On this Very Street in Belgrade
by Charles Simic
Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst.
A Noiseless Patient Spider
Walt Whitman
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
Your life is like a purse of gold:
day and night are like money changers.
Continually Time counts out that gold,
until your purse is emptied and death is here.
If you dig away at a mountain
and don’t replace anything of what you’ve taken
a desolate land is left behind.
So for every breath you breathe out,
put another in its place.
Fall in worship and draw near
so you may reach your aim.
Rumi
Thank you Word Portland for inviting me and Reggie Groff for the recording
Title Poem – Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Robert Bly)
It’s O.K. for the rich and the lucky to keep still;
no one wants to know about them anyway.
But those in need have to step forward,
have to say: I am blind,
or: I’m about to go blind,
or: nothing is going well with me,
or: I have a child who is sick,
or: right there I’m sort of glued together…
And probably that doesn’t do anything either.
They have to sing; if they didn’t sing, everyone
would walk past, as if they were fences or trees.
That’s where you hear good singing.
People really are strange: they prefer
to hear castratos in boy choirs.
But God himself comes and stays a long time
when the world of half-people start to bore him.
Someone
on this train
is close to death
I look
out the window
like I’m midway
between Rome
and Bethany
still someone
may be dead
we all know
the smell
I pray it’s
not me again
Photo: Portland, Maine – January 2019
Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
BY WALLACE STEVENS
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
“Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Photo, Solvang, CA – December 2017
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. – William Butler Yeats
Photo: Lewiston, ME – February 2013
