by Pablo Neruda

Naked you are as simple as one of your hands,

smooth, earthy, minimal, round, transparent,

you have moon lines, apple streets,

naked you are as thin as naked grain.

Naked you blue like the night in Cuba,

you’ve got creepers and stars in your hair,

naked you are huge and yellow

like summer in a golden church.

Naked you are small like one of your nails,

curvy, thin, rosy till the day rises

and you step into the world underground.

like in a long gallery of clothes and jobs:

your brightness goes off, gets dressed, and browses

and back to being a bare hand. “

(Pablo Neruda – “Nude you are simple ,from One Hundred Sonnets of Love, XXVII)

We rest at a new border crossing,
Our chipped swords and frayed packs 

leaning against a twisted tree,

New wounds healing with the old, 

bodies aching. 

More battles won,

more to come.

Questions of mortality
haunt our thoughts,
more with each year, decade, 

more with illnesses and surgeries, 

with new scars, pains,
choices, fears, revelations…

More tests of courage…

(Do these ever end? No…) 

Remember this? 

“We have both lived with lips more scar tissue than skin. 

Our love came unannounced in the middle of the night. 

Our love came when we’d given up 

on asking love to come. 

I think that has to be part
of its miracle.
This is how we heal.” *

But my love, you have a 

a wounded child to care for,

your own 

identity, desires, fears, memories,

you protect her

always.

‘I will kiss you like forgiveness. You
will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms
will bandage and we will press promises between us like flowers in a book….’ *

I await your heart’s choice—

Perhaps not forever— but

loving you, forgiving you… 

I will not be afraid
of your scars.
I know sometimes
it’s still hard to let me see you
in all your cracked perfection,
but please know:
whether it’s the days you burn
more brilliant than the sun
or the nights you collapse into my lap
your body broken into a thousand questions, 

you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. 

I will love you when you are a still day.
I will love you when you are a hurricane.” *

* Clementine von Radics, “Love”

When the egg was fertilized, stirred, ready.

I was already on my way.

Had a fleeting sense that 
“oh, this is not going to end well.“

There was something wrong
Too late to turn back.
Luck of the draw.
Law of Life.
Natural selection.

The woman who would carry, birth me 
did not want
to go through
this again.

Come what may…
The second I arrived in the fertile seed,
she knew
I felt her heart drop.

She had her reasons. 
Childbirth was life or death in those days.
And she had once almost died.
She also may have remembered her own mother’s
failed attempt to stop a beloved
brother with a hat pin,
leaving permanent disfiguring evidence,
lifelong pain,
moral stain.

But I was on the way. For better or worse,
’til death do us part….
Just not the hat pin.
(I knew none of that yet.
They don’t tell us everything.
But thank you.)  

Who said God doesn’t play dice?

Sorry, Ma. He does. 

Each body has its own unique,
peculiar bio-chemical, genetic soup
sour, sweet, full of loaded dice,
genetic time bombs, gifts. .

The spirit is destined to whip
all of that
into shape.
Eventually.
If it can.

But from the beginning
it gets drugged by the soup
and the humidity and noise,
and confused until
gradually, imperfectly
it forgets where it came from 

Almost. Almost. 
That’s where Hope lives.

The spirit swims in confusion, involuntary 
emotions, unfamiliar sensation,
Surrounded in life by other spirits—
As confused, or to one degree or another. 

And all of those things stiffen into a
garbled outline of a life
written in pencil,
designed for erasures and editing.

The creator gambles, 
has set in motion a universe of
a vastness unbelievable;
Of blinding violence
numinous beauty
cruel randomness, 

But it is all aware,

alive,

seeking.

It is us and we are made of it.

As our instruments peer deeper and
deeper into the seething heart of creation,
we one 

Day may see a question mark
Or an eye,
looking back at us.

Rejoicing.

Being poor is the hardest job there is. 

Rich people, or a critical mass of them, don’t get this. They’re so busy running from their own dragons that maybe they just won’t get it. Their fears are the same, just papered over with illusions, and sometimes hardened into cruelty. An unwillingness to look in the mirror will do this. Our shadow selves grow strong and hard.  

We all know in our guts all is temporary. We all know that no matter what, we will simply end someday. What we know of ourselves will move on.

If we get ours, if we run the race of survival a fraction faster than our fellow condemned prisoners, we label that as virtue. But it doesn’t affect the outcome in the slightest. The prison has us all, until it lets go.

Being poor isn’t just about material things, although the daily fear of being devoured by nameless horrors is a constant lurking presence. 

Money and security, or the having of the one and the illusion of the other, does make this part of life easier. 

And there are scurrilous, venal, vicious bastards everywhere, rich or poor. Predators. People defective in a litany of creative ways.

Then there are differences dictated by culture and genetics, handicapping some more than others to lives of bad choices or simple bad luck. The poor will always be with us, Jesus said. How we see them, and how they see themselves, is always going to have an element of personal choice. 

But those who have enough, more than enough, and some confidence there will be a tomorrow, preordained to be brief though it is, forget the true nature of this world. 

But the end is the same for everyone. We come into the world naked and naked we leave it. 

“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” wrote Walt Whitman a century and a half before Richard Dawkins considered the luckiness of death as a radiant token of the improbable odds of having lived at all. Death — the harrowing fact of our mortality — is the central animating force of life, the one great terror for which we have devised the coping mechanisms of love and art. Everything we make, everything we do, is a bid for bearing our transience.” —Maria Popova

The heartbreak of human failures across history to live in the honest heart of compassion is our central, mortal sin. 

The irony is deep and wide and so, so unnecessary. What if instead of grasping acquisitiveness,  justified with the illusion of superiority, we just look at those less fortunate with compassion. What if… 

There, but for the grace of God, go you and I. 

“Since sand and dirt pile up on everything, why does it look fresh for each new crowd? As natural and human debris raises the continents, vegetation grows on the piles. It is all a stage set — we know this — a temporary stage on top of many layers of stages, but every year fungus, bacteria, and termites carry off the old layer, and every year a new crop of sand, grass, and tree leaves freshens the set and perfects the illusion that ours is the new and urgent world now. When Keats was in Rome, he saw pomegranate trees overhead; they bloomed in dirt blown onto the Colosseum’s broken walls. How can we doubt our own time, in which each bright instant probes the future? We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.

In every arable soil in the world we grow grain over tombs — sure, we know this. But do not the dead generations seem to us dark and still as mummies, and their times always faded like scenes painted on walls at Pompeii?

We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out.”

—Annie Dillard

el aluddin Rumi

1207-1273

Little by little, wean yourself. 

This is the gist of what I have to say. 

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood, 

Move to an infant drinking milk, 

To a child of solid food, 

To a searcher after wisdom, 

To a hunter of more invisible game. 

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo. 

You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.

There are wheat fields and mountain passes, and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight

The beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.” 

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up

In the dark with eyes closed. 

Listen to the answer:

“There is no ‘other world.’

I only know what I’ve experienced. 

You must be hallucinating. 

Mathnawi, III, 49-6

Translated from the Persian by Coleman Barks

We can’t stare into the sun, but only see it reflected in the world it makes possible.

That reminded me of what someone once said, that man invented religion because our brains could not tolerate a direct encounter with God. What would we see in the last flash of brilliance, before it burned away our eyes and drove us mad?

Consider the orb spider on the rose bushes. The little engineer, born with multiple PhD’s including orbital mechanics, biochemistry, civil engineering—and with the composure of a Zen monk—figures out how to span gaps hundreds of times her body length, trailing a miracle of nature from her own body, knitting it all together in one of those perfect patterns we immediately experience as genius. Then waits with inborn trust that something just the right size will blunder into it and be held, and survival of the spider and her brood for a while longer assured.

But does she know, in any way we’d understand, that a passing hummingbird, or a sudden wind, a passing animal or one of us, and all that work, all that ineffable artistry is sent into eternity? And that this is inevitable, and that the world the sun has created expects her to begin again or die?

Does she not know regret? Self-pity? Anger? Either way, rebuilding begins again. I don’t remember a spider giving up, and for as many days as she has, keeps working in the rose garden, leaps into the unknown and weaves, again and again, and waits.

A stranger said…

“Leave the past upriver.”

That is a Cree phrase that seems to fit [the question of what to do with beautiful, but decrepit and dangerous old buildings towns across the country that are slowly crumbling, whose residents refuse to admit it and have hopeful street fairs and vintage B&B’s].

“I recently stopped in Butte, Montana on a road trip across the west,” the anonymous sage continued. “There have to be more ‘historically  significant’ buildings in that town than any town I have visited. All have gone beyond their best-by dates and then some. Most are beautiful in their own ways. But, judging from the state of the town, none will be brought back to their former glory. Most, if not all, will continue on their slide toward an ignoble end. Butte, Montana is my metaphor for old age. If we humans are to go out with dignity intact, we ought to leave the past upriver and build anew with what time we have.”

I don’t talk about it much

too many questions pop up,

not to mention the looks you get… and 

I ain’t tryin’ to sell anyone anything

but I know some things because I seen ‘em

and that’s always been my little secret.

I’m in the damnedest moment, though

So confusing

I ain’t never been quite so happy

It feels like I’m someone else

My bad times now are better

than my good times used to be. 

I’m what the world sees as old,

but inside I’m light as a cobweb

fluttering in a draft, and there’s no

other word for it. Love.

it’s found me. I got

ready first, then said ‘yes’.  

To be true with ya’… 

I looked for the catch. Old habit. 

Well, I went through some stuff. 

No need to dwell on that, 

since troubles don’t make 

anyone special, do they? 

I learned the 

truth of the old words about 

‘the valley of the shadow of death.’ 

Sure did. Maybe you know, too. 

That quiet, dark place where 

it seems the candle is just about snuffed. 

But somebody has been watching over me

I know it for true, because I seen it

in this world once. An angel— but not what 

you’ve seen in paintings. 

A being of power and grace. 

Standing still and silent beside me, 

me on my knees

That image bring tears still, 

45 years on. It carried me through

the bad times, burned away a lot

of pain with it. 

I’m an old man, and love walked in

And now I find 

love everywhere. That’s how you spot

the real deal, you know. 

Love reveals love, creates love.

Makes everything else seem trivial. 

A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck 

of the house. From there I could see and hear the water, 

and everything that’s happened to me all these years. 

It was hot and still. The tide was out. 

No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing 

a cobweb touched my forehead. 

It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned 

and went inside. There was no wind. The sea 

was dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade. 

Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath 

touches it. A fine thread. Intricate. 

Before long, before anyone realizes, 

I’ll be gone from here. 

—Raymond Carver

“Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. He contributed to the revitalization of the American short story during the 1980s.

BY JAMES LAUGHLIN

How she let her long hair down over her shoulders, making a love cave around her face. Return and return again.

How when the lamplight was lowered she pressed against him, twining her fingers in his. Return and return again.

How their legs swam together like dolphins and their toes played like little tunnies. Return and return again.

How she sat beside him cross-legged, telling him stories of her childhood. Return and return again.

How she closed her eyes when his were open, how they breathed together, breathing each other. Return and return again.

How they fell into slumber, their bodies curled together like two spoons. Return and return again.

How they went together to Otherwhere, the fairest land they had ever seen. Return and return again.

O best of all nights, return and return again.

Notes:
*It’s never too late.

After the Pervigilium Veneris and Propertius’ “Nox mihi candida.”

James Laughlin, “O Best of All Nights, Return and Return Again” from Poems New and Selected.Copyright © 1996 by James Laughlin.

by Clementine von Radics

“I am not the first person you loved.

You are not the first person I looked at

with a mouthful of forevers. We

have both known loss like the sharp edges

of a knife. We have both lived with lips

more scar tissue than skin. Our love came

unannounced in the middle of the night.

Our love came when we’d given up

on asking love to come. I think

that has to be part

of its miracle.

This is how we heal.

I will kiss you like forgiveness. You

will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms

will bandage and we will press promises

between us like flowers in a book.

I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat

on your skin. I will write novels to the scar

of your nose. I will write a dictionary

of all the words I have used trying

to describe the way it feels to have finally,

finally found you.

And I will not be afraid

of your scars.

I know sometimes

it’s still hard to let me see you

in all your cracked perfection,

but please know:

whether it’s the days you burn

more brilliant than the sun

or the nights you collapse into my lap

your body broken into a thousand questions,

you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I will love you when you are a still day.

I will love you when you are a hurricane.” 

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
                            Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
                                                                    (Catullus, Poems, 85)

          I hate and I love. Why I do this perhaps you ask.
             I do not know, but I sense that it happens and I am tormented.

I’m thrilled to announce “Lifting Stones” is available for pre-order now. Publishing is set for June 8 in print and E-book formats and available world-wide. It is also going to be in catalogs for bookstores and libraries to place orders through normal channels.

Published by Rootstock Publishing in Montpelier, VT, a website is now up with background information on the book and a link to pre-order.

https://www.rootstockpublishing.com/rootstock-books/lifting-stones

Early reviews are starting to come in and they are looking good. A sample: “…There is humility and there is enormous bravery. Within the pages of Lifting Stones there is no finite limit to Stanfield’s poetic skill, nor to his quality….”

Shared from “Oldest Daughter and Redheaded Sister”

this morning’s noises echo

facts of summertime dwindling.

a crow’s call to advance

spur last night’s crickets,

still rubbing within the window well.

my heart swells with hope

which confuses me,

and the neighbor lady sweeps her deck.

more at http://oldestdaughterredheadedsister.com

Noise

INTRODUCTION

From: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68657

The following are selections from columns originally published in the Polish newspaper Literary Life. In these columns, famed poet Wislawa Szymborska answered letters from ordinary people who wanted to write poetry. Translated by Clare Cavanagh, they appeared in slightly different form in our Journals section earlier this year.

To Heliodor from Przemysl: “You write, ‘I know my poems have many faults, but so what, I’m not going to stop and fix them.’ And why is that, oh Heliodor? Perhaps because you hold poetry so sacred? Or maybe you consider it insignificant? Both ways of treating poetry are mistaken, and what’s worse, they free the novice poet from the necessity of working on his verses. It’s pleasant and rewarding to tell our acquaintances that the bardic spirit seized us on Friday at 2:45 p.m. and began whispering mysterious secrets in our ear with such ardor that we scarcely had time to take them down. But at home, behind closed doors, they assiduously corrected, crossed out, and revised those otherworldly utterances. Spirits are fine and dandy, but even poetry has its prosaic side.”

To H.O. from Poznan, a would-be translator: “The translator is obliged to be faithful not only to the text. He must also reveal the full beauty of the poetry while retaining its form and preserving as completely as possible the epoch’s spirit and style.”

To Grazyna from Starachowice: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?”

To Mr. G. Kr. of Warsaw: “You need a new pen. The one you’re using makes a lot of mistakes. It must be foreign.” Continue reading “How To (And How Not To) Write Poetry”

The photo is mine, but the words are Louise Erdrich’s and I turn to them often when I forget why I’m here.

My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.

–Henry David Thoreau

by Raymond Carver

I want to get up early one more morning, before sunrise. Before the birds, even. I want to throw cold water on my face and be at my work table when the sky lightens and smoke begins to rise from the chimneys of the other houses. I want to see the waves break on the beach, not just hear them break as I did all night in my sleep. I want to see again the ships that pass through the Straight from every seafaring country in the world— old, dirty freighters just barely moving along, and the swift new cargo vessels painted every color under the sun that cut the water as they pass. I want to keep an eye out for them. And for the little boat that plies the water between the ships and the pilot station near the lighthouse. I want to see them take a man off the ship and put another up on board. I want to spend the day watching this happen and reach my own conclusions. I hate to seem greedy—I have so much To be thankful for already. But I want to get up early one more morning, at least, And go to my place with some coffee and wait, Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

He Who Learns Must Suffer

In our sleep, pain
which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon

the heart until,
in our own despair, 
against our will, 

comes wisdom through
the awful grace of God. 

—Aeschylus, “Father of tragedy”
c. 523 BCE- 456 BCE

• 

BY RUDYARD KIPLING

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

n/aSource: A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1943)

by W. B. Yeats

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

And I guess I just got in the way.

Doin’ OK, though.

 

“I think everyone must love life more than anything else in the world.’

‘Love life more than the meaning of it?’

‘Yes, certainly. Love it regardless of logic, as you say. Yes, most certainly regardless of logic, for only then will I grasp its meaning. That’s what I’ve been vaguely aware of for a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan: you love life. Now you must try to do the second half and you are saved.”

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Please consider picking up a copy of “Snowflakes & Ashes…” at Amazon or Barnes & Noble online. The links are below. It’s not a beach book, I’m afraid. But that’s not all bad this time of year.

But don’t take my word for it. From one of the reviews.

August 9, 2018

By Elizabeth Hardwick

Those with the least gift are the most anxious to receive a commission. It seems to them that there lies waiting a topic, a new book, a performance, and that this is known as material. The true prose writer knows there is nothing given, no idea, no text or play seen last evening, until an assault has taken place, the forced domination that we call ”putting it in your own words.” Talking about, thinking about a project bears little relation to the composition; enthusiasm boils down with distressing speed to a paragraph, often one of mischievous banality. To proceed from musing to writing is to feel a robbery has taken place. And certainly there has been a loss; the loss of the smiles and ramblings and discussions so much friendlier to ambition than the cold hardship of writing.

–from “Its Only Defense: Intelligence and Sparkle,” in The New York Times in 1986

A gentle reminder for July’s sales (going gangbusters!.. probably): if you meant to get a copy of “Snowflakes & Ashes….” and haven’t yet, it’s available through several channels, including  Barnes and Noble.

(It’s in stock at the State College (PA) B&N store near the mall, by the way. Or, you may order from B&N online and pickup at a store near you instead of home delivery.)

It’s also on Amazon, both paperback and e-Book. It is helpful if you leave a review and rating, as they use that for the algorithm to determine how visible it is. Thanks in advance. Now I can tell my marketing department I did my bit. 😉

Bulk orders for book clubs are available. Just email me with quantities and location so I can get you the discount price with shipping.

Oh, and I mentioned other channels. Your local small bookshop or library can order this one if you ask them to: ISBN: 978-1-64237-194-9

A brief note as an update… my wife has left the hospital and transitioned to the Hospice program at home.

Doubt is my most trusted traveling partner, that “curious questioner” who comes in the night,  that voice that says what I’ve done is not what it should be, that I’m not what I should be. And it is then—out of a last-ditch, almost reluctant refusal to betray myself— that everything comes of which I am most proud.

Doubt is my friend and lover. Doubt need not be fear’d, but endured and embraced as a means to an end. I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way I became strong enough. Strong enough…. If I can, you can, too.

I too have—
Have—have—
I too have—felt the curious questioning come upon me.
In the day they came.
In the silence of the night came [they] upon me

—Walt Whitman

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, 
The dark threw its patches down upon me also, 
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, 
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? 
Nor is it you alone ho know what it is to be evil, 
I am he who knew what it was to be evil, 
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety, 
blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudged, 
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I cared not speak, 
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant, 
The world, the snake, the hog not wanting in me, 
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting, 
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, 
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest. …”
—”Leaves of Grass, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ briefs, p. 219.

I’ve been reluctant to post some personal news here, but because just disappearing without an explanation seems odd, at the least, here goes.

Starting in November, my wife started coughing, and kept coughing. A blood test and then some scans detected a tumor in her lung, and some additional spots on her spine and pelvis. Biopsies confirmed these were Stage IV lung cancer, metastasized to 5-7 spots on vertebrae, the lungs, and pelvis.

She had radiation therapy to knock back the bone pain in her back, then had one chemotherapy infusion. Within 36 hours of that, we both came down with the flu that everyone’s getting. But it hit her very hard because her immune system is severely compromised. She ended up in the hospital for the flu as one very, very sick girl, and then for the pneumonia that followed. She recovered, although unable to eat much, was at home for nine days, then pneumonia returned and then she spent another week in the hospital. She’s on a feeding tube now and is regaining her strength.

I’ve been well occupied with all of this, obviously, and thought that a few of you would appreciate knowing what’s been happening. I’ll probably be absent a lot over the next months, as what’s ahead is going to be rough. I miss writing and reading your creations, and hope to be back. Until then….

Doug

“I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony. … A lot of good fiction is sentimental. … The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. … I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”
― Jim Harrison

“..Yes, now you know. Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those … of those about you.

To spend and waste time as though you had a million years.
To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.

Now you know that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to.
Ignorance and blindness ….

If you knew your work would never be read by anyone else—would you still write?

via Writing as Legacy: Quirks and Perks — A Quiver Of Quotes