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.