Poetry

The Quest

But now I seek the One in every form,
Scorning no vision that a dewdrop holds,
The gentle Light that shines behind the storm,
The Dream that many a twilight hour enfolds.

Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926)

From "Endymion"

But this is human life: the war, the deeds,
The disappointment, the anxiety,
Imagination's struggles, far and nigh,
All human; bearing in themselves this good,
That they are still the air the subtle food,
To make us feel existence.

John Keats

No Matter, Never Mind

The Father is the Void
The Wife Waves
Their child is Matter.
Matter makes it with his mother
And their Child is Life,
a daughter.
The Daughter is the Great Mother
Who, with her father/brother Matter
as her lover,
Gives birth to the Mind.

Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island

The Way In

Whoever you are: some evening take a step
out of your house, which you know so well.
Enormous space is near, your house lies where it begins,
whoever you are.
Your eyes find it hard to tear themselves
from the sloping threshold, but with your eyes
slowly, slowly, lift one black tree
up, so it stands against the sky: skinny alone.
With that you have made the world. The world is immense
and like a word that is still growing in the silence.
In the same moment that your will grasps it,
your eyes, feeling its subtlety, will leave it. . . .

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

---

The Boat

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken;
inside"love" there is more joy than we know of;
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds;
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.
How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word "reason" you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out.

Kabir

Questions

By the sea, the wild nocturnal sea,
Stands a stripling-man;
His breast full of woe, his mind full of doubt,
And with gloomy lips he questions the waves:

' 0 solve me the riddle of life,
The torturing ancient riddle
So many heads have brooded upon,
Heads in hieroglyph-covered hats.
In turbans and birettas of black,
Heads bewigged and a thousand more
Poor, perspiring human heads -
Tell me, what does Man signify
Whence does he come? and whither go?
Who dwells up there in the golden stars?'

They murmur, waves, their eternal murmur,
The wind it blows, the clouds run free,
The stars shine on, Indifferent and cold,
And a fool waits for an answer.

Heinrich Heine

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly
 

First Step

Beginnings
are sometimes foggy.
The path is not always clear.
The end of one begets another.

To begin, put one foot
in front of the other.
Your foot knows where to land,
the one that moves forward first.
Forget about the best foot.

Just put it out there.
Stop traffic if you have to.
Go home if that is where it leads you.
Go back to work
if that is where your foot falls.

You don't have to
go anywhere
Just rest.
After you step,
take another.
Forget about the weather.
Step
Step again.

Robin Heerens Lysne From Dancing Up the Moon, page 5

More Than Mundane

If the mundane is
-all there is-
then I cannot ask the big questions.
The one about meaning or
What are we here for? or
Where do I go when I die?

If everything is sacred,
surprising,
then you are fine
the way you are,
I can do this strange dance
though it may not be how I planned it,
and I learned, everyday that
we become
a
discovery.

Robin Heerens Lysne From Dancing Up the Moon, page 3

merge

I arrive
after rare May snow
sun gone
behind the west range

in the white last light
of Mt. Shasta
the dream dreamed
before the journey
finds me

the mountain stands
in a moving gauze of mist

I move into the dream

air of cloud surrounds
smell of pines
and damp earth

great peak above me
I bow to the earth
life
spirit
head to holy ground

I move into the dream
I move into the mountain

gravel in my palms
wet knees
five times I bow

time moves into time
place into place
my breath into breath

I move into the dream
I move into the mountain
I move into the movement

Layne Russell

Journeyman's Wages

To the waters of the Willamette I come
in nearly perfect weather,
Monday morning
traffic backed up at the bridge
a bad sign.

Be on the job at eight,
boots crunching in gravel;
cinch up the tool belt, string out the cords
to where we left off on Friday--
that stack of old
form lumber, that bucket of rusty bolts
and those two beat-up sawhorses
wait patiently for us.

Gil is still drunk, red-eyed, pretending he's not
and threatening to quit;
Gordon is studying the prints,
Slab on grad, tilt-up panels, Glu-lams
and trusses . . .

Boy's I've got an idea--
instead of a supermarket
why couldn't this be a cathedral?

Clemens Starck

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

What’s In The Temple?

In the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, but ready to spring.
It begs me to open the door so it can walk about.
The poets speak in obscure terms pointing madly at the unsayable.
The sages say nothing, but walk ahead patting their thigh calling for us to follow.
The monk sits pen in hand poised to explain the cloud of unknowing.
The seeker seeks, just around the corner from the truth.
If she stands still it will catch up with her.

Pause with us here a while.
Put your ear to the wall of your heart.
Listen for the whisper of knowing there.
Love will touch you if you are very still.

If I say the word God, people run away.
They’ve been frightened--sat on ‘till the spirit cried "uncle."
Now they play hide and seek with somebody they can’t name.
They know he’s out there looking for them, and they want to be found,
But there is all this stuff in the way.

I can’t talk about God and make any sense,
And I can’t not talk about God and make any sense.
So we talk about the weather, and we are talking about God.

I miss the old temples where you could hang out with God.
Still, we have pet pounds where you can feel love draped in warm fur,
And sense the whole tragedy of life and death.
You see there the consequences of carelessness,
And you feel there the yapping urgency of life that wants to be lived.
The only things lacking are the frankincense and myrrh.

We don’t build many temples anymore.
Maybe we learned that the sacred can’t be contained.
Or maybe it can’t be sustained inside a building.
Buildings crumble.
It’s the spirit that lives on.

If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart,
What would you worship there?
What would you bring to sacrifice?
What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies?

Go there now.

Tom Barrett

---

Different Paths

Hiking the high cliffs,
my friends clamber over rough
stone up to the high peak.
I, spotting an unused trail,
choose a different path.

I've heard
"there are many paths to the summit,"
and I trust this is one of those.
But this is the lonely way.
This is the slippery trail
on the cold side of the mountain.
I am alone, except for the few footprints
in the kneedeep snow.
No one to guide me but unknown strangers
who have trekked this way before.

I begin to wonder,
Have I been a fool?
Will I lose my way?
Is this a true path or some
way to where I should not go?

Climbing higher, the trail is scarce.
Thorny bushes slow the pace.
But I sense I'm closer to my goal.
I reach the peak before my friends,
but see them coming not far below.
And up ahead, another ridge,
a higher peak,
a mountain glowing in the sun.

Tom Barrett

Empty Mind

Writing about empty mind is not easy.
When I have got it, there are no words.
When the words come, it goes away.

Sitting in anger and fear,
Mind is full of the past and future.
Images of catastrophes big and small
Jostle for a seat at the brain.
Resentment, incredulity and disappointment
Slide their way into heart spaces
Pushing out loving-kindness.
Equanimity lies in pieces.

Some of us scrape up that slimy
Emotional stuff and put it in jars
To carry along with us,
And then we complain that
Our load is too heavy.
We need to put down that
Lumpy sack of ooze
And take a breath.

The sage said,
“I pack no provisions for my long journey---
Entering emptiness under the midnight moon.”
He did not pack his ego,
Or his remembrance of self.
He carried no big plans
Or regrets of the past.
Like a wise fool he may have
Even forgotten to leave.
While he sits still in darkness,
The moon travels the sky.

Tom Barrett

Meditation

One point of consciousness.
One star in the night.
A candle in the darkness
Small flame burning bright.
A sound with no echo.
A move with no result.
Single mind awareness
A breath seen, heard, and felt.
Standing here in empty space
Or drifting like an autumn leaf
No grasping, clinging, fear or hate
Mind stills and stirs like
Movement in the deep.
Then back again to daily thoughts
Up and down the stairway,
Tracking, trailing, hanging on
To business of a new day.
But always there is refuge
In going back within.
The mind that chatters
Stills once more,
On going back within.

Tom Barrett