Charles Simic, from “The Necessity of Poetry”
poetry
Louise Bogan on the practice of lyric poetry
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
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.
Ask Me – William Stafford
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
(Photo: Chama River, Abiquiu, New Mexico – September 2018)
August Prayer
This morning I give thanks
for breath
for breathing
I give thanks for
open windows and
French doors half-opened
and half-shut
This morning I give thanks
for clear glass tumblers
of cold Sebago water
and the crickets
of course and the crows
thanks for the cool
wash cloth
the comfort of hands
thanks for the taste of lemon
and the hair brush
this morning
I give thanks
for the shadow
that lingers a moment
then leaves the world
(photo: Portland, Maine – August 2014)
As Ripeness Comes – Rumi
What souls desire arrives.
We are standing up to our necks
in the sacred pool. Majesty is here.
The grains of the earth take in something
they do not understand.
Where did this come from?
It comes from where your longing comes.
From which direction?
As ripeness comes to fruit.
This answer lights a candle
in the chest of anyone who hears.
Most people only look for the way when they hurt.
Pain is a fine path to the unknowable.
But today is different.
Today the quality we call splendor
puts on human clothes, walks through the door,
closes it behind, and sits down with us
in this companionship.
two by Rilke
I Live My Life
I live my life in growing orbs,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.
A Walk
My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance –
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
(translated by Robert Bly)
Happy 85th Birthday, Wendell Berry
The Peace of Wild Things
BY WENDELL BERRY
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The Beach Hotel – Mark Strand
Silence
Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.
– Paul Goodman, from Speaking and Language
(Photo: Runaround Pond, Maine – June 2019)
Edge of Atlantic 