More Evidence

1.

The grosbeak sings with a completely cherishable

roughness.

The yellow and orange and scarlet trees - what do 

they denote about willingness, and the flamboyance 

of change?

With what words can I convince you of the

casualness with which the white swans fly?

It doesn't matter to me if the woodchuck and

the turtle are not always, thoughtfully,

considering their lives and making decisions,

the certainty that they are doing this at all -

that alters everything.

Do you give a thought now and again to the 

essential sparrow, the necessary toad?

Just as truly as the earth is ours, we belong

to it. The tissue of our minds is made of it,

and the soles of our feet, as fully as the

tiger's claw, the branch of the whitebark pine,

the voices of the birds, the dog-tooth violet

and the tooth of the dog.

Have you ever seen a squirrel swim? I have.

Is it not incredible, that in the acorn something

has hidden an entire tree?

"For there is nothing that grows or lives that

can approach the feathery grace, the symmetry

of form, or the lacy elegance of pattern of the 

Ferns: and to be blind to all this beauty is

nothing less than calamitous."

In Australia there is a cloud called The

Morning Glory.

Okay, I confess to wanting to make a literature 

of praise.

2.

Where are you when you're not thinking?

Frightening, isn't it?

Where are you when you're not feeling anything?

Oh, worse!

Except for faith and imagination, nature is that

hard fortress you can't get out of.

Some persons are captive to love, others would

make the beloved a captive. Which one are you?

I think I have not lived a single hour of my life

by calculation.

There are in this world a lot of devils with wondrous 

smiles. Also, many unruly angels.

The life of the body is, I suppose, along with 

everything else, a lesson. I mean, if lessons are

what you look for.

Faith: this is the engine of my head, my breast

bone, my toes.

3.

It is salvation if one can step forth from the

clutter of one's mind into that open space -

that almost holy space - called work.

Emerson: how the elegance of his language can 

make me weep over my own inadequacy.

Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.

Or, how sweet just to say of a great, burly 

man: he's a honey.

Or of the fox: his neat trot. The donkey, his 

sorrowful plodding. The cheetah: his clean leap.

The alligator: his lunge.

Do you hear the rustle and outcry on the page?

Do you hear its longing?

Words are too wonderful for words. The vibrant

translation of things to ideas. Hello there.

My best greetings to you.

Lord, there are so many fires, so many words, in

my heart. It's going to take something I can't

even imagine, to put them all out.

4.

Let laughter come to you now and again, that

sturdy friend.

The impulse to leap off the cliff, when the 

body falsely imagines it might fly, may be

restrained by reason, also by modesty. Of the

two possibilities, take your choice, and live.

Refuse all cooperation with the heart's death.

5.

Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be 

musical inside yourself.

The Kingfisher

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave

like a blue flower, in his beak

he carries a silver leaf. I think this is

the prettiest world - so long as you don't mind

a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life

that doesn't have its splash of happiness?

There are more fish than there are leaves

on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher

wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.

When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water

remains water - hunger is the only story

he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.

I don't say he's right. Neither

do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf

with its broken red river, and with a rought and easy cry

I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body

if my life depended on it, he swings back

over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it

(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

To be great, be entire

To be great, be entire: of what's yours nothing
    Exaggerate or exclude.

Be whole in each thing. Put all that you are
    Into the least you do.
Like that on each place the whole moon
    Shines, for she lives aloft.

I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not, how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

(May God grant us the grace to appreciate and care without worrying)

I Want

I want - unknown and calm
Because unknown, and my own

Because calm - to fill my days

With wanting no more than them.

Those whom wealth touches - their skin

Itches with the gold rash.

Those whom fame breathes upon -

Their life tarnishes.

To those for whom happiness is 

Their sun, night comes round.

But to one who hopes for nothing

All that comes is grateful.

The Peninsula

When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.

The sky is tall as over a runway,

The land without marks so you will not arrive

But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,

The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable

And you're in the dark again. Now recall

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

Islands riding themselves out into the fog

And drive back home, still with nothing to say

Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

Water and ground in their extremity.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves.

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Borges on writers

 From his review of William Faulkner's 'Absalom! Absalom!':

I know of two kind of writers: those whose central preoccupation is verbal technique, and those for whom it is human acts and passions. The former tend to be dismissed as "Byzantine" or praised as "pure artists". The latter, more fortunately receive the laundry epithets "profound", "human", or "profoundly human", and the flattering vituperation "savage". The former is Swinburne or Mallarme, the latter, Celine or Theodore Dresier. Certain exceptional cases display the virtue and joys of both categories. Victor Hugo remarked that Shakespeare contained Gongora; we might also observe that he contained Dostoevsky.... Among the other great novelists, Joseph Conrad was perhaps the last who was interested both in the techniques of the novel and personalities of his characters. The last, that is, until the tremendous appearance of Faulkner. 

The Poet Dreams of the Mountain

Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking
the rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
that we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

For Example

Okay, the broken gull let me lift it 

    from the sand.
Let me fumble it into a box, with the 

    lid open.
Okay, I put the box into my car and started 

    up the highway
to the place where sometimes, sometimes not, 

    such things can be mended.

The gull at first was quiet.

How everything turns out one way or another, I 

    won't call it good or bad, just

        one way or another.

Then the gull lurched from the box and onto

    the back of the front seat and 

        punched me.

Okay, a little blood slid down.

But we all know, don't we, how sometimes

    things have to feel anger, so as not

        to be defeated?

I love this world, even in its hard places.

A bird too must love this world,

    even in its hard places.

So, even if the effort may come to nothing,

    you have to do something.

It was, generally speaking, a perfectly beautiful

    summer morning.

The gull beat the air with its good wing.

I kept my eyes on the road.

The Plantation

Any point in that wood
Was a center, birch trunks

Ghosting your bearings,

Improvising charmed rings

Wherever you stopped,

Though you walked a straight line,

It might be a circle you travelled

With toadstools and stumps

Always repeating themselves.

Or did you re-pass them?

Here were bleyberries quilting the floor

The black char of a fire.

And having found them once

You were sure to find them again.

Someone had always been there

Though always you were alone.

Lovers, birdwatchers,

Campers, gipsies and tramps

Left some trace of their trades

Or their excrement.

Hedging the road so.

It invited all comers

To the hush and the mush

Of its whispering treadmill,

Its limits defined,

So they thought, from outside.

They must have been thankful 

For the hum of traffic

If they ventured in

Past the picknickers' belt

Or began to recall

Tales of fog on the mountains.

You had to come back

To learn how to lose yourself,

To be pilot and stray-witch,

Hansel and Gretel in one.

These things are not secrets but mysteries

from Glanmore Sonnets (II) (Seamus Heaney)

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,
Words entering almost the sense of touch,
Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch -
'These things are not secrets but mysteries',
Oisin Kelly told me years ago
In Belfast, hankering after stone
That connived with the chisel, as if the grain
Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.
Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore
And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise
A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter
That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:
Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,
Each verse returning like the plough turned round.