shimmer with masses of silver
And down in a garden old with years
And broken walls of ruin and story,
Roses rise with red rain-memories.
May!
In the open world
The sun comes and finds your face,
Remembering all.

Retrospective Pull

"This, your life had said, its only pronoun.

Here, your life had said, its only house.

Let, your life had said, its only order..."

This poem, as with the wisest of poems, is full of many questions...and answers. 


When Your Life Looks Back
 
When your life looks back—
as it will, at itself, at you—what will it say?

Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool.
Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from.
Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many.

Your life will carry you as it did always,
with ten fingers and both palms,
with horizontal ribs and upright spine,
with its filling and emptying heart,
that wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return.
You gave it. What else could you do?

Immersed in air or in water.
Immersed in hunger or anger.
Curious even when bored.
Longing even when running away.

“What will happen next?”—
the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,
in the in-breaths even of weeping.
Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.
Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face.
No back of the world existed,
no unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.

This, your life had said, its only pronoun.
Here, your life had said, its only house.
Let, your life had said, its only order.

And did you have a choice in this? You did—

Sleeping and walking,
the horses around you, the mountains around you,
the buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts.
Those of your own kind around you—

A few times, you stood on your head.
A few times, you chose not to be frightened.
A few times, you held another beyond any measure.
A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.

Mortal, your life will say,
as if tasting something delicious, as if in envy.
Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.

Grief

 

Grief - Richard Brostoff

Somewhere in the Sargasso Sea
the water disappears into itself,
hauling an ocean in.

Vortex, how you repeat
a single gesture,
come round to find only

yourself, a cup full of questions,
perhaps some curl of wisdom,
a bit of flung salt.

You hold an absence
at your center,
as if it were a life.

Why Regret?

Why Regret? - Galway Kinnell
 
Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
'The perfected lover does not eat.'
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

May Night

 

"My heart is fresh and fearless

And over-brimmed with spring..."

 
I love this poem! A perfect poem for May's full moon tonight, the flower moon.


May Night - Sara Teasdale

The spring is fresh and fearless
And every leaf is new,
The world is brimmed with moonlight,
The lilac brimmed with dew.

Here in the moving shadows
I catch my breath and sing - 
My heart is fresh and fearless
And over-brimmed with spring.

Renascence

"But you were something more than young and sweet
  And fair, - and the long year remembers you." 

 To Paul, one year on x

 

from Renascence - Edna St Vincent Millay

III

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
  And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,
  And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
  And all the nests that the bared branches show,
  And all winds that in any weather blow,
And all the storms that the four seasons bring.

You go no more on your exultant feet
  Up paths that only mist and morning knew,
Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat
  Of a bird's wings too high in air to view, -
But you were something more than young and sweet
  And fair, - and the long year remembers you.


 *Renascence: a new birth or life; rebirth.

Dandelion

I love dandelions! 

The Dandelion - Vachel Lindsay

O dandelion, rich and haughty,

King of village flowers!

Each day is coronation time,

You have no humble hours.

I like to see you bring a troop

To beat the blue-grass spears,

To scorn the lawn-mower that would be

Like fate’s triumphant shears.

Your yellow heads are cut away,

It seems your reign is o’er.

By noon you raise a sea of stars

More golden than before.