Alles Gut

I lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

Gary Snyder

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

I always miss you–
last fall, back from the mountains
you’d left San Francisco
now I’m going north again
as you go south.

I sit by a fire at the ocean.
How many times I’ve
hitchhiked away;
the same pack on my back.

Rain patters on the rhododendron
cloud sweeps in from the sea over sand dunes
and stoopt lodgepole pine.

Thinking of the years since we parted.
last week I dreamed of you–
buying a bag of groceries
for Hatch.

Gary Snyder
Sutton Lake, Oregon, 16 June 1954

by Anne Michaels
excerpt

…
The truth is why words fail.
We can only reveal by outline,
by circling absence.
But that’s why language
can remember truth when it’s not spoken.
Words in us that deafen,
That wait, even when their spell seems
wasted;
even when silence accumulates fate.

Prayer is the effort of wresting words
not from silence,
but from the noise of other words.
To penetrate heaven, we must reach
what breaks in us.
The image haunts me:
the double swaying
of prayer on the trains.

sostochastic:

There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.
Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:
he only looked over the edge, and one looked silenced him.
Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.

The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,
fear, we have tried. It is useless. The fifth,
nothing happened, is dull. The choices are these:
he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between them

is only an issue of whether the demons
work from the inside out or from the outside
in: the one
theological question.

Robert Bringhurst

by Sylvia Plath

These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air —
It would be better if they were alive, and that’s what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.

by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i   

Make a place to sit down.   
Sit down. Be quiet.   
You must depend upon   
affection, reading, knowledge,   
skill—more of each   
than you have—inspiration,   
work, growing older, patience,   
for patience joins time   
to eternity. Any readers   
who like your poems,   
doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   
the unconditioned air.   
Shun electric wire.   
Communicate slowly. Live   
a three-dimensioned life;   
stay away from screens.   
Stay away from anything   
that obscures the place it is in.   
There are no unsacred places;   
there are only sacred places   
and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   
Make the best you can of it.   
Of the little words that come   
out of the silence, like prayers   
prayed back to the one who prays,   
make a poem that does not disturb   
the silence from which it came.

by Jan Zwicky

Bones, my thanks

for your support,

your efforts to convince the world

that I can stand up for myself.

Thanks for your patience,

and for being home to certainties,

though they are often sad.

For beauty more than

skin deep; for the cheekbone and the pelvis;

for the beauty of horses, thank you.

Also for my love of moonlight,

the dream-case of the skull,

for being moonlight in me,

minarets and tendon-spindles,

labyrinth of the internal ear.

Thank you, especially, for music,

And for the legbone and the thighbone,

for the elegant contraptions,

of the wrist and knee, those nuts

and bolts of movement and the root

of how we mean.

Thanks for the orange crate

for my innards, hoop ladder

of the breath, and the reminder

that dying, like everything else,

takes time.

Blood

believes in busyness

and spring, but you

are winter to us,

ancient ice.

My thanks, white sister,

inner eggshell,

flowering of rock.