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