By Frazier Creek Falls

Standing up on lifted, folded rock

looking out and down --

The creek falls to a far valley.

Hills beyond that

facing, half-forested, dry

-- clear sky

strong wind in the stiff needle clusters

of the pine -- their brown 

round trunk bodies

straight, still;

rustling trembling limbs and twigs

listen.

This living flowing land

is all there is, forever

We are it

it sings through us -- 

We could live on this Earth

without clothes or tools!

-- Gary Snyder

Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions,

Knowing all the while that civilization and the other evils

That make humanity ridiculous, remain

Beautiful in the whole fabric, excesses that balance each other

Like the paired wings of a flying bird.

Misery and riches, civilization and squalid savagery,

Mass war and the odor of unmanly peace:

Tragic flourishes above and below the normal of life.

In order to value this fretful time

It is necessary to remember our norm, the unaltered passions,

The same-colored wings of imagination,

That the crowd clips, in lonely places new-grown: the unchanged

Lives of herdsmen and mountain farms,

Where men are few, and few tools, a few weapons, and their dawns are beautiful.

From here for normal one sees both ways,

and listens to the splendor of God, the exact poet, the sonorous

Antistrophe of desolation to the strophe multitude.

-- Robinson Jeffers

One plum blossom more

and that very one more is

where the warmth comes in.

-- Ransetsu

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.  The ice in the pond at length begins to be honey-combed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk.  Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary.  I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters.  On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song-sparrows, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick.  As the weather grew warmer, it was not sensibly worn away by the water nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honey-combed and saturated with water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away.

-- Henry Thoreau

 

Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.
There are things in a man besides his reason.
Come home, wind, he kept crying and crying.

Snow glistens in its instant in the air,
Instant of millefiori bluely magnified--
Come home, wind, he said as he climbed the stair.

Crystal on crystal until crystal clouds
Become an over-crystal out of ice,
Exhaling these creations of itself.

There is a sense in sounds beyond their meaning.
The tinsel of August falling was like a flame
That breathed on ground, more blue than red, more red

Than green, fidgets of all-related fire.
The wind is like a dog that runs away.
But it is like a horse.  It is like motion

That lives in space.  It is a person at night,
A member of the family, a tie,
An ethereal cousin, another milleman.

-- Wallace Stevens

October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow,
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know;
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon, release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away;
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--
For the grapes' sake along the wall.

-- Robert Frost

A Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys

When I must come to you, O my God, I pray
It be some dusty-roaded holiday,
And even as in my travels here below
I beg to choose by what road I shall go
To Paradise, where the clear stars shine by day.
I’ll take my walking stick and go my way
And to my friends the donkeys I shall say,
“I am Frances Jammes, and I’m going to Paradise,
For there is no hell in the land of the loving God.”
And I’ll say to them: “Come sweet friends of the blue skies,
Poor creatures who with a flap of the ears or a nod
Of the head shake off the buffets, the bees, the flies . . . ”

Let me come with these donkeys, Lord, into your land,

These beasts who bow their heads so gently, and stand
With their small feet joined together in a fashion
Utterly gentle, asking your compassion.
I shall arrive, followed by their thousands of ears,
Followed by those with baskets at their flanks,
By those who lug the carts of mountebacks
Or loads of feather dusters and kitchen wares,
By those with humps of battered water cans,
By bottle-shaped she-asses who halt and stumble,
By those tricked out in little pantaloons
To cover their wet, blue galls where flies assemble
In whirling swarms, making a drunken hum.
Dear God, let me be with these donkeys that I come
And let it be that angels lead us in peace
To leafy streams where cherries tremble in air
Sleek as the laughing flesh of girls; and there
In that haven of souls let it be that, leaning above
Your divine waters, I shall resemble these donkeys,
Whose humble and sweet poverty will appear
Clear in the clearness of your eternal love.

-- Frances Jammes, trans. Richard Wilbur

Lingering in Happiness

 

After rain after many days without rain,

it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,

and the dampness there, married now to gravity,

falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

 

where it will disappear--but not, of course, vanish

except to our eyes.  The roots of the oaks will have their share,

and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;

a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole's tunnel;

 

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,

will feel themselves being touched.

-- Mary Oliver



 

Parmenides / Fragments 3 and 15A

    1

To think = to be

statement needing to become
image

you will come to know what you think although not when you see
what you say
when you see what it is that you are doing

most gradual of images.

    2

Word in the Greek in itself unbroken needing nothing
hudatorizon

rooted-in-water.

    3

Conodoguinet small
river locally a creek many turnings

boundary of what the map says is mine
boundary to the west to the middle of its turning bed which remains

undredged
muddy

containing stones ripple
slide of water low because of the heat/drought ripple and slide
around stones

no one kind various colors several shapes

pulled out
hauled away to make not quite regular irregular steps

    4

On each side roses
carrying buckets of water two at a time scent of roses

there can be no argument against penetration.

    5

Effort to balance some effort to climb more or less level steps
pause before climbing
down

whole stretch of the mountain mass
and line ridge line of north mountain massive and elongated blue wave

what
I do what I think
climbing up and climbing down.


-- John Taggart

Trees

I think that I shall never see

A poem as lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day

And lifts her leafy arms to pray

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair

Upon whose blossom snow has lain

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems were made by fools like me

But only God can make a tree.

-- Joyce Kilmer

The Botticellian Trees

The alphabet of
the trees

is fading in the

song of the leaves

the crossing

bars of the thin

letters that spelled

winter

and the cold

have been illumined

with

pointed green

by the rain and sun--

the strict simple

principles of

straight branches

are being modified

by pinched-out

ifs of color, devout

conditions

the smiles of love--

. . . . . .

until the stript

sentences

move as a woman's

limbs under cloth

and praise from secrecy

quick with desire

love's ascendancy

in summer--

In summer the song

sings itself

above the muffled words--

-- William Carlos Williams

Routine

No matter what we are and who,

Some duties everyone must do:

A Poet puts aside his wreath

To wash his face and brush his teeth,

And even Earls

Must comb their curls,

And even Kings

Have underthings.

-- Arthur Guiterman

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the crickets take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn.  Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned 

in long grass.  Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down.  Let the shed

go black inside.  Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop 

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't 

be afraid.  God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

-- Jane Kenyon

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament, -- the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world, -- healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he that can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate," -- and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

-- HDT, from Walking

The unformed volcanic earth, a female thing,

Furiously following with the other planets

Their lord the sun: her body is molten metal pressed rigid

By its own mass; her beautiful skin,

basalt and granite and the lighter elements,

Swam to the top. She was like a mare in heat eyeing the stallion,

Screaming for life in the womb; her atmosphere

Was the breath of her passion: not the blithe air

Men breathe and live, but marsh gas, ammonia, sulphured hydrogen,

Such poison as our remembering bodies return to

When they die and decay and the end of life

Meets its beginning. The sun heard her and stirred

Her thick air with fierce lightnings and flagellations

Of germinal power, building impossible molecules, amino-acids

And flashy unstable protiens: thence life was born,

Its nitrogen from ammonia, carbon from methane,

Water from the cloud and salts from the young seas,

It dribbled down into the primal ocean like a babe's urine

Soaking the cloth: heavily built protein molecules

Chemically growing, bursting apart as the tensions

In the inordinate molecule become unbearable--

That is to say, growing and reproducing themselves, a virus

On the warm ocean.

Time and the world changed,

The proteins were no longer created, the ammoniac atmosphere

And the great storms no more. The virus now

Must labor to maintain itself. It clung together

Into bundles of life, which we call cells,

With microscopic walls enclosing themselves

Against the world. But why would life maintain itself,

Being nothing but a dirty scum on the sea

Dropped from foul air? Could it perhaps perceive

Glories to come? Could it foresee that cellular life

Would make the mountain forest and the eagle dawning,

Monstrously beautiful, wings, eyes and claws, dawning,

Over the rock ridge? And the passionate human intelligence

Straining its limits, striving to understand itself and the universe to the last galaxy --

Fammantia moenia mundi, Lucretius wrote,

Alliterating like a Saxon -- all those Ms mean majesty --

The flaming world walls, far flung fortifications of being

Against non-being.

For another time the cells of life

Bound themselves into clans, a multitude of cells

To make one being -- as the molecules before

Hand made of many one cell. Meanwhile they had invented

Chlorophyll and ate sunlight, cradled in peace

On the warm waves; but certain assassins among them

Discovered that it was easier to eat flesh

Than feed on lean air and sunlight: thence the animals,

Greedy mouths and guts, life robbing life,

Grew from the plants; and as the ocean ebbed and flowed

many plants and animals

Were stranded in the great marshes along the shore,

Where many died and some lived. From these grew all land-life,

Plants, beasts and men; the mountain forest

and the mind of Aeschylus

And the mouse in the wall.

What is this thing called life? -- But I believe

That the earth and stars too, and the whole glittering universe,

and rocks on the mountain have life,

Only we do not call it so -- I speak of the life

That oxydizes fats and proteins and carbo-

Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy

Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror:

how do these things grow

From a chemical reaction?

I think they were here already. I think the rocks

And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and galaxies

Have their various consciousnesses, all things are conscious;

But the nerves of an animal,

the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass

To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:

It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth

From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals

Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard

Prefer silence: but those and all things have their own awareness,

As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed

and influence each other, each unto all

Like the cells of a man's body making one being,

They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.

But whence came the race of man? I will make a guess.

A change of climate killed the great northern forests,

Forcing manlike apes down from their trees,

They starved up there. They had been secure up there,

But famine is no security: among the withered branches blue famine:

They had to go down to the earth, where green still grew

And small meats might be gleaned. But there the great flesh-eaters,

Tiger and panther and the horrible fumbling bear

and endless wolf-packs made life

A dream of death. Therefore man had those dreams,

And kills out of pure terror. Therefore man walks erect,

Forever alerted: as the bear rises to fight

So man does always. Therefore he invented fire and flint weapons

In his desperate need. Therefore he is cruel and bloody-handed and

quick-witted, having survived

Against all odds. Never blame the man: his hard-pressed

Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe

In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed

In a million years: but the race of man was made

By shock and agony. Therefore they invented

the song called language

To celebrate their survival and record their deeds.

And therefore the deeds they celebrate --

Achilles raging in the flame of the south,

Baltic Beowulf like a fog-blinded sea-bear

Prowling the blasted fenland

in the bleak twilight to the black water --

Are cruel and bloody. Epic, drama, and history,

Jesus and Judas, Jenghiz, Julius Ceasar, no great poem

Without the blood-splash. They are a little lower than the angels,

as someone said. -- Blood-snuffing rats:

But never blame them: a wound was made in the brain

When life became too hard, and has never healed.

It is there that they learned

trembling religion and blood-sacrifice,

It is there that they learned

to butcher beasts and slaughter men,

And hate the world: the great religions of love and kindness

May conceal that, not change it. They are not primary but reactions

Against the hate: as the eye after feeding on a red sunfall

Will see green suns.

The human race is one of God's sense organs,

Immoderately alerted to feel good and evil

And pain and pleasure. It is a nerve-ending,

Like eye, ear, taste-buds (hardly able to endure

The nauseous draught) it is a sensory organ of God's.

As Titan-mooded Lear or Prometheus reveal to their audience

Extremes of pain and passion they will never find

In their own lives but through the poems as sense-organs

They feel and know them:

so the exultations and agonies of beasts and men

Are sense organs of God: and on other globes

Throughout the universe much greater nerve-endings

Enrich the consciousness of the one being

Who is all that exists. This is man's mission:

To find and feel; all animal experience

Is a part of God's life. He would be balanced and neutral

As a rock on the shore, but the red sunset-waves

Of life's passions fling over him.

Slowly, perhaps, man may grow into it --

Do you think so? This villainous king of beasts,

this deformed ape? -- He has mind

And imagination, he might go far

And end in honor. The hawks are more heroic

but man has a steeper mind,

Huge pits of darkness, high peaks of light,

You may calculate a comet's orbit or the dive of a hawk,

not a man's mind.

-- Robinson Jeffers

Lines Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man hath made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And 'tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure:--

But the least motion which they made,

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

that there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature's holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

-- William Wordsworth

Song of the Hen's Head

After the abrupt collision

with the blade, the Word,

I rest on the wood

block, my eyes

drawn back into their blue transparent

shells like mollusks;

I contemplate the Word.

while the rest of me

which was never much under

my control, which was always

inarticulate, still runs

at random through the grass, a plea

for mercy, a single

flopping breast,

muttering about life

in its thickening red voice.

Feet and hands chase it, scavengers

intent on rape:

they want its treasures,

its warm rhizomes, enticing sausages,

its yellow grapes, its flesh

caves, five pounds of sweet money,

its juice and jellied tendons.

It tries to escape,

gasping through the neck, frantic.

They are welcome to it,

I contemplate the Word,

I am dispensable and peaceful.

The word is an O,

outcry of the useless head,

pure space, empty and drastic,

the last word I said.

The word is No.

-- Margaret Atwood

Mason-Dixon Lines

-- Justin Booth

Early Morning, New Hampshire

Near Wolfeboro,

near the vast, sparkling lake,
deep in the woods,
I swing

my legs over

the old wall and sit

on the iron-cold

stones. The wall

is longer
than any living thing, and quieter
than anything
that breathes, as we

understand breathing. It turns,
it cuts back, it approaches again.
It knows
all the angles.

Somebody
raised it
stone by stone, each lagging weight
pulling the shoulders.

Somebody

meant to sheet these green hills

with domesticity,

and did, for a while.

But not anymore.

And now the unmaking

has, naturally, begun.

Stones fall--

tilt and fall--

but slowly--

only a few a year--

into the leaves, or roll

down into the creeks, or into

the sappy knees

of the pines.

The birds

sing their endless

small alphabets.

Sometimes

a porcupine

hauls itself up and over--

or a deer

makes light of all of it,

leaping and leaping.

But mostly

nothing seems to be happening--

borders and divisions,

old sheep-holders,

the stones just sit there,

mute and tight, and wait

for the instant, gray and wild.

This morning

something slips,

and I see it all--the yearning,

then the blunt and paunchy flight,

then the sweet, dark falling.

-- Mary Oliver

The Bluebirds

In the midst of the poplar that stands by our door,

We planted a bluebird box,

And we hoped before the summer was o'er

A transient pair to coax.

One warm summer's day the bluebirds came

and lighted on our tree,

But at first the wand'rers were not so tame

But they were afraid of me.

They seemed to come from the distant south,

Just over the Walden wood,

And they skimmed it along with open mouth

Close by where their bellows stood.

Warbling they swept round the distant cliff,

And they warbled it over the lea,

And over the blacksmith's shop in a jiff

Did they come warbling to me.

They came and sat on the box's top

Without looking into the hole,

And only from this side to that did they hop,

As 'twere a common well-pole.

Methinks I had never seen them before,

Nor indeed had they seen me,

Till I chanced to stand by our back door,

And they came to the poplar tree.

In course of time they built their nest

And reared a happy brood,

And every morn they piped their best

As they flew away to the wood.

They wore the summer hours away

To the bluebirds and to me,

And every hour was a summer's day.

So pleasantly lived we.

They were a world within themselves,

And I a world in me,

Up in the tree--the little elves--

With their callow family.

One morn the wind blowed cold and strong,

And the leaves when whirling away;

The birds prepared for their journey long

That raw and gusty day.

Boreas came blust'ring down from the north,

and ruffled their azure smocks,

So they launched them forth, though somewhat loth,

By way of old Cliff rocks.

Meanwhile the earth jogged steadily on

In her mantle of purest white,

And anon another spring was born

When winter was vanished quite.

And I wandered forth o'er the steamy earth,

And gazed at the mellow sky,

But never before from the hour of my birth

Had I wandered so thoughtfully.

For never before was the earth so still,

And never so mild was the sky,

The river, the fields, the woods, and the hill,

Seemed to have an audible sigh.

I felt that the heavens were all around,

And the earth was all below,

As when in the ears there rushes a sound

Which thrills you from top to toe.

I dreamed that I was a waking thought--

A something I hardly knew--

Not a solid place, nor an empty nought,

But a drop of morning dew.

'Twas the world and I at a game of bo-peep,

As a man would dodge his shadow,

An idea becalmed in eternity's deep--

'Tween Lima and Segraddo.

Anon a faintly warbled note

From out the azure deep,

Into my ears did gently float

As is the approach of sleep.

It thrilled but startled not my soul;

Across my mind strange mem'ries gleamed,

As often distant scenes unroll

When we have lately dreamed.

The bluebird had come from the distant South

To his box in the poplar tree,

And he opened wide his slender mouth,

On purpose to sing to me.

-- Henry D. Thoreau