Falling: The Code

1.
Through the night
the apples
outside my window
one by one let go
their branches and
drop to the lawn.
I can’t see, but hear
the stem-snap, the plummet
through leaves, then
the final thump against the ground.

Sometimes two
at once, or one
right after another.
During long moments of silence
I wait
and wonder about the bruised bodies,
the terror of diving through air, and
think I’ll go tomorrow
to find the newly fallen, but they
all look alike lying there
dewsoaked, disappearing before me,

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The Weepers

Were it not for the rain
beginning, big drops slapping
the gravestones, then spreading
like wounds, or smacking
the leaves overhead, first
one, then another, until
I stand beneath a chorus of mumbling
and leaves trembling — thus the rain
marks its passage through time, steadily
darkening what it touches,
and makes indistinguishable the moments
by narration in a monotonous voice —
were it not for the rain I’d stay.

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The Weight of Sweetness

No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.

Song, wisdom, sadness, joy: sweetness
equals three of any of these gravities.

See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
and death so round and snug
in your palm.
And, so, there is
the weight of memory.

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Epistle

Of wisdom, splendid columns of light
waking sweet foreheads,
I know nothing.

but what I’ve glimpsed in my most hopeful of daydreams.
Of a world without end,
amen,

I know nothing,
but what I sang of once with others,
all of us standing in the vaulted room.

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Open and Closed Space

With his work, as with a glove, a man feels the universe.
At noon he rests a while, and lays the gloves aside on a shelf.
There they suddenly start growing, grow huge
and make the whole house dark from inside.

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Poem of the day, Feb. 17 2009

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
…………………………………………

Csezlaw Milosz (1911-2004), Nobel Laureate, 1980

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Looking Beneath the Surface in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

“The crisis of our lives do not come, I think, accurately dated; they crop up unexpected and out of turn, and somehow or other arrange themselves to a calendar we cannot control.” Elizabeth Bishop

In the first half of the poem At the Fishhouses, we are above the water, smelling and seeing the fish houses. But with the entrance of the seal in the last stanza, we go beneath the surface.

It’s a delightful image. The speaker sings “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” to a seal. Seals are curious and playful, and something about them seems human. That’s the basis for the Orcadian folklore that seals can shed their skins to become human. As the seal watches from the water, it’s half in one world and half in another.

At the Fishhouses (1955)

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.

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The Great Fires

Jack Gilbert (born 1925)

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.

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Tear It Down

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.

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Going There

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that

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