ein klage-himmel

winter grass

2012-02-23T20:34:00.000-08:00

February

Then, later in the afternoon, after crossing the white fields,
we step together over a berm of snow beside the common road
where wind gleams in the sinuosities of tall winter grass.
Daylight clings close to the bone, here,
and sweetens the marrow of the lengthening afternoon
even as shadows bulk out from the boles of pines.
The tufts of sinewy, thin blades rub and delay the shine,
exactly as the fibrous sheaf of the body defers the spirit’s passage
back to the earth, exactly so, to slow its arrival --
or, if there is no spirit, to clutch fire in the tangled atoms
for a moment longer, before they slack apart and fall again
through the void. Already we lean toward evening.
We touch the rustling stems as roughly as the wind
and hurry home to uncover warm skin, to offer, here, always here --
here, where I kneel before the tender gate of my lover’s womb.

the house at the edge of the swamp

2012-02-21T18:50:00.001-08:00

by the frozen lake

2012-02-16T06:53:00.000-08:00

real

2012-02-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

definitions from Vilém Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography

photographer: a person who attempts to place, within the image, information that is not predicted within the program of the camera

Chicago, Feb. 2011

translation: switching over from one code to another; hence,jumping from one universe to another

inside Notre Dame, Paris, July 2011

code: a sign system arranged in a regular pattern

roadside, La Porte County, Indiana, July 2011

reality: what we run up against on our journey toward death; hence, that which interests us

Manitoulin Island, Ontario, January 2012

dharmata / sunyata

2012-02-09T21:52:00.001-08:00

chicago, from the train

2012-02-07T07:39:00.000-08:00

this photo is from last february, a year ago

i go there today, an alien environment for me, so far from my natural habitat

i will wander

i will watch people

i will fade on streets where i have never faded before

a new breathfield

2012-02-03T13:10:00.000-08:00

Now let it be time that gods step forth

from dwelt-in things ...

Time they knock down every wall

in my house. New page. Only the wind

stirred by such a page turning

could shovel air as a spade turns earth:

a new breathfield. Oh gods, gods!

You who came so often, sleepers inside things,

who cheerfully arise -- who, by wells

that we guess at, wash face and neck

and lightly add your repose

to that which seems full, our own life.

May it again be your morning, gods.

We repeat. You alone are source.

The world arises with you, and origin shines

on all the cracks in our failures ...

Rainer Maria Rilke, late untitled fragment

[mostly Edward Snow's translation from Uncollected Poems, with my own revisions to Snow's version]

this tree is

2012-01-31T12:14:00.001-08:00

a place where hard men shift a boulder to plant a seed

2012-01-28T09:04:00.000-08:00

House

.....Manitoulin Island, Ontario

she was a doorframe
she was the windowpane in his blood

she breathed slowly by the sink
and thought of a tree in bloom
a warmth in her thighsagainst snowfall
sunlight quavered in a bowl of water

he held the phrase matrimonial privacy
a mouthful of nails to hammer a stair toward the bedroom

winters later
he curls no larger than a loaf of bread
under strips of wallpaper
mewling for home

holy

2012-01-20T14:40:00.000-08:00

thursday afternoon is light and shadow

2012-01-19T15:21:00.000-08:00

if there is another world

it is inside this one

look here

rise

2012-01-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

it was just then starting to snow outside in the winter sunlight

the first flakes coming erratic and bright from the cloud-swept wilderness of sky

morning, snow

2012-01-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

Wer weiß, ob derselbe Vogel nicht hinklang durch uns gestern, einzeln, im Abend?

2012-01-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

Reverie is not a vacuum of the mind. It is, rather, the gift of an hour that knows the plenitude of the soul.

-- Gaston Bachelard

katie

2011-12-25T22:12:00.000-08:00

A granddaughter. He hones the knowledge

of his end on the serious beauty.

This requires balance --

he is glad for the clarity,

happy as well that it came no sooner,

for all he pieced together

from the heart's years of confusion.

distance

2011-12-25T20:48:00.000-08:00

i will be absent for the next week or so

the only arts are music and loss

2011-12-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

The only arts are music and loss

-erin

Theme and variation at the trees' edge,

singular waves lifting water and earth to the air

and the sun at peculiar angles that only crows know

or twilight crumbling from their branches --

I love a woman who will die,

not soon, please, but for sure.

I hide her death in my pocket

like a jackknife or songbird,

because she is a wave lifting earth and water,

an energy, a clean curve in time

more beautiful even than her body, the gorgeous debris

she carries for a while in the air. We saw the trees,

the breaks in cloud cover

that played afternoon light over the fields

like the danger of fingertips on a back,

on a lover's pulse. That night she cried,

knowing the impossibility

of keeping each tree in mind, each note shining on the trunks.

How beautiful our loss then, crest and breaking,

that beauty we would not choose.

hearts in paris, july 2011

2011-12-14T08:27:00.000-08:00

Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, night

in a station of the métro

today this was the road between us

2011-12-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

.

.

ben

2011-12-08T11:17:00.001-08:00

anna marie

2011-12-05T18:48:00.000-08:00

bridge (2)

2011-12-02T11:48:00.000-08:00

pentru cea care visează pe podul

bridge (1)

2011-12-01T10:59:00.000-08:00

water light pine

2011-11-30T12:18:00.001-08:00

where the river is lost in the lake

2011-11-29T12:24:00.000-08:00

the meeting of water and water is about silence
we let silence sway on its stem in our mouths

cold daylight a silver wire drawn through the air
what sounds there are hold their shapes

five ducks skim their images
the blur blur of their wings wakes into distance

the moment comes and dissolves
the moment comes and dissolves

at the edge of things a pulse of small waves
the floating dock grieves against its moorings

Chutes Provincial Park, Massey, Ontario

2011-11-28T08:45:00.000-08:00

the edge of the ice

cold binds pale breath to the earth
alone i don’t speak to save heat

or i speak because my distant mouth needs it
the world cracks underfoot

she said, if there was only one landscape,
it should be gray with a single red berry at the center

my hands remember refuge
the warmth beneath her breasts

nightfall

2011-11-16T20:55:00.000-08:00

woman and bear

2011-11-02T14:24:00.000-07:00

.

One Possible Death, Among Others

An ordinary day. The second of November. The sunlight
is thin and cool, just enough to sketch pale shadows of branches

on the fallen leaves. I would like to say this light is filmy
and sleek, like some undergarment tossed aside in a hurry,

puddled silk on the floor of the sky -- but it isn’t,
I am only wishing for you. Across the street,

the council of starlings debates hunger in a tall maple.
Somewhere colder, the bear you met by the river tears apart a rotting log

for a meal of white grubs, plunging claws in the soft wood,
fattening himself, as winter begins to glow around his heart.

The bear is real. That querulous note when you told me
of woman and hump-shouldered, hungry bear

staring at each other across the water, tensing -- as if

you might wish the bear had come for you --
if not for the pain, you said, what a glorious death --

that same slant music seems to quaver beneath the trees
when a cloud passes. If we must die, and we must,

why not silted into the warm fat of a wintering bear?

But how easily you could have slipped from this world.
Hearing, I wanted to lift your hips to me like a wooden bowl.

Do you see how knowing your transience
makes this a love poem? At once, for no reason,

the whole flock of starlings glitters, unfurls from the tree,
reels squabbling twice around the yard, and settles back.

.

first snow

2011-11-01T17:58:00.000-07:00

10/28/11

somewhere in michigan, mid-day, just off the interstate
berries the birds have left deepen in their october blue
as sleet dry-whispers into the last hanging birch leaves --

trucks roar past, all hurry and wind
i want to turn and tell you that i loiter here
halfway on the long road
leaning back
the flat miles in chains between us

yesterday a river lifted the year’s first few snowflakes
i breathed the cold from your hair
you opened your eyes over my shoulder
and gasped when a raven landed soundlessly in the top of a pine

we saw the raven fly again
but now I stop here to delay further distance
to touch the berries and ask you
as if you might hear -- knowing you will hear --
is the raven still there?
does the green branch sway in this wind?
tell me and i will believe --
is the snow still falling?

i drift among the forked trunks of the birches
wishing for your small pale shoulders in my hands

evening

2011-10-14T18:05:00.000-07:00

gull

2011-09-22T07:36:00.001-07:00

gull

2011-09-21T04:52:00.001-07:00

2011-09-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

in this field of ragweed
where the name ragweed
unfolds in our breath like a childhood

we are lost together
you become the hour when i am born

.

oblique

2011-09-02T20:11:00.000-07:00

an infinite distance

2011-08-16T06:36:00.001-07:00

Rise

It comes unsought -- only unsought.

It comes uninvited -- only uninvited --
and by preference at the core of sorrow,
when sorrow without relief

slumps into the mind like thick,
obvious mud: the sick child,
the fallen marriage, the failing

god who hides the fragments of his face
in debris, weeks when you learn
sorrow is the only possibility.

It comes like this. One evening
you trudge along, broken,
a street chosen because choice

doesn’t matter, watching your numb
shoes, and for no reason at all
the late-spring light lifts itself

up from the late-spring lawns,
and the two sullen teens,
glaring as you pass, shyly

take each others’ hands,
and the fading sun
has just enough day left

to burn the stained glass
of a stone church
free of its gray blur,

so that gold and blue flash
and yearn, and the sky above
trembles now, ready -- ready

to fly open at just the right whisper.

.

tearing torn

2011-07-30T23:09:00.000-07:00

she tore her other lives from the sunlight

lives she won’t taste now
leaves from a book or pages of breath

and let them flutter from her fingertips
or cupped their darkness between her palms

as if trying to warm a broken moth
struggling for a moment her eyes lowered

she wondered at her terror
terrified by her joy

,

i always wanted to be somewhere else

2011-07-27T05:25:00.000-07:00

travel

2011-07-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

Toward

Maybe the high clouds
will be there before me?

As if arrival
were already true in the departure,

I close this door
and think your pulse beats in my wrists.

What does distance matter now?

.

setting sun

2011-07-13T20:56:00.000-07:00

Quelques vieux bâtiments et les champs en friche

Comme si le soleil
était l’ombre d’un abîme
qui approfondirait
l’horizon en nous,

l’après-midi mourant
trempe les murs
d’une clarté de cuivre.
Le lierre miroite et pense

quand une brise
dans le piège de vignes
cherche des mots
comme des tessons de verre.

S’envolant d’un toit,
un corbeau rauque
d’un seul trait d’aile
peint le retour de nos noms

dans la bouche de la terre.

A few old buildings among the fallow fields

As if the sun were
the shadow of an abyss
that would deepen
the horizon in us,

this dying afternoon
soaks the walls
in coppery light.
The ivy glimmers and thinks

when a breeze in the trap
of vines seeks words
like shards of glass.
Flying from a roof,

a hoarse crow
in a single wingbeat
paints our names’ return
to the mouth of the earth

marram grass

2011-07-11T21:04:00.000-07:00

clover blossom

2011-06-29T18:38:00.000-07:00

Please note: I will be away from the computer for about a week -- there are places in the world where that is still possible! -- but I will look forward to catching up on blog visits when I come home....

when shall i be as the swallow and give up my silence?

2011-06-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

Lettre du vingt-six juin

Que les oiseaux vous parlent désormais de notre vie.
Un homme en ferait trop d'histoires
et vous ne verriez plus à travers ses paroles
qu'une chambre de voyageur, une fenêtre
où la buée des larmes voile un bois brisé de pluie...

La nuit se fait. Vous entendez les voix sous les tilleuls:
la voix humaine brille comme au-dessus de la terre
Antarès qui est tantôt rouge et tantôt vert.

*

N'écoutez plus le bruit de nos soucis,
ne pensez plus à ce qui nous arrive,
oubliez même notre nom. Ecoutez-nous parler
avec la voix du jour, et laissez seulement
briller le jour. Quand nous serons défaits de toute crainte,
quand la mort ne sera pour nous que transparence,
quand elle sera claire comme l'air des nuits d'été
et quand nous volerons portés par la légèreté
à travers tous ces illusoires murs que le vent pousse,
vous n'entendrez plus que le bruit de la rivière
qui coule derrière la forêt; et vous ne verrez plus
qu'étinceler des yeux de nuit...

*

Lorsque nous parlerons avec la voix du rossignol….

Philippe Jaccottet

Letter of 26 June

From now on let our life be told to you by birds.
A man would churn out too many tales
and all you’d see through his words would be
a traveler’s lodgings, a window
where tears have misted a rain-shattered wood….

Night settles. You hear voices under the lime trees:
the human voice shines like the earthward gleam
of Antares which is sometimes red, sometimes green.

*

Don’t listen anymore to the din of our worries,
don’t think about what has happened to us,
forget our name, too. Listen as we speak
through the voice of day, and let there be only
daylight shining. When we come to be drained of all fear,
when death seems to us mere transparency,
when it is clear as the night air in summer
and we are carried by lightness, flying
through all these imagined walls the wind leans on,
all you will hear is the sound of the river
flowing behind the forest, all you will see
is night’s eyes as they gleam….

*

When we shall speak with the voice of the nightingale….

Translated by Jennie Feldman

summer

2011-06-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

no other world

2011-06-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

We both had fears -- what might happen, what might not happen -- but in the end we forgot to be afraid. What was the point in dwelling on our fears? As if we might feel something different because we had been warned? We didn't know who we were together until we were together, until the secret that had been born within us stepped into the air and began to speak. And the the sky bowed to hear....

--Kitsune-onna

the dragonfly lives its life without a single error

2011-06-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful

but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light,

frenzied,
wringing our hands,

half-mad, saying over and over:

what does it mean, that the world is beautiful—
what does it mean?

The child asks this,
and the determined, laboring adult asks this—

both the carpenter and the scholar ask this,
and the fisherman and the teacher;

both the rich and the poor ask this
(maybe the poor more than the rich)

and the old and the very old, not yet having figured it out,
ask this
desperately

standing beside the golden-coated field rock,
or the tumbling water,
or under the stars—

what does it mean?
what does it mean?

--Mary Oliver
from "Gravel"

unwilled, in our night

2011-05-28T05:14:00.000-07:00

Body

1.

It was a violation, I know -- not the accidental glimpse,
but the lingering gaze. One night long ago,
in the first months of you and me, I left you
at your door for the night, and on my way,
walking past your basement room, I saw you ---
just in, unbuttoning. I watched you undress,
private and practical, unceremonious, tossing
your skirt to the edge of the bed, and you stood
in bra and panties before the mirror and half-
swiveled your hips toward the glass, flexing
to appraise the long, sleek-muscled calf and the silken
firm thigh, and turned away, I think, happy and secret.

I’m telling you this now. It happened.
It was winter and late. My white breath clung to the air,
and the campus slept through its plundered dreams
as I trudged back to the dormitory, the fading tan-line
across your shoulder blades still cutting into me,
as it does today. This was the body.
I was flush with the good story of the body, as if
a voice breathed it warm onto my skin, there
under the winter stars that prickled overhead,
a sleeping limb come back to life, everything before us.

2.

Those last nights before I left, when you undressed
behind the closet door so I would not see,
we slept in the same bed, but meticulously
measured our separate spaces, keeping to what was ours,
far to the edges of the mattress, no touching.
So often those last mornings, we woke tangled
together, the stupid desperate bodies clinging
to what they knew so well, the warmth
they dreamed back to, unwilled, in our night.
Eyes lowered then, careful, we crept apart, unspeaking.
The summer morning light washed us like cool water.

dogwood

2011-05-22T17:20:00.001-07:00

Sunday light inside the shadow

2011-05-15T06:45:00.001-07:00

If you blindfold me and chain my hands around a stick, this stick separates me from things, but through it I explore them. I only feel the stick, I only perceive the wall. Created things are like this for the faculty of love. Supernatural love touches only the creatures around one but goes toward God. We love these creatures (what else is there to love?), but as intermediaries. In this way, we love all creatures, including ourselves. Loving a stranger like oneself implies this corollary: love yourself like a stranger.

--Simone Weil

Saturday the brush of other wings

2011-05-14T12:58:00.001-07:00

Nonattachment: no longer wishing that your loved ones be immortal.

--Simone Weil

Friday desire without object

2011-05-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

Perfect joy excludes even the feeling of joy -- for when the soul is completely full, no corner is available for saying "me".

-- Simone Weil

Thursday silence in the breath

2011-05-13T09:49:00.001-07:00

Saying that this world is worth nothing, that this life is worth nothing, and giving evil as proof, is absurd -- for if it is worthless, what does evil take from it? Thus suffering in sorrow and compassion for others are all the purer and more intense the better we understand the fullness of joy.

One must have through joy the revelation of reality in order to find reality in suffering. Else, life is only a more or less bad dream. One must come to find a yet fuller reality in suffering that is nothingness and void. In the same way, one must love life in order to love death yet more.

--Simone Weil

Wednesday zero at the bone

2011-05-11T06:06:00.000-07:00

In order to attain non-attachment, sorrow is not enough. There must be sorrow with no consolation.... One must accept the past, without asking compensation from the future. Stop time in this moment. It is, thus, the acceptance of death.... Reduce oneself to the point one occupies in space and time. To nothing. Strip oneself of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute loneliness. Then one has the truth of the world.

--Simone Weil

Tuesday broken in the garden

2011-05-10T08:58:00.001-07:00

We are that which is farthest from God, at the extreme limit where it is still not absolutely impossible to return to him. In our being, God is torn. We are the crucifixion. God's love for us is torment. How could good love evil without suffering? And evil suffers as well in loving good. The mutual love of God and humanity is suffering.

--Simone Weil

Monday morning sermon

2011-05-09T05:28:00.000-07:00

We must renounce everything that is not grace, even the longing for grace.

--Simone Weil

if i remembered a story about rain

2011-05-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

Hard Rain Behind a Screen of Thistles

If I remembered a story about rain, would that be a way back?
It was not this mean spring cold seeping under the doors
but a summer cloudburst when we stopped the car,
obeying the ache that twisted through our nerves that year,
and touched naked on the rich grass, secret
behind a row of thistle and clotted blackberry.
Rainwater was the taste of July sky licked from your thighs,
sopping our hair, streaming off your breasts, off my shoulders.

Later, in the afternoon, after watching more rain fall,
I think I should have said it was like a baptism.
Seeing us there, discovering those two hidden in the long grass,
would it seem that our whole bodies were weeping
the fat warm rain, movements tensing fast to a shared cry
lost in thunder, our bellies together, as slick as newborns?

we dreamed these colors were Nineveh

2011-05-01T10:20:00.001-07:00

Photograph by Roxana Ghita

A poem, "Things the Blue Turtle Spoke to Her," is online at quantum poetry

For other photographs in this series, go to The Floating Bridge of Dreams

Miller's Pond

2011-04-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

Three poems
reprinted from
my book
Frost Lights
a Thin Flame
are online at
Miller's Pond

stilled here and pale

2011-04-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

A poem, "Funeral," is now online at Chantarelle's Notebook.

a cage of bone

2011-04-18T17:48:00.000-07:00

Cage d'oiseau

Je suis une cage d'oiseau
Une cage d’os
Avec un oiseau

L'oiseau dans sa cage d’os
C'est la mort qui fait son nid

Lorsque rien n’arrive
On entend froisser ses ailes

Et quand on a ri beaucoup
Si l'on cesse tout à coup
On l'entend qui roucoule
Au fond
Comme un grelot

C'est un oiseau tenu captif
La mort dans ma cage d’os

Voudrait-il pas s'envoler
Est-ce vous qui le retiendrez
Est-ce moi
Qu'est-ce que c'est

Il ne pourra s'en aller
Qu'après avoir tout mangé
Mon cœur
La source de sang
Avec la vie dedans

Il aura mon âme au bec.

--Saint-Denys Garneau

Bird cage

I am a bird cage
A cage of bone
With a bird

The bird in its cage of bone
Is death making a nest

In a lull
I hear its wings rustle

And when I laugh heartily
And suddenly stop
I hear it coo
In the deep
Like a little bell

It is a captive bird
Death in my cage of bone

Doesn’t it want to take flight
Is it you who will hold it back
Is it me
What then

It can’t go until
It has devoured all
My heart
The font of blood
With life inside

It will carry my soul in its beak

--my translation

fog at dawn

2011-04-13T12:12:00.000-07:00