Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her..
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
It is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her-
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
Okay, Mary, you've nailed it down to one question, although just a few poems ago, your question was, what is a soul? Perhaps this comes out of the question, "how to love the world." The question is not how to be loved? Why me? Why not me? Or how shall I die and when? How shall I best meet my needs? In the asking, I feel empowerment. In the asking, we give ourselves a choice. Now, this moment, we choose how to love. Shall it be wordlessly like the bear? Watching like in so many of Mary's poems? Reading this poem?
How do you love the world?
T says: I love the world by merging with it, losing my boundaries. And then (I think?) I take unconsciously whatever it was I got from that, however I grew, and make new things with it. When I do that fully, I think my life may be growing on the right path - or, if one doesn't like the "path" word, how about growing in sync with everything else, instead of at odds with it? (I see all this is fairly garbled, but the best I can do at the moment!)
ReplyDeleteAre you then like the bear coming down the mountain, a scary path in that the way is sometimes steep? Yet the flow of gravity, the flow of love, invites us to come off of the peak of our delusions (and enter other cliches here). Now I'm being "garbled" as the images and the interaction say just blurt, just stumble down the path of love.
ReplyDeleteT says: Yes, but more "breathing and tasting", without even realizing that there is a scary path there. I have had a bear withing for some time...probably at least 20-25 years. Don't know what that's about, but it doesn't feel like me. Of course it could be...
ReplyDelete(How's that for garbled!)