unask

 

be free

In the end you disappeared, gone beyond sight
Strange, the path you took, leaving this world
Strange how the beat of your wings destroyed the cage
And you flew to the world of the soul.

You were a nightingale, drunk amidst the owl music
Drunk with the music of joy
When the scent of the rose garden reached you
You were gone.

Now that you are the sun, what good is a crown?
And how do you tie your belt
Now that your body is air?
You were rain from heaven
That fell on this dry earth.

Be silent. Be free
Of all the pain of speech
Now, now you can rest
In the arms of the Beloved.

Rumi, transl. Tom Davis

 

 

actor

I am the silver glimpse, in the corner of your eye.
I am the needle in the haystack,
the elegance of the unexpected,
the dazzling brightness, the exceptional.

I am the slip, between the cup and the lip.
I am why you touch wood. I am dangerous.
Without me, everything would be known
and nothing would be beautiful.

I shimmer; I am difficult.
I am what it is, when you can’t get what you want.
I am the dream you can’t remember, and long for
the interrupted poem
the unsatisfactory narrative.

From the play Limitless Bliss, by Deirdre Burton and Tom Davis

 

 

a tree telling of Orpheus

he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots out of the earth, into my bark
out of the air, into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.

He told me of journeys, of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark, of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day deeper than roots ...
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
and I, a tree, understood words – ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that grew too fast in the spring when a late frost wounds it.

Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name) were both frost and fire, its chords flamed up to the crown of me.
I was seed again. I was fern in the swamp. I was coal.

Denise Levertov

 

 

a break, for a few days

the next post will be on Thursday, May 29th.

 

 

 

sound as a bench

The Rav
of Northern White Russia declined,
in his youth, to learn the
language of birds, because
the extraneous did not interest him; nevertheless
when he grew old it was found
he understood them anyway, having
listened well, and as it is said, 'prayed
with the bench and the floor.'

He used
what was at hand--as did
Angel Jones of Mold, whose meditations
were sewn into coats and britches.

Well, I would like to make,
thinking some line still taut between me and them,
poems direct as what the birds said,
hard as a floor, sound as a bench,
mysterious as the silence when the tailor
would pause with his needle in the air.

Denise Levertov

 

 

the lotos rose

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

T.S. Eliot