impossible, sometimes [self-reflexion]

You who I don’t know I don’t know how to talk to you.

— What is it like for you there?

Here ... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship —
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices —

What are you afraid of?

What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death.
What happens when you die?

"... not scatter the voices,"

Drown out. Not make a house, out of my own words. To be quiet in
another throat; other eyes; listen for what it is like there. What
word. What silence. Allowing. Uncertain: to drift, in the
restlessness ... Repose. To run like water —

What is it like there, right now?

Listen: the crowding of the street; the room. Everyone hunches in
against the crowding; holding their breath: against dread.

What do you dread?

What happens when you die?

What do you dread, in this room, now?

Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin.
To die, not having listened. Not having asked ... To have scattered
life.

Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to
follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.

~ Jean Valentine ~

Part [self-reflexion]

Of something, separate, not
Whole; a role, something to play
While one is separate or parting;

Also a piece, a section, as in
Part of me is here, part of me
Is missing; an essential portion,

Something falling to someone
In division; a particular voice
Or instrument (also the score

For it), or line of music;
The line where the hair
Is parted. A verb: to break

Or suffer the breaking of,
Become detached,
Broken; to go from, leave,

Take from, sever, as in
Lord, part me from him,
I cannot bear to ever

~ Phillis Levin ~

Pour eux ...

... la vie n'a pas la même sens.

First Memory [about love]

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was --
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

~ Louise Gluck ~

the deepest secret nobody knows

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

~ e.e. cummings ~

[...]

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.

[...]

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

[...]

~ R. M. Rilke ~

Intrusion

After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones

something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.

After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown

something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.

~ Denise Levertov ~

Change

Changed? Yes, I will confess it – I have changed.
I do not love you in the old fond way.
I am your friend still – time has not estranged
One kindly feeling of that vanished day.

But the bright glamour which made life a dream,
The rapture of that time, its sweet content,
Like visions of a sleeper’s brain they seem –
And yet I cannot tell you how they went.

Why do you gaze with such accusing eyes
Upon me, dear? It is so very strange
That hearts, like all things underneath God’s skies,
Should sometimes feel the influence of change?

The birds, the flowers, the foliage of the trees,
The stars which seem so fixed, and so sublime,
Vast continents, and the eternal seas, -
All these do change, with ever-changing time.

The face our mirror shows us year on year
Is not the same; our dearest aim, or need,
Our lightest thought, or feeling hope, or fear,
All, all the law of alternation heed.

How can we ask the human heart to stay,
Content with fancies of Youth’s earliest hours?
The year outgrows the violets of May,
Although, maybe, there are no fairer flowers.

And life may hold no sweeter love than this,
Which lies so cold, so voiceless, and so dumb,
And will I miss it, dear? Why, yes, we miss
The violets always – till the roses come!

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox ~

Within This Tree

Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body;

[...]

And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings; there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.

~ Jane Hirshfield ~

The Borders

To say that she came into me,
from another world, is not true.
Nothing comes into the universe
and nothing leaves it.
My mother — I mean my daughter did not
enter me. She began to exist
inside me — she appeared within me.
And my mother did not enter me.
When she lay down, to pray, on me,
she was always ferociously courteous,
fastidious with Puritan fastidiousness,
but the barrier of my skin failed, the barrier of my
body fell, the barrier of my spirit.
She aroused and magnetized my skin, I wanted
ardently to please her, I would say to her
what she wanted to hear, as if I were hers.
I served her willingly, and then
became very much like her, fiercely
out for myself.
When my daughter was in me, I felt I had
a soul in me. But it was born with her.
But when she cried, one night, such pure crying,
I said I will take care of you, I will
put you first. I will not ever
have a daughter the way she had me,
I will not ever swim in you
the way my mother swam in me and I
felt myself swum in. I will never know anyone
again the way I knew my mother,
the gates of the human fallen.

~ Sharon Olds ~

In Mind [self-reflexion]

(in-between, 16-09-09)

There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but

fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears

a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she

is kind and very clean without
ostentation –

but she has
no imagination

And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl

or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers

and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs

but she is not kind.

~ Denise Levertov ~

I

(Romania, 13-08-09)

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I

~ Adrienne Rich ~

summer #2

(Bulgaria, 12-08-09)

[...]

Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor.

~ Louise Gluck ~

The Breathing

(Bulgaria, 12-08-09)

An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.

~ Denise Levertov ~

I have tried to write Paradise #2

(Greece, 11-08-09)

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

[...]

~ Ezra Pound ~

Time does go on [intermezzo]

(in-between, 13-09-09)

Time does go on --
I tell it gay to those who suffer now --
They shall survive --
There is a sun --
They don't believe it now --

~ Emily Dickinson ~

talking about [pain]

(Greece, 10-09-09)

"I am a landscape," he said.
"A landscape and a person walking in that landscape.
There are daunting cliffs there,
And plains glad in their way
of brown monotony. But especially
there are sinkholes, places
of sudden terror, of small circumference
and malevolent depths."
"I know," she said. "When I set forth
to walk in myself, as it might be
on a fine afternoon, forgetting,
sooner or later I come to where sedge
and clumps of white flowers, rue perhaps,
mark the bogland, and I know
there are quagmires there that can pull you
down, and sink you in bubbling mud."
"We had an old dog," he told her, "when I was a boy,
a good dog, friendly. But there was an injured spot
on his head, if you happened
just to touch it he'd jump up yelping
and bite you. He bit a young child,
they had to take him down to the vet's and destroy him."
"No one knows where it is," she said,
"and even by accident no one touches it.
It's inside my landscape, and only I, making my way
preoccupied through my life, crossing my hills,
sleeping on green moss of my own woods,
I myself without warning touch it,
and leap up at myself -- "
" -- or flinch back
just in time."
"Yes, we learn that.
It's not a terror, it's pain we're talking about:
those places in us, like your dog's bruised head,
that are bruised forever, that time
never assuages, never."

~ Denise Levertov ~

mystic waters [longing]

(Greece, 10-08-09)

These quiet Autumn days,
My soul, like Noah's dove, on airy wings
Goes out and searches for the hidden things
Beyond the hills of haze.

With mournful, pleading cries,
Above the waters of the voiceless sea
That laps the shore of broad Eternity,
Day after day, it flies,

Searching, but all in vain,
For some stray leaf that it may light upon,
And read the future, as the days agone -
Its pleasures, and its pain.

Listening patiently
For some voice speaking from the mighty deep,
Revealing all the things that it doth keep
In secret there for me.

Come back and wait, my soul!
Day after day thy search has been in vain.
Voiceles and silent o'er the future's plain
Its mystic waters roll.

God, seeing, knoweth best,
And in His time the waters shall subside,
And thou shalt know what lies beneath the tide,
Then wait, my soul, and rest.

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox ~

Idler's Song [breathing space]

(Greece, 10-08-09)

I sit in the twilight dim
At the close of an idle day,
And I list to the soft sweet hymn,
That rises far away,
And dies on the evening air.
Oh, all day long,
They sing their song,
Who toil in the valley there.

But never a song sing I,
Sitting with folded hands,
The hours pass me by –
Dropping their golden sands –
And I list, from day to day,
To the 'tick, tick, tock'
Of the old brown clock,
Ticking my life away.

And I see the twilight fade,
And I see the night come on,
And then, in the gloom and shade,
I weep for the day that's gone –
Weep and wail in pain,
For the misspent day
That has flown away,
And will not come again.

Another morning beams,
And I forget the last,
And I sit in idle dreams
Till the day over – past.
Oh, the toiler's heart is glad!
When the day is gone
And the night comes on,
But mine is sore and sad.

For I dare not look behind!
No shining, golden sheaves
Can I ever hope to find:
Nothing but withered leaves.
Ah! dreams are very sweet!
But will not please
If only these
I lay at the Master's feet.

And what will the Master say
To dreams and nothing more?
Oh, idler, all the day!
Think, ere thy life is o'er!
And when the day grows late,
Oh, soul of sin!
Will He let you in,
There at the pearly gate?

Oh, idle heart, beware!
On, to the field of strife!
On, to the valley there!
And live a useful life!
Up, do not wait a day!
For the old brown clock,
With its 'tick, tick, tock, '
Is ticking your life away.

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox ~

Passing Time [self-reflexion]

(in-between, 09-09-09)

Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk

One paints the beginning
of a certain end.

The other, the end of a
sure beginning.

~ Maya Angelou ~

The Civil War

(in-between, 06-09-09)

I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
I will dig up the pride.
I will take scissors
and cut out the beggar.
I will take a crowbar
and pry out the broken
pieces of God in me.
Just like a jigsaw puzzle,
I will put Him together again
with the patience of a chess player.

How many pieces?

It feels like thousands,
God dressed up like a whore
in a slime of green algae.
God dressed up like an old man
staggering out of His shoes.
God dressed up like a child,
all naked,
even without skin,
soft as an avocado when you peel it.
And others, others, others.

But I will conquer them all
and build a whole nation of God
in me – but united,
build a new soul,
dress it with skin
and then put on my shirt
and sing an anthem,
a song of myself.

~ Anne Sexton ~

exit [sequel]

(Greece, 10-08-09)

I examine
my skin

searching for
the pore

with EXIT
over it

~ Bill Knott ~

skyful [intermezzo]

(Switzerland, 04-09-09)

[...]

I though that Storm -- was brief --
The Maddest -- quickest by --
But Nature lost the Date of This --
And left it in the Sky --

~ Emily Dickinson ~

The Windows of my Tower

(Greece, 07-08-09)

Turn from that road's beguiling ease; return
to your hunger's turret. Enter, climb the stair
chill with disuse, where the croaking toad of time
regards from shimmering eyes your slow ascent
and the drip, drip, of darkness glimmers on the stone
to show you how your longing waits alone.
What alchemy shines from under that shut door,
spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart?

Enter the turret of your love, and lie
close in the arms of the sea; let in new suns
that beat and echo in the mind like sounds
risen from sunken cities lost to fear;
let in the light that answers your desire
awakening at midnight with the fire,
until its magic burns the wavering sea
and flames carress the windows of your tower.

~ Denise Levertov ~

sea-wash

(Greece, 07-08-09)

The sea-wash never ends.
The sea-wash repeats, repeats.
Only old songs? Is that all the sea knows?
Only the old strong songs?
Is that all?
The sea-wash repeats, repeats.

~ Carl Sandburg ~

reaching out

(Greece, 07-08-09)

How long ago the day is
when at last I look at it
with the time it has taken
to be there still in it
now in the transparent light
with the flight in the voices
the beginning in the leaves
everything I remember
and before it before me
present at the speed of light
in the distance that I am
who keep reaching out to it
seeing all the time faster
where it has never stirred from
before there is anything
the darkness thinking the light

~ W.S. Merwin ~

~ balance ~

(Greece, 06-08-09)

I prayed, at first, a little Girl,
Because they told me to --
But stopped, when qualified to guess
How prayer would feel -- to me --

If I believed God looked around,
Each time my Childish eye
Fixed full, and steady, on his own
In Childish honesty --

And told him what I'd like, today,
And parts of his far plan
That baffled me --
The mingled side
Of his Divinity --

And often since, in Danger,
I count the force 'twould be
To have a God so strong as that
To hold my life for me

Till I could take the Balance
That tips so frequent, now,
It takes me all the while to poise --
And then -- it doesn't stay --

~ Emily Dickinson ~

I have tried to write Paradise #1

(Greece, 05-08-09)

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

[...]

~ Ezra Pound ~

faith

(Greece, 05-08-09)

The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.

~ James Matthew Barrie ~

nichts mehr wollen wollen

(Greece, 05-08-2009)

Wenn man ans Meer kommt
soll man zu schweigen beginnen
bei den letzten Grashalmen
soll man den Faden verlieren

und den Salzschaum
und das scharfe Zischen des Windes einatmen
und ausatmen
und wieder einatmen

Wenn man den Sand sägen hört
und das Schlurfen der kleinen Steine
in langen Wellen
soll man aufhören zu sollen
und nichts mehr wollen wollen
nur Meer

Nur Meer

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If one comes to the sea
one shall start to be silent
at the last blades of grass
one shall lose the thread

and breathe in
the salt foam
and the sharply hissing wind
and breathe out
and breathe in again

If one hears the sand sawing
and the shuffling of the little stones
in long waves
one shall stop shalling
and wanting to want nothing more
only sea

Only sea

~ Erich Fried ~