poetry

Something inside the moth…

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

A Mystic and a Drunk – Rumi

The universe turns on an axis.
Let my soul circle around a table
like a beggar, like a planet
rolling in the vast, totally helpless and free.

The Knight and the castle move jaggedly
about the chessboard, but they’re actually
centered on the king. They circle.

If love is your center, a ring
gets put on your finger.

Something inside the moth
is made of fire.

A mystic touches the annihilating tip
of pure nothing.

A drunkard thinks peeing is absolution.
Lord, take these impurities from me.

The lord replies, First, understand
the nature of impurity. If your key is bent,
the lock will not open.

I fall silent.
King Shams has come.
Always when I close, he opens.

Photo: Alba Street, Portland, ME – September 2013

Lead – Mary Oliver

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Lead

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

October Day – Rainer Maria Rilke

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Oh Lord, it’s time, it’s time. It was a great summer.
Lay your shadow now on the sundials,
and on the open fields let the winds go!

Give the tardy fruits the hint to fill;
give them two more Mediterranean days,
drive them on into their greatness, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house by now will not build.
Whoever is alone now will remain alone,
will wait up, read, write long letters,
and walk along sidewalks under large trees,
not going home, as the leaves fall and blow away.
(translated by Robert Bly)

23415556_10208111474823806_734949575924898360_o

three new poems from New Mexico

/ Bill Schulz / 1 Comment

Smoke

smoke in Chama Canyon
surrounds me like the ghosts
of all the dead I’ve ever known

somewhere close a lone cow bellows
echoes sound far upriver

in the dusk her calf replies
too late too late
from the other side

20180920_074441.jpg

Morning – Chama River
For you are mist that appears for a little while
and then vanishes.  – James 4:14

the silence
of breaking clouds

the little ones hiding
in side canyons

breaking free
above the river

a raven laughs
and drops a feather

2018_09_22_08_22_31_758_pic.png

Evening – Chama River

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
– Czelslaw Milosz

Pulling back the blankets tonight
I found a small cricket
quiet and shy
hiding under my pillow.

Oh, I know better.
Like me, though, it seemed alone
and in need of a companion
to get through the dark alive.

So, I’ll awaken before dawn
and give thanks if we’re still here
like the moths that flew to the light just now
when I opened the door to check for rain.

2018_09_22_08_27_42_390_pic.png

Mr. or Mrs. Nobody – William Stafford

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Some days when you look out, the land
is heavy, following its hills, dim
where the road bends. There are days when
having the world is a mistake.
But then you think, “Well, anyway, it wasn’t
my idea,” and it’s OK again.

Suppose that a person who knows you happens
to see you going by, and it’s one of those days –
for a minute you have to carry the load
for them, you’ve got to lift the whole
heavy world, even without knowing it,
being a hero, stumbling along.
Some days it’s like that. And maybe
today. And maybe all of the time.

2312634262_738dc6b6ea_o

Poetry is a species of love

/ Bill Schulz / 1 Comment

Christian Wiman – Our minds are constantly trying to bring God down to our level rather than letting him lift us into levels of which we were not previously capable. This is as true in life as it is in art. Thus we love within the lines that experience has drawn for us, we create out of impulses that are familiar and, if we were honest with ourselves, exhausted. What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? This is what it means to love. This is what it should mean to write one more poem. The inner and outer urgency of it, the mysterious and confused agency of it. All love abhors habit, and poetry is a species of love.

Love – Czeslaw Milosz

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

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.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

20180917_185953