To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say - behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs….

4.

Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,

The dancer, the potter,

To make me a begging bowl

Which I believe

My soul needs.

And if I come to you,

To the door of your comfortable house

With unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,

Will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.

I would like to give you this chance.

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change.

Congratulations, if

You have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.

Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure-

Your life-

What would do for you?

7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
through with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself.  Then forget it.  Then, love the world.

Someday I feel like a child playing in the meadow, while bombs fly over head and digging parties put friends into the ground next to where I stare in wonder at the trees.  What do I mean by this?  Some days I grow weary of fighting – I just want to love the world. 

For instance I am at a bird conference now.  Many of these people, if not most, have wild parrots as companions in their home, or raise them for various reasons, including making a livelihood.  I am mostly of the clan, “mutual other” where I see birds as beings with their own inherent worth and dignity. After years of studying them in the wild, my heart hurts to have them in captivity where we humans make most of the choices for them.  Those surrounding me are mostly of the clan, “utilitarian.”  Humans have ultimate control over birds and it is not an ethical dilemma to control them and place them into our lives, where the birds live quite differently from their natural and evolved behavior.  Truly I guess that all of us belong to both clans, to the one clan called earth.

So I find myself torn – is it possible to fight with one’s self for any worthwhile reason? How do I speak of my truth, of my longing, and of my pain while letting the other know that I hold their needs tenderly and that we are of the family of things?

I go to the other, hold out my begging bowl, and ask them to fill it with their beauty.

As our cups fill together, may we forget to love only ourselves, and instead love the world.

Love the world…them’s good fighting words!

To whom or to what do you hold out your begging bowl today?

Spring

Faith is the instructor. 

We need no other.

Guess what I am, he says in his incomparably lovely

Young-man voice.  Because I love the world I think of grass,

I think of leaves and the bold sun, I think of the rushes

In the black marshes just coming back from under the pure white

And now finally melting stubs of snow.

Whatever we know or don’t know

Leads us to say:

Teacher, what do you mean?

But faith is still there, and silent.

Then he who owns the incomparable voice suddenly flows upward

And out of the room and I follow, obedient and happy.

Of course I am thinking the Lord was once young and will never in fact be old.

And who else could this be, who goes off down the green path,

Carrying his sandals, and singing?

What if the grass were to sprout tall one day, and the seeds as they take to the wind, whisper, “follow me.”

Would you go?

What if instead a mighty wave came to shore and then in gentleness, ever so slowly, flowed in streets and alley ways and even right up to your front porch, and just as the wave turned to return to the sea, commanded “follow me.”

Would you go?

What if a bird came a calling to your window, tapping until you finally opened your life onto the world, and in a voice sweetly luring, sang, “follow me.”

Would you go?

What if a fierce eyed man you usually spy on one street corner or another emerges from the woods, and then walks past you (as you leisurely dine in a local restaurant) on his way to the bus terminal, alternating whistling with a face that pleads, “follow me.”

Would you spring up and step outside, spread your arms, and shout with tears to the bold sun and the sons and daughters of hominids, “Yes!  I will take your hand, wing, surge, and wind filled promises and follow you.”

What if we did this today?

Red Bird Explains Himself

Yes, I was the brilliance floating over the snow
and I was the song in the summer leaves, but this was
only the first trick
I had hold of among my other mythologies,
for I also knew obedience: bring sticks to the nest,
food to the young, kisses to my bride.

But don’t stop there, stay with me: listen.

If I was the song that entered your heart
then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed,
and thus wilderness bloomed that, with all its
followers: gardeners, lovers, people who weep
for the death of rivers.

And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body.  Do you understand? for truly the body needs
a song, a spirit, a soul.  And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable
beauty of heaven
where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart..

Mary, you are the brilliance and the song.  You bag of tricks includes obedience to work, to paper and pen, to breaking the heart open like an egg - but what delicious sweetness you cook up with your words!

I will stay with you and listen.

For the song of my heart I hear more clearly in your song - you help me grow, love, and weep.

You are both of this earth and of the ethereal vision that beauty resides here with me, down in the mud, and over and around me, bathing me in light and feathers with each rising sun. 

You were sent to this life to teach us our hearts.

I bow in gratitude to you - your feathered soul now flying with mine.

What does redbird, Mary, and this day teach you?

Red

All the while

I was teaching

in the state of Virginia

I wanted to see

gray fox.

Finally I found him.

He was in the highway.

He was singing

His death song.

I picked him up

And carried him

Into a field

While the cars kept coming.

He showed me

How he could ripple

How he could bleed.

Goodbye I said

To the light of his eye

As the cars went by.

Two mornings later

I found the other.

She was in the highway.

She was singing

Her death song.

I picked her up

And carried her

Into the field

Where she rippled

Half of her gray

Half of her red

While the cars kept coming.

While the cars kept coming.

Gray fox and gray fox.

Red, red, red.

Once, when I was a teen I was in the car with my father when across the road flew two flickers in front of the car ahead of us.  One made it across safely, the other not.  The injuring car kept going. My father stopped. Wordless we went to the side of the road to see what might be done for the stricken bird.  There was the male, quite dead, and so amazingly beautiful in his stillness. Over his body was his mate, uninjured, unmoving - protecting?  Saying goodbye?  I didn’t know what we could do for either bird, so I looked to my father who had tears falling down his face.  While the three of us stood vigil, the cars kept going by, the drivers unaware of the beauty and tragedy they were passing by.

We are the cars Mary speaks of.  We participate in death, of course, for we are alive and we die and we cannot escape this interdependence that claims us.  Perhaps though there are more songs of death we could hear, could write, and could sing.  I will give this day to hear, write, and sing the songs around me. 

Will you join me?  And then tell me what you songs you partook of?

The Poet Visits the Museum of Fine Arts - September 9, 2010

For a long time

I was not even

In this world, yet

Every summer

Every rose

Opened in perfect sweetness

And lived

In gracious repose,

In its own exotic fragrance,

In its huge willingness to give

Something, from its small self,

To the entirely of the world.

I think of them, thousands upon thousands,

In many lands,

Whenever summer came to them,

Rising

Out of the patience of patience,

To leaf and bud and look up

Into the blue sky

Or, with thanks,

Into the rain

That would feed

Their thirsty roots

Latched into the earth-

Sandy or hard, Vermont or Arabia,

What did it matter,

The answer was simply to rise

In joyfulness, all their days.

Have I found any better teaching?

Not ever, not yet.

Last week I say my first Botticelli

And almost fainted,

And if I could I would paint like that

But am shelved somewhere below, with a few songs

About roses: teachers, also, of the ways

Toward thanks, and praise.

Mary paints with words, roses with petals, and golden age artists with strokes of color. All teach us to rise in joy, giving prayers and thanks. What else do they teach us? Beauty yes, but what of the thorns? Looking deeper would we see a prickly poet and a painter who fears women? Inside all are evolved harsh lessons, to fear and to protect.

When I was a child I often walked among my father’s rose garden. The flowers were nice, but I entered my father’s world with trepidation. In the rose plants not only were there thorns and reminders of my father’s tough standards, but other risks. The roses were full of bees, ants, spiders, Japanese beetles, and toxins my father sprayed on the roses to keep them whole, to keep them safe.

Roses do teach me to give thanks and praise, and also, in that gratitude, rightly claim the stabbing pain of this world as beauty too.

Today, I ask you to join me in looking out at the “harsh” reality of the world, and breathe once in and out together, and feel the energy of the wholeness.