praising the grey sky

I'm very much enamoured with this poem I read on the Poetry Foundation by Brenda Shaughnessy, titled "A Poet's Poem." It really is completely brilliant, summing up a day in the writer's life in so few lines, and so humorously.  Short excerpts don't work with this poem, and I try to go by the 'fair usage' guidelines, so encourage you to click through to Poetry Foundation for a read. The last line cracked me up - maybe it's because it's something I've said more than once - half laughing at myself, half completely seriously.

We had a beautifully busy long weekend - saw lots of wonderful friends which was very restorative.  Ate lots of dessert.  (We made these vanilla cupcakes with pink champagne icing and the pink lemonade granita below, my girl and I).

So now I'm ready to do a little bit of hermiting, be alone in my room again.





The morning will begin with making lists, then.  And watching the late snow that has begun falling soft and straight down.  And dreaming a little, and praising the grey sky.

their deliciousness . . .

To a friend who sent me some Roses

by John Keats

As late I rambled in the happy fields, 

   What time the sky-lark shakes the tremulous dew 
   From his lush clover covert;—when anew 
Adventurous knights take up their dinted shields: 
I saw the sweetest flower wild nature yields,         
   A fresh-blown musk-rose; 'twas the first that threw 
   Its sweets upon the summer: graceful it grew 
As is the wand that queen Titania wields. 
And, as I feasted on its fragrancy, 
   I thought the garden-rose it far excell'd:         
But when, O Wells! thy roses came to me 
   My sense with their deliciousness was spell'd: 
Soft voices had they, that with tender plea 
   Whisper'd of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquell'd.

{worth taking a look at the poem flow version on poets.org}

You may recognize these roses from a previous post.  I was rummaging for a trash bag, about to toss them out. I set them on the kitchen counter where the light happened to be shining in, where the light happened to transform them.

So in a week of pretty intense creative angst, there were these dried flowers, that for me rather suddenly and unexpectedly became enlivened. My senses leaned toward their deliciousness.... 

I began to resume my belief in various possibilities.  In possibility itself.

I re-read Wislawa Szymborka's poem "Possibilities" and decided for the 725th time, that I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.  Or the poem-like excursions that I'm currently immersed in. And maybe it all comes down to preferences.  I prefer to see the beauty in thinned out places.  I prefer to position dried flowers in a slash of light.

P O S S I B I L I T I E S


by Wislawa Szymborska


I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the river.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

this great pull in us to connect

That Sweet Moon Language

~ Hafiz

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the authorities.

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to
connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
full moon in each eye that is
always saying,

with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in
this world is
dying to
hear?

R. started a new painting this week and I happened to be home just after he'd mixed up the paints on his broken glass palette.  So, this is what it looks like at the beginning.  It was after I popped the photos up on the computer that I began to see all the hearts.  The palette that says, Love Me!

It's Friday.  How about becoming moon-eyed.  Becoming what every eye in the world wants to hear? Let's speak to each other in the sweet language of the moon....

drink and be filled up . . .

Have been thinking about minimalism lately - the calming affect of it - both in poetry and in photography.

This is a poem that's lately been sticking in my head, maybe because often I work at home, write, etc, in the morning but then go off to work later in the afternoon.  I find that when I have an entire day to play with, the morning does indeed seem large.  But when I need to leave the house in the afternoon, how small the mornings are!


A  DAY IS VAST

by Jane Hirshfield {from Come, Thief}

A day is vast.
Until noon.
Then it's over.


Yesterday's pondwater
braided still wet in my hair.


I don't know what time is.


You can't ever find it.
But you can lose it.

I think I do usually read at least a poem a day. A poet's habit. But I enjoyed reading this article about someone who consciously does the same.

When I posted the top photo on Flickr, I included this quotation from Anne Lamott:

“Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative
 art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.” 

~ Anne Lamott

I think poetry is also magic, and that even seeking out a poem a day can be sustaining.

Of course as a poor starving (haha!) poet, it would be nice to see people buying books of poetry, or taking them out of the library.  But there are so many great places on the web to read a poem a day.  And even Poetry Daily.

It's interesting I think - how reading a poem in the morning will colour your entire day.

though solitude may taste like opium . . .

A N O T H E R   B E A U T Y 

~ by Adam Zagajewski


We find comfort only in 
another beauty, in others'
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like 
opium. Other people aren't hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
This is why I pause: which word
to use, you or he. Each he
betrays some you, but
calm conversation bides its time
in others' poems.

 It's nearly time to hop in the car and pick up my kid, so just a quick hello and a poem. I've been reading the above poem a couple times a day for the last week, having a calm conversation with it.  It's a good exercise.  I've left the book open on my desk, folded over actually.  So now it pops open directly to the page.  Which makes me love the book just a little bit more.  And why I think that the material book will never go away.

Also, the usual random photographs.  The comfort of milk and cookies.

yet i believe you , messengers

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” 


~ Thomas Merton

Oh yes, I have long reconciled myself to the fact that my work will be worthless.  One does learn to concentrate on the work rather than the result.  The making, the doing, the rightness of the work. On doing what you can.  Which brings me to this poem by Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, from The Collected Poems.

ON ANGELS

~ Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for humans invented themselves as well.

The voice - no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

       Berkeley, 1969

words that blossom...

"The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what he saw in a plain way. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one." 

~John Ruskin

Words do not always approach what we wish to say, they do not approach those things we see and wish to convey.  As writers this is our struggle.  How to write words that blossom?  

Wishing you all a beautiful Saturday.....

This song is love....