On Earth by Matthew Dickman

My little sister walks away
from the crash, the black ice, the crushed passenger
side, the eighteen-wheeler that destroyed
the car, and from a ditch on the side of the highway
a white plastic bag floating up
out of the grass
where the worms are working slow and blind beneath
the ants that march
in their single columns of grace like soldiers
before they’re shipped out, before war makes them human
again and scatters them across the fields
and the sands, across stretchers and bodies,
across the universe
of smoke and ash, makes them crouch down
in what’s left of a building
while a tank moves up the street towards the river
where it will stop, turn its engine off, the driver looking
through a window smaller than an envelope,
where he will sweat and think
about how beautiful Kentucky is. On earth
my twin brother gets his cancer cut out
of his forehead after a year of picking at it and me
always saying, ‘Hey! Don’t pick at your cancer!’
but joking because he can never be sick,
not if I want to stay on earth,
and my little sister can never be torn in half, a piece of her
used Subaru separating her torso
from her legs, not if I want to live, not if I want to walk
across the Hawthorne Bridge
with the city ahead of me, the buildings
full of light and elevators, the park full of maples
and benches, the police filling up
the streets like Novocain, numbing
China Town, numbing Old Town, the Willamette
running towards the wild
Pacific, the great hydro-adventure North
still pulling at the blood of New Yorkers and New Englanders,
the logging gone and the Indians gone
but for casinos and fireworks and dream-catchers,
my little sister has to rise from the dead
steel and broken headlights, my twin brother
has to get himself down from the operating table
if I’m going to be able to watch the rainclouds come in
like a family of hippos
from the warm waters of Africa
and dry off in the dust, they have to be here
if I’m going to write a letter
to Marie or Dorianne, Michael and Elizabeth
have to be in their bodies
for me not to cut them
out of my own. They have to answer
the phone when I call for me not to walk into the closet
for ever. Right now I am sitting
on the porch of the house I grew up in. The second place
I was on earth! The porch where Emily sat
in 1994, drinking licorice tea
and reading Rexroth’s translations of Li Po,
some Chinese poetry
in the curve of her foot, the Han River
spilling out of her hair, over the steps,
and into the driveway
where the dandelions grew like white blood
cells. I would pick them in Kelly Park
and I would walk along the street with them
on 92nd. All my wishes, all of them floating out
over a neighbourhood
where I wanted to be in love
with someone, drinking orange sodas on our backs
with the sky unbuttoning our jeans
and pulling off our shirts. There’s nothing
like walking through Northwest Portland
at night, even though it’s sick with money
and doesn’t look like itself. There’s nothing on earth
like the moonlight, lake at night
smell of tall grass and suntan lotion. It’s hard to imagine
not knowing the smell of gas stations or pine,
the smell of socks worn too long and the smell
of someone’s hands
after they have swum through a rosemary bush.
I want them all
and all the time. I need to walk
into Erika’s room, over the piles of clothes on the floor
which I love for their pyramid euphoria. I need to
smell her body on mine
days after we have destroyed the bed or ruined the carpet
she hates unless we are on it. On earth
my older sister can never open another bottle of beer, shoot
another glass of whiskey. She can’t have the monster
of her body go slouching through
the countryside of her family, killing the peasants,
burning the fields along the road to another sobriety
and then be hacked to death by her own pitchforks and spades,
not if I want to brush my teeth
without biting off my tongue. Not if I want to drink coffee
and read the paper and breathe. Oh to be on earth.
To walk barefoot on the cold stone
and know that the woman you love is also walking barefoot
on the cold tile in the kitchen
where you kissed her yesterday, to be standing in a bookstore
and smell the old paper and the glue
in the spines, to look at a map of a strange city
and be able to figure out
where it is you’re going. To swim in the ocean,
to swim in a lake and not know
what’s beneath you. To have two thousand
friends on Facebook you don’t know
but stare at every night because you’re lonely.
To walk through
Laurelhurst and see a blue heron
killing a bright orange fish, lifting it into the suffocating air
and then drowning it again, and then the air,
and back and forth until it feels
the fish is hers completely. To feel how the subway is racing
beneath an avenue
or how the plane that took off from New York is doing
well in the sky over Arizona. To know
how it feels after drinking whiskey or that secretly reading
romance novels has made you
into a kinder, gentler person, walking through
the grocery store in the middle of the night,
in love with avocados and carrots,
standing in front of the frozen fruit
with the glass door open
so the cold frozen-food air can cool your body down
before you walk through the cereal aisle
with its innumerable colours and kinds, how a box of cereal
feels in your hands
like an award you’ve received for some great service, to wait
in line at the checkout and not care that you
have to wait. The feeling of being on a boat
and the feeling of putting on new shoes
with a metal shoehorn. How you feel like you can run
faster than you ever have. To get on a bus in winter
and have your glasses steam up, the bus
taking you down the street you have known all your life
or only just found but love all the same. On earth
my mother is talking to her breasts
because they want to kill her, they have turned against her
like a senate, but in the end
she talks them out of it. She makes them behave like two dogs
or like children playing
too rough with the cat and the cat screaming, her tail almost
pulled off. She has to still be here, taking
the Lloyd Center exit to work
in the rain, if I’m going to live at all. On earth
I have a bed I can’t wait to get into, the clean smell of white
sheets, letting my head fall
onto the soft pillow and worry and pull
the blanket over, like a grave,
and in the morning watch the cold winter light
blowing in through the window. Every night the dark
and every morning the light
and you don’t think Jesus walked out
of his cave, crawled out of his Subaru
and stood on the side of the road for the ambulance to come
and cover him in a white shroud? On earth
I faint in the lobby of the multiplex, pee my pants, go into a seizure
like someone talking in tongues, wrapped
in the flames of belief, my body held in the hands of strangers
above the old shag carpet
while on earth the popcorn is popping wildly
and the licorice is bright red
beneath the glass counter, next to the M&Ms
where the most beautiful girl in the world is standing
in her stiff uniform, her name-tag
pinned tight, her name written on a piece of tape
that covers someone else’s name.
She will never kiss me, never lie in bed with August outside
and whisper my name. On earth
Joe has a heart attack, his pack of unfiltered cigarettes
resting like a hand near his books.
He rides his heart through the three acres of bypass
and then leads it to water. On earth
I steal flowers from the park, roses and star lilies,
I sleep too much. I’m always too slow
or arriving too early, before anything has opened. I keep
dreaming my older brother
has come back like a man returned from a long, exhausting
run. I can’t do this much longer!
And because I don’t have to, I cut an orange
the way athletes do, into perfect
half moons. I peel the pulp away, the skin that looks like
the surface of the moon. I put each one
inside my mouth
and let the sex of it burst into my throat, my lungs
like two black halves of a butterfly
trapped in the net of my chest, I read a poem
Zach wrote about a pond, I’m thinking
about the last time I saw Mike
before he moved into the Zion-air of Utah, I reread
a note Carl wrote that only says
beware. On earth Charlie is cut open
and put back together.
He goes on loving his friends and looking into the mirror,
and maybe the nerves have not grown back
over the river the scar has made, and maybe he is tired
but on earth! He has to get up in the morning
if I’m going to lie on my bed
listening to records with the window open
and the door open and wait
in my boxers for love to enter in her dirty feet
and sweaty hands, if I’m going to pull her near me, my mouth
over a knuckle, my hand beneath her knee, he has to
still be here. On earth
survival is built out of luck and treatment centres
or slow like a planet being born, before
there was anyone to survive,
the gases of the Big Bang just settling, or it’s built
like a skyscraper, by hand, some workmen
falling, and some safe on the scaffold, up above the earth,
unwrapping the sandwiches they have been waiting all day to eat.

Finding the Space in the Heart by Gary Snyder

I first saw it in the sixties,

driving a Volkswagen camper

with a fierce gay poet and a

lovely but dangerous girl with a husky voice,

 

we came down from Canada

on the dry east side of the ranges. Grand Coulee, Blue

Mountains, lava flow caves,

the Alvord desert—pronghorn ranges—

and the glittering obsidian-paved

dirt track toward Vya,

seldom-seen roads late September and

thick frost at dawn; then

follow a canyon and suddenly open to

          silvery flats that curved over the edge

 

          O, ah! The

          awareness of emptiness

          brings forth a heart of compassion!

 

We followed the rim of the playa

to a bar where the roads end

and over a pass into Pyramid Lake

from the Smoke Creek side,

by the ranches of wizards

who follow the tipi path.

The next day we reached San Francisco

in a time when it seemed

the world might head a new way.

 

And again, in the seventies, back from

Montana, I recklessly pulled off the highway

took a dirt track onto the flats,

got stuck—scared the kids—slept the night,

and the next day sucked free and went on.

 

Fifteen years passed. In the eighties

With my lover I went where the roads end.

Walked the hills for a day,

looked out where it all drops away,

discovered a path

of carved stone inscriptions tucked into the sagebrush

 

          “Stomp out greed”

          “The best things in life are not things”

 

words placed by an old desert sage.

 

Faint shorelines seen high on these slopes,

long gone Lake Lahontan,

cutthroat trout spirit in silt—

Columbian Mammoth bones

four hundred feet up on the wave-etched

          beach ledge; curly-horned

                    desert sheep outlines pecked into the rock,

 

and turned the truck onto the playa

heading for know-not,

bone-gray dust boiling and billowing,

mile after mile, trackless and featureless,

let the car coast to a halt

on the crazed cracked

flat hard face where

winter snow spirals, and

summer sun bakes like a kiln.

Off nowhere, to be or not be,

 

          all equal, far reaches, no bounds.

          Sound swallowed away        

          no waters, no mountains, no

          bush no grass and

                    because no grass

          no shade but your shadow.

          No flatness because no not-flatness.

          No loss, no gain. So—

          nothing in the way!

          —the ground is the sky

          the sky is the ground,

          no place between, just

 

          wind-whip breeze,

          tent-mouth leeward,

          time being here.

          We meet heart to heart,

          leg hard-twined to leg,

                    with a kiss that goes to the bone.

          Dawn sun comes straight in the eye. The tooth

          of a far peak called King Lear.

 

Now in the nineties desert night

          —my lover’s my wife—

old friends, old trucks, drawn around;

great arcs of kids on bikes out there in darkness

          no lights—just planet Venus glinting

by the calyx crescent moon,

and tasting grasshoppers roasted in a pan.

 

          They all somehow swarm down here—

          sons and daughters in the circle

          eating grasshoppers grimacing,

 

singing sūtras for the insects in the wilderness,

 

—the wideness, the

foolish loving spaces

 

full of heart.

 

          Walking on walking,

                    under foot   earth turns

 

          Streams and mountains never stay the same.

 

 

 

 

                              The space goes on.

                              But the wet black brush

                              tip drawn to a point,

                                       lifts away.

There Are Those Who Love To Get Dirty by Gary Snyder

There are those who love to get dirty

and fix things.

They drink coffee at dawn,

beer after work,

And those who stay clean,

just appreciate things,

At breakfast they have milk

and juice at night.

There are those who do both,

they drink tea.

December at Yase by Gary Snyder

You said, that October,

In the tall dry grass by the orchard

When you chose to be free,

"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you

One time. You were strange,

And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have

Gone by: I've always known

where you were—

I might have gone to you

Hoping to win your love back.

You still are single.

I didn't.

I thought I must make it alone. I

Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,

Does the grave, awed intensity

Of our young love

Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others

All crave and seek for;

We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had

Lived many lives.

And may never now know

If I am a fool

Or have done what my

karma demands.

Spring Travel by Chia Tao (Jia Dao)

Keeping on and on,

a traveler gets farther, farther away;

dust of the world

follows an indefatigable horse.

A traveler's feelings

after the sun's rays slant-

colors of spring

in the morning mist.

The river's flow heard

at the empty inn-

flowers just blooming

at the old palace.

I think of home

a thousand li away;

wind off the pond

stirs in green willows.

contexture

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.

-      Marcus Aurelius

flux

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

-      Marcus Aurelius

Fleeting

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this
fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet
revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the
earth wherein he dwells.

世の中を　憂しとやさしと　おもへども　飛び立ちかねつ　鳥にしあらねば

Yononaka wo / Ushi to yasashi to / Omo(h)e domo / Tobitachi kanetsu / Tori ni shi arane ba

I feel the life is / sorrowful and unbearable / though / I can't flee away / since I am not a bird.

Gestalt Prayer

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

quake

I felt the universe suddenly quake, and that a golden spirit sprang up from the ground, veiled my body, and changed my body into a golden one. At the same time my body became light. I was able to understand the whispering of the birds, and was clearly aware of the mind of God, the creator of the universe.

At that moment I was enlightened: the source of Budo is God's love — the spirit of loving protection for all beings... Budo is not the felling of an opponent by force; nor is it a tool to lead the world to destruction with arms. True Budo is to accept the spirit of the universe, keep the peace of the world, correctly produce, protect and cultivate all beings in nature.

- Morihei Ueshiba

W.G. Sebald.

"The fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight."

three quotes

"Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you"

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine"

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

“Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it”

Mahatma Gandhi

Intimacy

Ordinary young lives. Lulu, Rirette, Henri and Pierre. What of them? Ordinary language. What of it? Familiar circumstances. No Zoroastrian prophet here. No awareness of a single philosophical idea in these minds. No genteel intellectual discussions. Sartre's phenomenology is at work. The idea of "intimacy" denies everything of the transcendental ego and affirms "intentionality", which a detached ego violates. Intimacy is discovered in reflection and interaction, which necessitates the connection to "others". It involves a sacrifice of freedom through commitment and participation, but it is also where we uncover meaning.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/11/sean-mcgrady-top-10-philosophers-novels

Ithaka by Constantine Cavafy

When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - do not fear them:
such as these you will never find
as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.

Ask that your way be long.
At many a Summer dawn to enter
with what gratitude, what joy -
ports seen for the first time;
to stop at Phoenician trading centres,
and to buy good merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensuous perfumes of every kind,
sensuous perfumes as lavishly as you can;
to visit many Egyptian cities,
to gather stores of knowledge from the learned.

Have Ithaka always in your mind.
Your arrival there is what you are destined for.
But don't in the least hurry the journey.
Better it last for years,
so that when you reach the island you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth.
Ithaka gave you a splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn't anything else to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka hasn't deceived you.
So wise you have become, of such experience,
that already you'll have understood what these Ithakas mean.

Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,

That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age-old pain,

It's ancient tale of being apart or together.

As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,

Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.

At the heart of time, love of one for another.

We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same

Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-

Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you

The love of all man’s days both past and forever:

Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.

The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –

And the songs of every poet past and forever.

Where the Mind is Without Fear by Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

A Moments Indulgence by Rabindranath Tagore

I ask for a moment's indulgence to sit by thy side. The works

that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite,

and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and

the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.

Now it is time to sit quiet, face to face with thee, and to sing

dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.

Study of Loneliness by Czeslaw Milosz

A guardian of long-distance conduits in the desert?

A one-man crew of a fortress in the sand?

Whoever he was. At dawn he saw furrowed mountains

The color of ashes, above the melting darkness,

Saturated with violet, breaking into fluid rouge,

Till they stood, immense, in the orange light.

Day after day. And, before he noticed, year after year.

For whom, he thought, that splendor? For me alone?

Yet it will be here long after I perish.

What is it in the eye of a lizard? Or when seen by a migrant bird?

If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

And he knew there was no use crying out, for none of them would save him.

Love by Cselaw Milosz

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.

A Magic Mountain by Czeslaw Milosz

I don’t remember exactly when Budberg died, it was either two years

ago or three.

The same with Chen. Whether last year or the one before.

Soon after our arrival, Budberg, gently pensive,

Said that in the beginning it is hard to get accustomed,

For here there is no spring or summer, no winter or fall.

“I kept dreaming of snow and birch forests.

Where so little changes you hardly notice how time goes by.

This is, you will see, a magic mountain.”

Budberg: a familiar name in my childhood.

They were prominent in our region,

This Russian family, descendants of German Balts.

I read none of his works, too specialized.

And Chen, I have heard, was an exquisite poet,

Which I must take on faith, for he wrote in Chinese.

Sultry Octobers, cool Julys, trees blossom in February.

Here the nuptial flight of hummingbirds does not forecast spring.

Only the faithful maple sheds its leaves every year.

For no reason, its ancestors simply learned it that way.

I sensed Budberg was right and I rebelled.

So I won’t have power, won’t save the world?

Fame will pass me by, no tiara, no crown?

Did I then train myself, myself the Unique,

To compose stanzas for gulls and sea haze,

To listen to the foghorns blaring down below?

Until it passed. What passed? Life.

Now I am not ashamed of my defeat.

One murky island with its barking seals

Or a parched desert is enough

To make us say: yes, oui, si.

'Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.”

Endurance comes only from enduring.

With a flick of the wrist I fashioned an invisible rope,

And climbed it and it held me.

What a procession! Quelles délices!

What caps and hooded gowns!

Most respected Professor Budberg,

Most distinguished Professor Chen,

Wrong Honorable Professor Milosz

Who wrote poems in some unheard-of tongue.

Who will count them anyway. And here sunlight.

So that the flames of their tall candles fade.

And how many generations of hummingbirds keep them company

As they walk on. Across the magic mountain.

And the fog from the ocean is cool, for once again it is July.

A Blessing by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

so it goes

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Inner Light

Without going out of my door
I can know all things on earth
Without looking out of my window
I can know the ways of heaven

The farther one travels
The less one knows
The less one really knows

Without going out of your door
You can know all things on earth
Without looking out of your window
You can know the ways of heaven

The farther one travels
The less one knows
The less one really knows

Arrive without traveling
See all without looking
Do all without doing

Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Goethe

“The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast.”

Recollections by Keorapetse Kgosisile

Though you remain
Convinced
To be alive
You must have somewhere
To go
Your destination remains
Elusive.

Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,

legato con amore in un volume,

ciò che per l'universo si squaderna.

I saw within Its depth how It conceives all things in a single volume bound by Love, of which the universe is the scattered leaves.

Dante Aligheri Canto XXXIII, lines 85-87

"There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light".

She reminds one that we can be in many different places at once...not only the place where we actually are physically at the moment...but in all the places our minds, memories, hearts and souls have been