The First Green of Spring

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,

this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting

to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching

on this message from the dawn which says we and the world

are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we

will never be young again, we also know we’re still right here

now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste good.

-- David Budbill

From Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse.

One Heart

Look at the birds. Even flying

is born

out of nothing. The first sky

is inside you, open

at either end of day.

The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening

one heart to every falling thing.

--Li-Young Lee, from Book of My Nights

Lessons from Darkness

“I'm afraid of the darkness, and the hole in it;

and I see it sometime of every day!”

-Martin Luther, in Luther

Everything you love will perish. Try saying this to yourself

at breakfast, watching the amber-colored tea

swirl in the teapot. Try it on the tree, the clouds, the dog

asleep under the table, the sparrow taking a bath

in the neighbor's gutter. A magician’s act: Presto!

On a morning you feel open enough to embrace it

imagine it gone. Then pack the child’s lunch: smooth the thick

peanut butter, the jeweled raspberry preserves,

over the bread. Tell yourself the world

must go on forever. This is why

you feed her, imagining the day—orderly—

unfolding, imagining what you teach her

is true. Is something she will use. This is why, later, you will go out

into the garden, among the calendula, rosemary, hibiscus,

run your finger along the trunk of hawthorn

as though it were the body

of a lover, thinking of the child

on the steps of the schoolyard, eating her sandwich. Thinking nothing,

transparent air, where her hands are.

--Anita Barrows

When autumn winds blow

Not one leaf remains

The way it was

--Togyu (Died 1749)

Thank You

If you find yourself half naked 

and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing, 

again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says 

you are the air of the now and gone, that says 

all you love will turn to dust, 

and will meet you there, do not 

raise your fist. Do not raise 

your small voice against it. And do not 

take cover. Instead, curl your toes 

into the grass, watch the cloud 

ascending from your lips. Walk 

through the garden’s dormant splendor. 

Say only, thank you. 

Thank you. 

From Against Which. Copyright © 2006 by Ross Gay.

The Middle

When I remember bygone days

I think how evening follows morn;

So many I loved were not yet dead,

So many I love were not yet born.

-- Ogden Nash

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

--W.S. Merwin, from Migration: New and Selected Poems. 

in passing

how swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost and become precious

--Lisel Mueller

Waving Goodbye

Why, when we say goodbye
at the end of an evening, do we deny
we are saying it at all, as in We'll
be seeing you, or I'll call, or Stop in,
somebody's always at home? Meanwhile, our friends,
telling us the same things, go on disappearing
beyond the porch light into the space
which except for a moment here or there
is always between us, no matter what we do.
Waving goodbye, of course, is what happens
when the space gets too large
for words – a gesture so innocent
and lonely, it could make a person weep
for days. Think of the hundreds of unknown
voyagers in the old, fluttering newsreel
patting and stroking the growing distance
between their nameless ship and the port
they are leaving, as if to promise I'll always
remember, and just as urgently, Always
remember me. Is it loneliness, too,
that makes the neighbor down the road lift
two fingers up from his steering wheel as he passes
day after day on his way to work in the hello
that turns into goodbye? What can our own raised
fingers to for him, locked in his masculine
purposes and speeding away inside the glass?
How can our waving wipe away the reflex
so deep in the woman next door to smile
and wave on her way into her house with the mail,
we'll never know if she is happy
or sad or lost? It can't. Yet in that moment
before she and all the others and we ourselves
turn back to our disparate lives, how
extraordinary it is that we make this small flag
with our hands to show the closeness we wish for
in spite of what pulls us apart again
and again: the porch light snapping off,
the car picking its way down the road through the dark.

--Wesley McNair

It Is Enough

To know that the atoms
of my body
will remain

to think of them rising
through the roots of a great oak
to live in
leaves, branches, twigs

perhaps to feed the
crimson peony
the blue iris
the broccoli

or rest on water
freeze and thaw
with the seasons

some atoms might become a
bit of fluff on the wing
of a chickadee
to feel the breeze
know the support of air

and some might drift
up and up into space
star dust returning from

whence it came
it is enough to know that
as long as there is a universe
I am a part of it.

-- Anne Alexander Bingham

You Will Lose Everything

You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.

But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.

Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.

-- Jeff Foster

Evening

Moonlight pours down
without mercy, no matter
how many have perished
beneath the trees.

The river rolls on.

There will always be
silence, no matter
how long someone
has wept against
the side of a house,
bare forearms pressed
to the shingles.

Everything ends.
Even pain, even sorrow.

The swans drift on.

Reeds bear the weight
of their feathery heads.
Pebbles grow smaller,
smoother beneath night’s
rough currents. We walk

long distances, carting
our bags, our packages.
Burdens or gifts.

We know the land
is disappearing beneath
the sea, islands swallowed
like prehistoric fish.

We know we are doomed,
done for, damned, and still
the light reaches us, falls
on our shoulders even now,

even here where the moon is
hidden from us, even though
the stars are so far away.


--Dorianne Laux 

Prescription for the Disillusioned

Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid overcoat of experience,

the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud your vision.

Leave behind the stories of your life.
Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation.

Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.

Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty, the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined.

Live the life that chooses you,
new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.

– Rebecca del Rio

In December of 2005, a cancer made its presence suddenly and dramatically known--a melanoma in my right eye, which presented as a sudden incandescence to one side and then a partial blindness....The cancer was irradiated, then lasered several times, because certain areas kept regrowing. During the first eighteen months of treatment, sight fluctuated in my right eye almost daily, from near blind to near normal, and I would be thrown, with these fluctuations, from terror to relief, then back to terror--from one emotional extreme to another.
This would have been hard to bear (and I would have been even harder to live with) had I not become fascinated by some of the visual phenomena which occurred as, bit by bit, my retina--and eyesight--were nibbled away by the tumor and the lasering: the wild topological distortions, the perversions of color, the clever but automatic filling in of blind spots, the incontinent spread of color and form, the continued perception of objects and scenes when the eyes were closed, and, not least, the varied hallucinations which now swarmed in my ever-larger blind spots. My brain was clearly as involved as the eye itself....
Without binocular vision, I now had many new, disabling (but sometimes enthralling!) phenomena to contend with--and investigate....I was not only physically blind but mentally blind, to the right. I could no longer even imagine the presence of what I could no longer see. Such a hemi-neglect, as neurologists call it, is usually the result of a stroke or a tumor in the visual or parietal areas of the brain. For me, as a neurologist, these phenomena were especially fascinating, for they provided an astonishing panorama of the ways in which the brain works (or misworks, or fails to work) when the input from the senses is deficient or abnormal...The whole experience became an experiment with, or on, myself.
The perceptual consequences of my eye damage constituted a fertile ground of enquiry. I felt as if I were discovering as whole world of strange phenomena, although I could not help thinking that all patients with eye problems like mine surely experienced some of the same perceptual phenomena as I did. Writing of my own experiences, then, I would also be writing for them. But the sense of discovery was exhilarating and kept me going through what might otherwise have been rather fearful and demoralizing years, as did my continuing seeing patients and writing.

--from "On the Move", the memoirs of Oliver Sacks.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

--Mary Oliver

Death poems

Kiba, 1868, ae. 90

My old body:
a drop of dew
grown heavy at the leaf tip


Joseki, 1779, ae. 85

This must be
my birthday
there
in paradise


Ensei, 1725, ae. 69

A parting gift to my body:
just when it wishes
I'll breathe my last.


Fukaku, 1753, ae. 92

Empty cicada shell:
as we come
we go back naked


Kin'u, 1817, ae. 62

How leisurely
the cherry blossoms
bloom this year
unhurried
by their doom


Renseki, 1789, ae. 88

I cleansed the mirror of my heart
now it reflects the moon


Yamazaki Sokan, ~1540

Should someone ask where Sokan went,
just say,
he had some business in the other world


Kyoriku, 1715, ae. 59

Till now I thought that death
befell the untalented alone.
If those with talent, too, must die,
surely they make
a better manure?


Zosan Junku, 1308, ae. 76

You must play the tune of non-being yourself--
nine summits collapse, eight oceans go dry.


Inseki, 1765, ae. 67

I give my name back
as I step in
this Eden of flowers.


Toko, 1795, ae. 86

Death poems
are mere delusion:
death is death.


Japanese Death poems, Yoel Hoffman, Tuttle Publishing.
(It was traditional for Zen masters to compose poems as they were dying.)

The Dakini speaks

My friends, let’s grow up.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven’t noticed, let’s wake up and notice.

Look: everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It’s simple–how could we have missed it for so long?
Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be so shocked by them.
Let’s not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.

Impermanence is life’s only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.

To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion is exquisitely precise:
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.
This is the true ride — let’s give ourselves to it!

Let’s stop making deals for a safe passage:
There isn’t one anyway, and the cost is too high.

We are not children any more.
The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost.
Let’s dance the wild dance of no hope!

--Jennifer Welwood