Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love
the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are
written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which
cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And
the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps
you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some
distant day into the answer.

- Rilke

The Apple Trees at Olema

By Robert Hass

They are walking in the woods along the coast

and in a grassy meadow, wasting, they come upon

two old neglected apple trees. Moss thickened

every bough and the wood of the limbs looked rotten

but the trees were wild with blossom and a green fire

of small new leaves flickered even on the deadest branches.

Blue-eyes, poppies, a scattering of lupine

flecked the meadow, and an intricate, leopard-spotted

leaf-green flower whose name they didn't know.

Trout lily, he said; she said, adder's tongue.

She is shaken by the raw, white, backlit flaring

of the apple blossoms. He is exultant,

as if some thing he felt were verified,

and looks to her to mirror his response.

If it is afternoon, a thin moon of my own dismay

fades like a scar in the sky to the east of them.

He could be knocking wildly at a closed door

in a dream. She thinks, meanwhile, that moss

resembles seaweed drying lightly on a dock.

Torn flesh, it was the repetitive torn flesh

of appetite in the cold white blossoms

that had startled her. Now they seem tender

and where she was repelled she takes the measure

of the trees and lets them in. But he no longer

has the apple trees. This is as sad or happy

as the tide, going out or coming in, at sunset.

The light catching in the spray that spumes up

on the reef is the color of the lesser finch

they notice now flashing dull gold in the light

above the field. They admire the bird together,

it draws them closer, and they start to walk again.

A small boy wanders corridors of a hotel that way.

Behind one door, a maid. Behind another one, a man

in striped pajamas shaving. He holds the number

of his room close to the center of his mind

gravely and delicately, as if it were the key,

and then he wanders among strangers all he wants.

National Poetry Month

April.

http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41

Touch-and-Go

by Sylvia Plath

Sing praise for statuary:

For those anchored attitudes

And staunch stone eyes that stare

Through lichen-lid and passing bird-foot

At some steadfast mark

Beyond the inconstant green
Gallop and flick of light

In this precarious park

Where vivid children twirl

Like colored tops through time

Nor stop to understand

How all their play is touch-and-go:

But, Go! they cry, and the swing

Arcs up to the tall tree tip;

Go! and the merry-go-round

Hauls them round with it.

And I, like the children, caught

In the mortal active verb,

Let my transient eye break a tear

For each quick, flaring game

Of child, leaf and cloud,

While on this same fugue, unmoved,

Those stonier eyes look,

Safe-socketed in rock.

Atlas

by Lucile Clifton

I am used to the heft of it

sitting against my rib,

used to the ridges of forest,

used to the way my thumb

slips into the sea as I pull

it tight. Something is sweet

in the thick odor of flesh

burning and sweating and bearing young.

I have learned to carry it

the way a poor man learns

to carry everything.

from Jamie

Ways of Talking

by Ha Jin

We used to like talking about grief

Our journals and letters were packed

with losses, complaints, and sorrows.

Even if there was no grief

we wouldn't stop lamenting

as though longing for the charm

of a distressed face.

Then we couldn't help expressing grief

So many things descended without warning:

labor wasted, loves lost, houses gone,

marriages broken, friends estranged,

ambitions worn away by immediate needs.

Words lined up in our throats

for a good whining.

Grief seemed like an endless river--

the only immortal flow of life.

After losing a land and then giving up a tongue,

we stopped talking of grief

Smiles began to brighten our faces.

We laugh a lot, at our own mess.

Things become beautiful,

even hailstones in the strawberry fields.

the key to this girl's heart

Peonies

By Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready

to break my heart

as the sun rises,

as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open ---

pools of lace,

white and pink ---

and all the day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes

into the curls,

craving the sweet sap,

taking it away

to their dark, underground cities ---

and all day

under the shifty wind,

as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,

and tip their fragrance to the air,

and rise,

their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness

gladly and lightly,

and there it is again ---

beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.

Do you love this world?

Do you cherish your humble and silky life?

Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,

and softly,

and exclaiming of their dearness,

fill your arms with the white and pink flowers

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,

their eagerness

to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are

nothing, forever?

(here)

reading aloud is under-appreciated

I'd like to have a book club. Headquartered here:

Or here:

We don't have to dissect or analyze all that much. Mostly take turns reading aloud. People from anywhere or anywhen with anythought will be welcomed and embraced.

(here)

clearly I like poetry

Facing west from California's shores,

Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,

I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,

the land of migrations, look afar,

Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;

For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,

From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,

From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,

Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,

Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,

(But where is what I started for so long ago?

And why is it yet unfound?)

Walt Whitman, Facing West from California's Shores

(via Anna)

questions persist no matter where you go

Maybe I should have been brave enough to go abroad like I had planned/imagined/hoped. Or maybe not.

Questions of Travel

By Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

hurry too rapidly down to the sea,

and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops

makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,

aren't waterfalls yet,

in a quick age or so, as ages go here,

they probably will be.

But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,

the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,

slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is is right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

inexplicable and impenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream or dreams

and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity

not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing

like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard

the sad, two-noted, wooden tune

of disparate wooden clogs

carelessly clacking over

a grease-stained filling-station floor.

(In another country the clogs would all be tested.

Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

--A pity not to have heard

the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird

who sings above the broken gasoline pump

in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:

three towers, five silver crosses.

--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,

blurr'dly and inconclusively,

on what connection can exist for centuries

between the crudest wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.

--And never to have had to listen to rain

so much like politicians' speeches:

two hours of unrelenting oratory

and then a sudden golden silence

in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?"

The Departure of the Prodigal Son

Rainer Maria Rilke

Now to go away from all this tangledness

that is part of us and yet not ours,

that like the water in old wells

reflects us trembling and ruins the image;

from all this, which as if with thorns

still clings to us--to go away,

and on this and this, so near at hand,

which almost from the first you ceased to see

(they were so common, so undemanding),

suddenly to gaze: tenderly, full of amends,

as if in a beginning and from up close:

and to see at last how without least malice,

how over everyone indifferently the hurt descends

that filled childhood to the brim--:

and then still to go, hand leaving hand,

as if you were tearing open a new-healed wound,

and to go away: where? Into certainty,

far into some unrelated warm land

that behind all action keeps its distance

like a backdrop--garden or wall;

and to go away: why? From urge, from instinct,

from impatience, from dark expectation,

from not understanding and not being understood:

To take all this upon yourself and in vain

perhaps let fall things firmly held,

in order to die alone, not knowing why--

Is this how new life begins?