Category Archive

There was a time
when things had gone so wrong
I knew they’d been ordained.
It was then I learned
that I learned this lesson
how to receive

and my long dreams
found a hole
inside my heart that could not
could not close
inside myself where
I thought myself unfairly wounded
but not so much that anymore
as what the universe was meant to bring me
came through that hole
inside myself
and so I practice-prayed
my child’s violin maybe each night
afterward (this night
this is the one)
by throwing out arms far to my sides
and like a giant, just
looked up through the ceiling
as the ceiling looked back down
to ask for whatever I wanted
that was meant to come.

I never slept so well as when
in my innermost, shamed parts
myself to myself I said
those words
that seemed to hold so much
meaning but are now so blank
so unrecollectable except
their forms were some form
of something
some lost music maybe
that strange felt sense
like smell or before smell was smell
only soft familiar ground and a scent of lilacs
wasn’t it? and violets, yes
and the sound of the creek
just after the rain stopped
trees still drip-dripping
and the clouds starting to break
wide open into
(I remember now)
a kind of blue peace
the still
wide open
unknown
empty vault
of mind
that is
the only

Sky

~Dan~

The roped off sea is supposed to be safer,
that’s the way it seems at least,
though anything, I imagine
that actually wants to get in
will find it easy enough, and anything
that actually wants to get out
certainly can find its way.
The warm sun massages
the muscles of my back,
the warm sun colors
the water and the clouds.
Not far beyond the rope
the interrogative eyes of barracuda
swim slowly past — they’re friendly here it’s said
and just beyond that I’ve heard
that an underground river empties,
sweeping upward among the corals,
but here within the buoys
all is well today — as usual
the children swim and frolic
without concern
while we parents drink our sweet
refreshing pina coladas.
A dog may drift by in search of handouts
only to be run off by the help.
A poor woman, overladen
and trudging the beach
may try to sell us jewelry
before, she too, is angrily
sent away.
Oh, tell me, why go to the reef today
when these markers promise
a better tan and
say nothing
will ever happen if you stay
carefully within them?

~Dan~

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the river of the windfall light.

~Dylan Thomas, from Fern Hill~

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

~Mark Strand~

Just a picture for you.
If this flower can bloom
after months sitting still
in its vase of stones
and waiting water,
then so can you.
So can I.

The soul is full of surprises.
Don’t you know
without thinking
we open out from unknowing
into fragrant possibility?
A river with a blossom
that floats suddenly
across an empty sky.

This sky.

~Dan~

For Carmen

En los árboles del huerto
hay un ruiseñor;
canta de noche y de día,
canta a la luna y al sol.
Ronco de cantar:
al huerto vendrá la niña
y una rosa cortará.
Entre las negras encinas,
hay una fuente de piedra,
y un cantarillo de barro
que nunca se llena.
Por el encinar,
con la blanca luna,
ella volverá.

Out in the garden
a nightingale sings
night and day in the treetops,
in moonlight, in sunlight.
He sings himself out:
the girl will come to the garden
and pick a rose.
Among the dark oaks
there’s a stone spring
and a little earthen jug
that never fills up.
Through the oak grove,
by white moonlight,
she will return.

~Antonio Machado~

My mother said don’t go near anyplace other children have drowned;
my father said death wasn’t the worst thing: it was waking up crippled
from falling to the rocks below, a broken back or head injury but alive,
knowing forever from your permanent bed you’d done it to yourself.

But don’t you think you have to find out on your own? Don’t you think
it’s essential to crawl down the sharp walls where one misstep hurtles you
into unthinkable pain? Don’t you think – and this isn’t a prank — that unless
you flirt with the river of sorrow happiness will never find its way?

So I wandered down through a broken, bony forest to the edge of the canyon,
and I looked straight down into the dark waters, became addicted to the view
at the edge. It would be so easy, I thought, to drift over the falls of air and through
the hidden portal to those dirty little shallows where they’d finally find my body.

I sat quietly looking into its face, the smell of damp stone rising
entwined with the soft gurgle of the winding flow and the wet transience
of impersonal traces. Yes, here is my suffering now: I could not escape
the dungeons of my self-belittlement and the same sad repetitive ends.

Until one day I slipped, came so close to the flowers of the funeral home
that my body lost all feeling in anticipation of the cut, the nothingness,
and I scrambled upward as if startled by the unseen snake on a ledge,
as if eye-level I’d barked at it, my own destruction; saw it whole and coming.

Scared me enough, I guess, to live. I stopped looking down there, letting that
slippery thing dominate. Let it slither through on its own. I’d seen it now
and jumped aside, saw how new the mountains were ahead, felt the way the sun
crosses entire valleys in a day and how any river, even sorrow, is only a part.

~Dan~

The darkness in the room was like enormous riches;
there the child was sitting, wonderfully alone.
And when the mother entered, as if in a dream,
a glass quaked in the silent china closet.
She felt it, how the room was betraying her,
and kissed her child, saying, “Are you here?”
then both looked toward the piano in fear,
for often at evening they would have a song
in which the child found himself strangely caught.

He sat stone still. His great gaze hung
upon her hand, which, totally bowed down by the ring,
walked over the white keys
as if plowing through deep drifts of snow.

~Rainer Maria Rilke~

Friends make us fuller.
When friends leave, their light stays behind.
It is like the blue sea
that supports the white breakers
that come and go.

No matter how far I go.
I long to return and be with friends.
It is never the same fire I left,
but beneath it are the ashes
of all our meetings that have gone before.

~Robert Sund~

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

~Wallace Stevens~