A Lesson from James Wright

 If James Wright could put in his book of poems a blank page

dedicated to "the Horse David Who Ate One of My Poems,"

I am ready to follow him along

the sweet path he cut through the dryness and suggest that you sit now

very quietly in some lovely wild place, and listen to the silence.

And I say that this, too, is a poem

Let us leave our minds blank for horses, over ridden, abandoned, shipped to slaughter

Let us leave our minds blank for the sparrows dropping from the skies and the flies upon children's faces

Let us leave our minds blank for the wildness without to colonize the wildness within

Let us leave our minds blank for that we love and may one day come to love.

Let us leave our minds blank in honor of all beings

All beings, who I say that too, are poems.

What kind of poem do you write today?

Heart Poem

My heart, that used to pump along so pleasantly, has come now to a different sort of music.

There is someone inside those red walls, irritated and even, occasionally, irrational.

Years ago I was part of an orchestra: our conductor was a wild man. He was forever rapping the music stand for silence. Then he would call out some correction and we would begin again.

Now again it is the wild man.

I remember the music shattering, and our desperate attentiveness.

Once he flung the baton over our heads and into the midst of the players....What silence!  Then someone picked it up and it was passed forward back to him. He rapped the stand and raised his arms. Then we all breathed again, and the music restarted. 

Oh Mary, is your heart faltering?  Does it in the middle of the night awaken you with it's crazy out of synch rhythm, sharply drawing your attention to your body, and to what your life may be?  Perhaps you lie awake for hours, wondering if the coming rising will be your last.  Then the day lightens, and you restart your day like you have thousands of times, ever more grateful for the music of the spheres?

Have you had nights like this, and mornings as well?

This Too

There was the body of the fawn, in the leaves,

under the tall oaks.

There was the face, the succulent mouth,

the pink, extruded tongue.

There were the eyes.

There was its dark dress, half pulled off.

There were its little hooves.

There was the smell of change, which was

stink.

There was my dog's nose, reading the silence

like a book.

No one spoke, not the Creator, not the Preserver, not the Destroyer.

There was the sound of wind in the leaves,

in the tall oaks.

There was the terrible excitement

of the flies.

Two nights ago I saw the movie, "All the Little Animals" that is about, in part, a man who dedicates his life to burying dead animals he finds along the side of the road. He considers this his lifelong work and takes on an apprentice to carry on after he too lies in the ground.  At one point in the movie the apprentice, Bobby, silently digs what might be his own grave. As he ponders his own death, he suddenly feels lighter and more whole than he ever has.  He notices everything, and in this clarity he grows excited as his life and death give him meaning.   

Death, this too, must we not only notice in every detail, but love?

Whose death do you remember in detail, and how does this add to your life today?

This is the One

The bear who shuffles over the hillsides filling himself

With berries until his tongue is purple (which remember, is a royal color)

The bear who circles the cabin, who will not steal the honey, who will not rifle the knapsack

Of the sleeping camper-the one who sits by himself by the river,

Who sings to himself the secret song ho one has ever heard-the bear

Who yawns with the cavernous mouth of a shaggy god-who, when he sees me

Is solidly silent and rises on the mass of his legs, disdainful and free

As anything on earth could ever be-this is the bear I want to see.

We came out of Africa and out of the wilderness, but we have not wavered from the gods of our fearful focus.  Just like the snake a few days’ blog ago, we wake up when we see a bear.  Having lived in Alaska, nothing brings me more to full attention over a campfire that is luring me into sleepiness, than this sentence “When I was on the trail and ran into a grizzly…”  Truly though if we had lost limb, life, or love to snake, shark, or bear, would we truly prefer the wild one and not the beaten down old bear in a circus? 

I remember the story of a young woman who was attached by coyotes a year ago in Eastern Canada. She had been out on her own when the pack attacked and killed her.  Her mother, surely bereaved, did not blame the wild canines and did not want them hunted down for their actions.  She believed that we always need wildness, and that wilderness tracts are not human’s home alone, but the home of many.  We take our risks to see that which is free.

How much risk are you willing to take?

What risks are you willing to take?

Who Said This

Something whispered something

that was not even a word.

It was more like a silence

that was understandable.

I was standing

at the edge of the pond.

Nothing living, what we call living,

was in sight.

And yet, the voice entered me,

my body-life,

with so much happiness.

And there was nothing there

but the water, the sky, the grass.

Once when on a plane traveling back from conservation work in Guatemala, a voice entered me.  I had been spending all morning out tramping through the grass of cow pastures, climbing, protecting, and loving parrots and their nest trees.  The final nest inspected before I sped to the capital city to board the plane contained two chicks whose parents had died or abandoned the nest. They were hungry and thin, and were bound to die if we did not intervene.  They were much in my heart as I sat on the plane reading my veterinary journals.   The voice spoke my name, "Kim" and continued to call out to me. I never did discover who said the word, but I had gotten up and inspected every inch of the cabin and there was no one there whom I knew.  I suspect though that the voice was someone I knew, my inner wisdom which is the love of earth and all her beings. The voice told me to move to Guatemala and at first I refused. But by the end of the conversation I relented, and such an overwhelming since of love came to me and staid for many months. In that moment I knew that there was nothing more important than love.  There was nothing else there in my life that mattered, except the expression of love. This moment of "awakes on a plane" altered my body-life and has directed me sometimes in no more than a whisper over the nearly 20 years since. 

What voice has come to you to tell you of wisdom?  Has it whispered, laughed, or screamed?

Both Worlds

Forever busy, it seems,

With words,

Finally

I put the pen down

And rumple

Most of the sheets

And leave one or two,

Sometimes a few,

For the next morning.

Day after day’

Year after year’

It has gone on this way,

I rise from the chair,

I put on my jacket

And leave the house

For that other world’

The first one,

The holy one

Where the trees say

Nothing the toad says

Nothing the dirt

nothing and yet

what has always happened

keeps happening:

the trees flourish

the toad leaps

and out of the silent dirt

the blood-red roses rise

I have been over 40 hours in transit to get home from Central America to Northern Florida.  I leave one world where life seems evidently harsh no matter where you turn to this world, where abundance hides the sacrifice of others. 

While waiting in the San Jose, Costa Rica airport yesterday I met an owner of a Honduran banana plantation. He and I swapped stories of violence in the daily lives of Guatemalans and Hondurans, including vengeance killings, gangs, narco lords, assassin squads, murderous politics of militaries and governments, gunfights, and people bound and thrown into rivers to die with no threat of penalty or discovery.  To me he seemed hardened by the life he had led, willing to do whatever it took to protect his interests. 

Then we began to speak of birds and he smiled for the first time .He stood up as his very soul seemed to become lighter. He spoke of how he loved birds and how he enjoyed taking his children to a bird park in Honduras.  It was like we had been transported to another world, this one of light and not of darkness.   We shared a magic moment where we had both reminded each other of the light within and without.

The theme of light came up in a movie I also saw yesterday in transit, “The Christmas Cottage.”  In it a character says that there is a light within us all and goes with us down all roads.  It ended with an artist painting a snow covered house, brightly lit up from within and without.  This image brings me back to Mary’s poem of yesterday where there are many roads leading from home.

We all travel far in our lives, one way or another.  How often we tragically forget that the light stays with us, no matter our paths, no matter the brutality and cruelty we encounter.  In this mess of our lives, life with daring audacity, flourishes.  Why should we not as well? 

Where do you travel between two worlds?

Praying

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Just yesterday I wrote about doorways into loving and Mary uses a similar metaphor today, and so well. I wish I had this poem years ago when I was asked by a pilot in Afghanistan how to pray with her troops. She was leading a group stationed at a mountain airfield and they were coming under daily fire, and were dropping bombs on villages with innocent people. She said her troops were despairing and she asked me how she might pray with them. Our means of communication was email through the computer on her bomber. I don't remember what I said exactly, but it was something like this: Name the sorrow and fear. Name the thanks. Allow silence at the end so each individual's voice may be heard, and also so each could listen to the voices that arise.

So my prayer today would be:

Spirit of life, God and love of our hearts, I am grateful for the love within and without. I regret all those times I am not open to this love and keep it from reaching the depths within and without. Let me be quiet now in this moment, so I may listen within and without.....

What is your prayer today?

JUST LYING ON THE GRASS AT BLACKWATER

I think sometimes of the possible glamour of death -
that it might be wonderful to be
lost and happy inside the green grass -
or to be the green grass! -
or, maybe the pink rose, or the blue iris,
or the affable daisy, or the twirled vine
looping its way skyward – that I might be perfectly peaceful
to be the shining lake, or the hurrying, athletic river,
or the dark shoulders of the trees
where the thrush each evening weeps himself into an ecstasy.

I lie down in the fields of goldenrod, and everlasting.
Who could find me?
My thoughts simplify. I have not done a thousand things
or a hundred things but, perhaps, a few.
As for wondering about answers that are not available except
in books, though all my childhood I was sent there
to find them, I have learned
to leave all that behind

as in summer I take off my shoes and my socks,
my jacket, my hat, and go on
happier, through the fields. The little sparrow
with the pink beak
calls out, over and over, so simply – not to me
but to the whole world. All afternoon
I grow wiser, listening to him,
soft, small, nameless fellow at the top of some weed,
enjoying his life. If you can sing, do it. If not,

even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness,
like praise,
from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting.

I feel as if I am reading the Sufi poet Rumi this morning who could have easily written about a thrush weeping herself into ecstasy. For Rumi, for Mary, and for you perhaps there is glamour in the death that brings everlasting union with the beloved other. What I want to know, is how to do that now, and not when I finally lay my bones in the drained swamp grounds of Florida. How am I a Swallow-tailed Kite, now, who swirls on updrafts of grace above my backyard pines? Why am I not now an indigenous person of this area, shelling oysters, building middens that won’t taste oil for another 500 years? How can my mourning of perceived separation fuel everlasting love? It just does I suppose is the answer, not found in books, but in the heart of longing, and of belonging.

Have you ever wept yourself into ecstasy?

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose that sometime

we will learn everything

there is to learn: what the world is, for example,

and what it means. I think this as I am crossing

from one field to another, in summer, and the

mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either

knows enough already or knows enough to be

perfectly content not knowing. Song being born

of quest he knows this: he must turn silent

were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead

oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly

unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display

the small suns of their center piece, their -- if you don't

mind my saying so -- their hearts. Of course

I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and

narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,

to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;

for example -- I think this

as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch --

the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the

daisies for the field.

There is so much we do not know. Are you content with this? Can you still sing the rightness of your belonging on the planet in the family of things? How do we know in our bones that questions and answers are not the point, but the song we were born to sing? I think it is perhaps to have our hearts in the center of our being. This and no more.

Where do you feel "right" and as if you "belong" without reservation? Can you imagine that being everywhere and all times?

This World

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it

nothing fancy.

But it seems impossible.

Whatever the subject, the morning sun

glimmers it.

The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.

The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark

pinprick well of sweetness.

As for the stones on the beach, forget it.

Each one could be set in gold.

So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds

were singing.

And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music

out of their leaves.

And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and

beautiful silence

as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too

hurried to hear it.

As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs

even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.

So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.

So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,

and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,

so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being

locked up in gold.

When working with the endangered Central American Scarlet Macaw two years ago we had a saying, “Every chick is gold.” We said this to enforce our commitment that we would do everything we could to save every single bird. No bird would die on our watch! Of course, many did. This past year, despite overwhelming obstacles, the Guatemalan biologists seem even more committed and accomplished. I asked them what happened, and one replied that it was because of their great love for the bird and for each other. Part of their love took the form of trying to increase the numbers of chicks fledged in the wild by caring not just for chicks, but for eggs. So they said this year, “Every egg is gold.” No eggs would die on our watch! Of course, many did. I often wondered if we were belittling the bird’s beauty and wonder by comparing them to gold. It seems to me that the better phrase would be, “Every golden moment is macaw!” -or-“Every child born is macaw!” “Everything that glitters, or doesn’t, is macaw!”

How can you unlock your life?