Month: August 2019

The Tunnel – Mark Strand

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A man has been standing
in front of my house
for days. I peek at him
from the living room
window and at night,
unable to sleep,
I shine my flashlight
down on the lawn.
He is always there.

After a while
I open the front door
just a crack and order
him out of my yard.
He narrows his eyes
and moans. I slam
the door and dash back
to the kitchen, then up
to the bedroom, then down.

I weep like a child
and make obscene gestures
through the window. I
write large suicide notes
and place them so he
can read them easily.
I destroy the living
room furniture to prove
I own nothing of value.
When he seems unmoved
I decide to dig a tunnel
to a neighboring yard.
I seal the basement off
from the upstairs with
a brick wall. I dig hard
and in no time the tunnel
is done. Leaving my pick
and shovel below,

I come out in front of a house
and stand there too tired to
move or even speak, hoping
someone will help me.
I feel I’m being watched
and sometimes I hear
a man’s voice,
but nothing is done
and I have been waiting for days.

(from Collected Poems)

Wounds & sacred wounds

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Richard Rohr –
Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing—that we must go down before we even know what up is. It is first an ordinary wound before it can become a sacred wound. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as “whenever you are not in control.”

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If your religion is not showing you how to transform your pain, it is junk religion. It is no surprise that a crucified man became the central symbol of Christianity.

If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become negative or bitter—because we will be wounded. That is a given. All suffering is potentially redemptive, all wounds are potentially sacred wounds. It depends on what you do with them. Can you find God in them or not?

If there isn’t some way to find some deeper meaning to our suffering, to find that God is somehow in it, and can even use it for good, we will normally close up and close down, and the second half of our lives will, quite frankly, be small and silly.

Louise Bogan on the practice of lyric poetry

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L. Bogan

The practice of lyric poetry – the most intense, the most condensed, the most purified form of language – must be centered in a genuine gift. The chances of getting away with pure fakery within it are very small. One cannot fib – it shows. One cannot manipulate – it spoils. One cannot apply decoration from the outside; or pretend that non-feeling is feeling; or indulge in any of the lower-grade emotions, such as self-pity. The truth: and we can look back and see that piece of paper, in Dante, burning in the way paper always burns; and feel the coolness of Shakespeare’s flowers; and the wet loops of Sabrina’s hair. All immortal and all true.

But it’s silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of sou-crashing, devastating emotional experience that writes you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. It’s not like embroidery or painting on silk. It doesn’t come to you on the wings of a dove. It’s something you have to work hard at.

THE ENGINE

The secure pulses of the heart
Drive and rock in dark precision,
Though life brings fever to the mouth
And the eyes vision.

Whatever joy the body takes,
Whatever sound the voice makes purer,
Will never cause their beat to faint
Or become surer.

These perfect chambers, and their springs,
So fitly sealed against remorse
That keep the lifting shaft of breath
To its cool course,

Cannot delay, and cannot dance –
Until, wrung out to the last drop,
The brain, knowing time and love, must die,
And they must stop.

(from Journey Around My Room, the autobiography of Louise Bogan)

Night – Louise Bogan

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townlanding12.15.18.jpg-66

The cold remote islands

And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

A question in marriage

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It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow. A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

Therefore this too must be the standard for rejection or choice: whether one is willing to stand guard over the solitude of a person and whether one is inclined to set this same person at the gate of one’s own solitude, of which he learns only through that which steps, festively clothed, out of the great darkness.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

The New Colossus – Emma Lazarus

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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

See that you do not despise one of these little ones…

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2019_01_06_16_10_04_061_pic
(photo: Greene, Maine – January 2019)
The disciples approached Jesus and said,
“Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?”
He called a child over, placed it in their midst, and said,
“Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children,
you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Whoever becomes humble like this child
is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.
And whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me.

“See that you do not despise one of these little ones,
for I say to you that their angels in heaven
always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.
What is your opinion?
If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray,
will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills
and go in search of the stray?
And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it
than over the ninety-nine that did not stray.
In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father
that one of these little ones be lost.
– Mt 18:1-5, 10, 12-14

Prayer by Eric Doyle, OFM

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Lord of my origin
     Draw me closer to you
Lord of my existence
     Direct all my ways
Lord of my calling
     Give me strength to go on
Lord of my faith
     Preserve me from doubt
Lord of my hope
     Keep me from despair
Lord of my love
     Let me never grow cold
Lord of my past
     May I never forget you
Lord of my present
     Be near me always
Lord of my future
     Keep me faithful to the end
Lord of my life
     Let me live in your presence
Lord of my death
     Receive me at last
Lord of my eternity
     Bless me forever. Amen

(Photo: Evergreen Cemetery – Portland, Maine, August 2019)