There isn't any

It is lovely when there is no next thing.

You are simply doing this

and there is no next thing.

You are not thinking

as soon as I get this finished

I can get started on the next

because there isn't any.

There is simply this.

You are doing it now.

And it is lovely.

--Pat Ingoldsby

From a Country Overlooked

There are no creatures you cannot love.

A frog calling at God

From the moon-filled ditch

As you stand on the country road in the June night.

The sound is enough to make the stars weep

With happiness.

In the morning the landscape green

Is lifted off the ground by the scent of grass.

The day is carried across its hours

Without any effort by the shining insects

That are living their secret lives.

The space between the prairie horizons

Makes us ache with its beauty.

Cottonwood leaves click in an ancient tongue

To the farthest cold dark in the universe.

The cottonwood also talks to you

Of breeze and speckled sunlight.

You are at home in these

great empty places

along with red-wing blackbirds and sloughs.

You are comfortable in this spot

so full of grace and being

that it sparkles like jewels

spilled on water.

--Tom Hennen

The Way it Is

One morning you might wake up

to realize that the knot in your stomach

had loosened itself and slipped away,

and that the pit of unfulfilled longing in your heart

had gradually, and without your really noticing,

been filled in—patched like a pothole, not quite

the same as it was, but good enough.

And in that moment it might occur to you

that your life, though not the way

you planned it, and maybe not even entirely

the way you wanted it, is nonetheless—

persistently, abundantly, miraculously—

exactly the way it is.

--Lynn Ungar

A Scrap in Time

Something about the relentless beauty

of the dahlias this year makes me forget

lists and calls and news and aches as

I stand beside them in a splendor stupor,

watching them bloom in real time, not

wanting to miss a moment of the long stems

rising, the red color deepening then fading

from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse

begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening

again, and now a hundred years pass,

now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden

bed is gone and the fence is gone and

the trees and the ditch and the home

are gone, and there’s no way to know

this was once a place where dahlias grew.

Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you

to come stand here with me to watch

the dahlias open themselves to the sun,

each petal a hymn to the present,

a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time

we might put in a vase and marvel as

all around it the whole world spins.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Dreams Before Waking

Despair falls:

the shadow of a building

they are raising in the direct path

of your slender ray of sunlight

Slowly the steel girders grow

the skeletal framework rises

yet the western light still filters

through it all

still glances off the plastic sheeting

they wrap around it

for dead of winter

At the end of winter something changes

a faint subtraction

from consolations you expected

an innocent brilliance that does not come

though the flower shops set out

once again on the pavement

their pots of tight-budded sprays

the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold

and at such a price

though someone must buy them

you study those hues as if with hunger

Despair falls

like the day you come home

from work, a summer evening

transparent with rose-blue light

and see they are filling in

the framework

the girders are rising

beyond your window

that seriously you live

in a different place

though you have never moved

and will not move, not yet

but will give away

your potted plants to a friend 

on the other side of town

along with the cut crystal flashing

in the window-frame

will forget the evenings

of watching the street, the sky

the planes in the feathered afterglow:

will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold

where still you can manage

to go on paying rent

where still you can believe

it’s the old neighborhood:

even the woman who sleeps at night

in the barred doorway — wasn’t she always there?

and the man glancing, darting

for food in the supermarket trash –

when did his hunger come to this?

what made the difference?

what will make it for you?

What will make it for you?

You don’t want to know the stages

and those who go through them don’t want to tell

You have four locks on the door

your savings, your respectable past

your strangely querulous body, suffering

sicknesses of the city no one can name

You have your pride, your bitterness

your memories of sunset

you think you can make it straight through

if you don’t speak of despair.

What would it mean to live

in a city whose people were changing

each other’s despair into hope? –

You yourself must change it. –

what would it feel like to know

your country was changing? –

You yourself must change it. –

Though your life felt arduous

new and unmapped and strange

what would it means to stand on the first

page of the end of despair?

 - Adrienne Rich

For You Who Are About to Give Up

Do it. Give up

the old ghosts, the old fears; give up

the shadowy house of childhood,

the voices like knives spilled in the kitchen;

give up the stories

you never meant to be, your father's

rage, your mother's silence inside you.

Stay, stay

in this one world

but give it up, give it up to wonder.

I am here. I will hold you

through the hard part. I will thumb away

the cold thorns from your face.

And then,

my love, when you are ready,

when you've told yourself

no one is ever ready,

give up

that life you never meant to be,

those clothes that have worn you

like old ghosts, those dreams

you have carried in you like winters.

Give up

and walk out through the rivers

and look at it, that old moon

in the spruces. She is trying, she is still trying

to tell you: like a child,

like a bride stepping

from a wedding dress, give up

every heft you have borrowed

and live the life you have imagined.

In your life is where the dead are saved.

--Joseph Fasano

“A man who can’t cry is a social time bomb... In my village, emotion is ritualized because it is seen as a sacred thing. If addressed within a sacred space, the emotions of grief can provide powerful relief and healing. Any time the feeling of loss arises there is an energy that demands ritual in order to allow reconciliation and the return of peace.”

— Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa

September

And now the first winds

purr what they've been learning

like a children's choir

flipping through their hymnals.

This test again, this wintering,

this bite.

Summer, Summer's roads are over-

And all these leaves,

this foliage on your shoulders-

like all the ghosts of childhood's

wild silence

laying on their hands

as though to guide you.

It is time to fall into your life.

-Joseph Fasano

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs-all this resinous, unretractable earth.

--Jane Hirshfield

The Difficult Countryside

I talk more to trees and mice than I let on. Flies, too.

And cars. Actually, I’m a regular chatterbox

to what doesn’t respond. So I understand prayer.

The way a street’s a street, but catch it right, and with

good framing, the street achieves art. So I get out my bike 

and take off down it, with headphones and a little cloud

of dust. I need to get myself to Marfa and see the lights.

Not really, but saying that gives me a starting point.

I’m having a debate with my third eye. It goes like this:

if I have a deeply unsettling dream about someone,

does it change my perception of them? Should it?

Maybe it should change my perception of me.

Maybe I’m catching some subtle clue my sleep

is trying to warn me about. I ask the trees and mice about it,

the flies and cows. Aren’t we all injured by our art?

All the grandmothers, as one, are banging apple pies

against their kitchen windows, wanting out of our flashbacks.

I wave. I know everyone in this town. I’m filled with purpose,

because playing music makes everything a movie.

I appeared from nowhere, to tell you this. I will be gone 

just as fast, turning the corner of University Drive

and Sixteenth Street, spelled out just like that. S I X

T E E N T H. I’ve never been this happy before 

and I don’t know what to do with myself. The wind’s even

at my back. The sun is mostly down, 8 pm. Summer’s

listening, but only to an ‘80s playlist, so we’re safe.

Why isn’t everyone doing this? America! What?

I don’t know. But it feels great out here. The trees say hi.

--John Gallaher

Can I weave a nest of silence

The phoebe sits on her nest

Hour after hour,

Day after day,

Waiting for life to burst out

From under her warmth.

Can I weave a nest of silence,

weave it of listening,

listening, listening,

Layer upon layer?

But one must first become small,

Nothing but a presence,

Attentive as a nesting bird,

Proffering no slightest wish

Toward anything

that might happen or be given,

Only the warm, faithful waiting,

contained in one’s smallness.

Beyond the question,

the silence.

Before the answer,

the silence.

--May Sarton

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness

out of which comes the unbroken,

a shatteredness

out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow

beyond all grief which leads to joy

and a fragility

out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space

too vast for words

through which we pass with each loss,

out of whose darkness

we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound

whose serrated edges cut the heart

as we break open to the place inside

which is unbreakable and whole,

while learning to sing.

--Rashani Rea

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose that sometime

we will learn everything

there is to learn: what the world is, for example,

and what it means. I think this as I am crossing

from one field to another, in summer, and the

mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either

knows enough already or knows enough to be

perfectly content not knowing. Song being born

of quest he knows this: he must turn silent

were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead

oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly

unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display

the small suns of their center piece, their - if you don't

mind my saying so - their hearts. Of course

I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and

narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,

to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;

for example - I think this

as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -

the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the

daisies for the field.

--Mary Oliver

Could It Happen Anywhere?

Listen to the rhythm of things that never die.

                  —Mark Nepo, “For a Long Time”

Worried about what was to come, I went to the river

and listened to the constant song as water met stone,

met log, met wall. The endless white hush of it.

Song of building up banks. Song of tearing them down.

Song of surrender to invisible force. Song of change

that is ever the same and not the same. And in the listening,

I found refuge—not in the longing to hide, not in the sound—

I found refuge in the listening. Refuge in the opening

of the senses. In attuning to what is here. Wave and current

and eddy and flow and the attentiveness that lives

through this woman. And I listened and listened, listened

to it all, and was opened by listening. At some point

the listener disappeared. What was left was

listening itself. For a time, peace found me there.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Camas Lilies

Consider the lilies of the field,

the blue banks of camas opening

into acres of sky along the road.

Would the longing to lie down

and be washed by that beauty

abate if you knew their usefulness,

how the native women boiled

the bulbs for food?

And you — what of your rushed and

useful life? Imagine setting it all down —

papers, plans, appointments, everything,

leaving only a note:

"Gone to the fields to be lovely.

Be back when I’m through

with blooming."

--Lynn Ungar

Medicinal

I start accepting food from the neighbors:

Handful of tomatoes before they rot.

Annual s’more at the bonfire. I savor

odd things—quick knock at the door, apricot

pit in the window. Small shrines appear.

There are flats of strawberries. Homemade

broth to help a harmed esophagus heal.

We all mend, somewhere, in the exchange.

Little gifts evolve into meals, board games

after lunch. One day my son is with grand-

mother neighbors, pulling weeds in the yard.

I’m at their side before I understand.

We kneel together, chewing on mint leaves,

like it’s no miracle, like it’s ordinary.

--Megan Nichols

Keep Reaching

The trick is to keep reaching

for the light you will never touch,

and to be nourished by the stretch

toward impossible things.

The trick is to bloom where you are,

not calling it a failure because

you wanted a different outcome.

Live each day devoted to awe, 

so that when a monarch lands 

on the tip of a coneflower, seeming 

to swell with that sudden infusion 

of sweetness, you don’t miss it. 

So that, while you watch, a pair 

of hard-won wings seems to open 

and close and open again in you.

—James Crews

Beyond Patience

If I knew another word for patience,

would it open me to the act?

Perhaps something that invokes the patience

in the zinnias after first central flower has died

and before the next buds are formed.

Something that speaks to the patience of winter

while the field is greening more deeply every day.

To be patient is to believe there is a moment

beyond now that will be better than now. 

So perhaps instead of patience, the word

I’m longing for is presence. The capacity

to be only here. Only now. Here in the garden

where the zinnia row is thick with leaves.

Here in the meadow where it’s warm and

the tall grass tickles my bare thighs. Now

in the week before my sweet girl arrives.

Ah, there it is, back to the anticipation.

Try again. Presence, as in now, in this moment

when swallows swoop and skate and swirl.

Now, when my breath opens in my chest,

opens like a zinnia, many petalled and red.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Heron rises from the dark, summer pond

So heavy

is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,

always it is a surprise

when her smoke-colored wings

open

and she turns

from the thick water,

from the black sticks

of the summer pond,

and slowly

rises into the air

and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,

I take the deep breath

of happiness, and I think

how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,

how improbable

that ascension is not possible,

though everything seems so inert, so 

nailed

back into itself —

the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,

the turtle,

the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful

that the summers are long

and the ponds so dark and so many,

and therefore it isn’t a miracle

but the common thing,

this decision,

this trailing of the long legs in the water,

this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden

gray-blue sheets of her wings

strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing

takes her in.

—Mary Oliver

One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself’. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.

— A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes

--Stanley Kunitz

She Let Go

She let go.

She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.

She let go of the fear.

She let go of the judgments.

She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.

She let go of the committee of indecision within her.

She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons.

Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.

She didn’t ask anyone for advice.

She didn’t read a book on how to let go.

She didn’t search the scriptures.

She just let go.

She let go of all of the memories that held her back.

She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.

She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.

She didn’t promise to let go.

She didn’t journal about it.

She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer.

She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper.

She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.

She just let go.

She didn’t analyze whether she should let go.

She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter.

She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.

She didn’t call the prayer line.

She didn’t utter one word.

She just let go.

No one was around when it happened.

There was no applause or congratulations.

No one thanked her or praised her.

No one noticed a thing.

Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.

There was no effort.

There was no struggle.

It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad.

It was what it was, and it is just that.

In the space of letting go, she let it all be.

A small smile came over her face.

A light breeze blew through her.

And the sun and the moon shone forevermore…

--Safire Rose

Dogfish

...

You don't want to hear the story

of my life, and anyway

I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story - - -

a few people just trying,

one way or another,

to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.

And nobody, of course, is kind,

or mean,

for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to

swim through the fires to stay in

this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish

better wake up and dash themselves away

from the hopeless future that is

bulging toward them.

*

And probably,

if they don't waste time

looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

--Mary Oliver

The Myth of Sisyphus

We tend to think of Sisyphus as a tragic hero, condemned by the gods

to shoulder his rock sweatily up the mountain, and again up the mountain, forever.

The truth is that Sisyphus is in love with the rock. He cherishes every roughness

and every ounce of it. He talks to it, sings to it. It has become the mysterious Other.

He even dreams of it as he sleepwalks upward. Life is unimaginable without it,

looming always above him like a huge gray moon.

He doesn’t realize that at any moment he is permitted to step aside, let the rock

hurtle to the bottom, and go home.

Tragedy is the inertial force of the mind.

--Stephen Mitchell 

Symphony

In the womb, we learn to listen

long before we can even breathe.

Maybe this is our body’s way

of saying, listening is a form of

breathing, and hearing is more 

essential than air. Maybe we spend 

our lives trying to get back to a time 

when the voices around us sounded 

like a distant music, strange song 

of the everyday that plays even now 

when I pause at the street corner 

before crossing, and just listen—

to snippets of phone conversations, 

someone’s radio, a mother calling 

to her child to keep him near—this 

endless symphony of the world.

—James Crews