Deep Summer

The mockingbird opens his throat among the thorns for his own reasons

but doesn't mind if we pause to listen and learn something

for ourselves; he doesn't stop, he nods his gray head

with the frightfully bright eyes, he flirts his supple tail, he says:

listen, if you would listen.  There's no  end to good talk, to passion songs,

to the melodies that say this branch, this tree is mine,

to the wholesome happiness of being alive on a patch

of this green earth in the deep pleasures of summer. What a bird!

Your clocks, he says plainly,

which are always ticking,

do not have to be listened to.

The spirit of his every word.

We are in deep winter in North America.  The mockingbirds are here, but not as flamboyant as they will be come this summer.  I suppose that if I listened hard enough I would hear the happiness of being alive from other sources, whether it's on a patch of urban sidewalk, suburban strip mall, or brown fields of last year's harvest. 

I step outside and I hear street traffic, a dog barking, some identified bird, my own heart, and a ringing in my ears.  I have hearing loss accompanied by a constant ringing and have for years. So  I don't always hear the bird calls that others might.  Instead I let my imagination wonder, for I know that beauty flits among the wet branches this grey morning.

Whatever our perceived flaws or losses, don't we each have to find our way to compensate, to be able to listen to the spirit of this world?

What do you hear when you walk out this morning?  In what ways do you compensate for who you are so that you may know happiness?

Terns

Don’t think just now of the trudging forward of thought,

But of the wing-drive of unquestioning affirmation.

It’s summer, you never saw such a blue sky,

And here they are, those white birds with quick wings,

Sweeping over the waves, chattering and plunging,

Their thin beaks snapping, their hard eyes

Happy as little nails

The years to come-this is a promise-

Will grant you ample time

To try the difficult steps in the empire of thought

Where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,

Than this deepest affinity between your eyes and the world.

The flock thickens

Over the rolling, salt brightness. Listen,

Maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world

In the clasp of attention, isn’t the perfect prayer,

But it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,

Is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,

But of pure submission. Tell me, what else

Could beauty be for? And now the tide

Is at its very crown,

The white birds =sprinkle down,

Gathering up the loose silver rising

As if weightless. It isn’t instruction, or parable.

It isn’t for any vanity or ambition

Except for the one allowed, to stay alive.

It’s only a nimble frolic

Over the waves. And you find, for hours,

You cannot even remember the questions

That weigh so in your mind.

I wonder what beauty is for? Why did we evolve with such a close affinity to what is beautiful in this world, or to make things of beauty? I have heard some say we move towards beauty so that we can stand to be in the world. Otherwise the pain and the loss would be too great. Some trigger needs to soothe the aching brain that must hold how harm is all around us, some of it performed by our very words and hands. This leads me to suggest indeed religion, or meditation, or nature walks, or whatever intentional practice you cultivate for the awareness of interconnection, is perhaps an opiate of the masses. We adhere ourselves to faith claims of interdependence so that we know we will always survive and all we see before us continues on in one form or another. Said another way, if we as isolated ego driven individuals never exist, how can we disappear?

Here I spin in the realm of doubt and thought, and right now, I see the sun filtering through the trees in the nearly fall like air. Soon I will be holding a cup of coffee graciously prepared by my hosts, and then have a walk down by Lake Erie before heading to a veterinary clinic to watch how people fumble with their love of birds and their draw towards their beauty. Perhaps my faith is misguided, but I know not what else to do but to submit to these blessings, this merger of life coming to me and through me. I am a tern going fishing.

What do you have faith in? Where do you doubt?

White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

I wonder what it is that I will accomplish today

If anything can be called that marvelous word.

It won’t be

My kind of work, which is only putting words on a page,

The pencil

Haltingly calling up

The light of the world,

Yet nothing appearing on paper half as bright

As the mockingbird’s verbal hilarity

In the still unleafed shrub in the churchyard-

Or the white heron rising over the swamp and the darkness,

His yellow eyes and broad wings wearing

The light of the world in the light of the world-

Ah yes, I see him.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Okay, I’m flat out disagreeing with Mary, although given the paradoxical nature of poems; she probably secretly led me into agreeing with her. I do believe that the poem on the paper is the light of the world as is the poet. The heron over the swamp is no more beautiful than the humans I saw in the hydrotherapy pool this morning. I’m at a resort/convention hotel in San Diego and after working out I limped over to the Jacuzzi to lessen the ache of my knee. In one corner of the Jacuzzi is a middle aged woman, her body bulging out of her suit. In another corner is an older man, he too rotund and big bandage covering a third of his face. I can go into judgment mind and ask what is right about we well-fed middle aged people relaxing in the middle of the day in an expensive hotel while billions upon billions of other beings are suffering? How is the work we putter with considered any kind of accomplishment amidst the beauty and tragedy that rises out of the ache of our hearts and the bodies of so many? I don’t rightly know how to answer this except to say that my inner knowing replies to the doubting mind that beauty is in all bodies and all words. And that means mine too.

What is it you hope to accomplish today, and is it enough?

Morning Glories

Blue and dark-blue

rose and deepest rose

white and pink they

are everywhere in the diligent

cornfield rising and saying

in their reliable finery...

The reaper's story is the story

of endless work of

work careful and heavy but the

reaper cannot

separate them out there they

are in the story of his life

bright random useless

year after year

taken with the serious tons

weeds without value humorous

beautiful weeds.

A Haiku in response to this:

Coming to take us

You and me. Beautiful weeds

Death makes us all one.

Do you ever feel useless and fail to trust your bright beauty?