My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and signs the smoke,
The ashes shame and scornes.
™
The life we begin with a scream
we end with a whisper.
™
In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Marianne Moore, ”Poetry”
The Lady is a humble thing
Made of death and water
The fashion is to dress it plain
And use the mind for border.
So sat I between the word truth
And the word fable
Took out my empty bowl
And spoon.
™
I must go to the mountainsto hear
the sound and the sound.
™
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
™
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about,
Noli me Tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
There is neither heaven nor earth,
Only snow
Falling incessantly.
™
I cannot abide these malapert males,
Pirates of love who know no duty;
Yet love with a storm can take down their sales,
And they must strike to Admiral Beauty.
™
That if gold ruste, what shal iren doo?
™
And cannot pleasures, while they last,
Be actual unless, when past,
They leave us shuddering and aghast,
With anguish smarting?
Know you faire on what you look;
Divinest love lyes in this booke.
™
O get thee wings!
™
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;
And done, we straight repent us of the sport
™
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye.
™
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy your health
™
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known.
Come in the evening, or come in the morning;
Come when you’re look’d for, or come without warning.
The answer lies within
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name,
Mother of Exiles.
™
There are no people
To gape at them now,
For people are loath to
Peer in the dimness.
™
The least flower with a brimming cup may stand,
And share its dew-drop with another near.
You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
™
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
™
O drinke to thirst, and thirst to drinke that treasurer,
where the only danger is to keepe a measurer.
™
This cynic smile is but a wile of guile
This costume chaste is
But good taste misplaced!
™
And in his mistress’ flame, playing like a fly,
Turned to cinders by her eye?
Yes; and in death, as life, unblessed,
To have’t expressed,
Even ashes of lovers find no rest.
There is a channel between voice and presence,
where information flows.
In disciplined silence the channel opens;
with wandering talk, it closes.
™
How happy he, who free from care
The rage of courts, and noise of towns;
Contented breathes his native air,
In his own grounds.
™
Velvet at the edge of the tongue,
at the edge of the brain, it was
velvet. At the edge of history.
™
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
And the greatest gift
God can give is His own experience.
The answer is no
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
™
And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.
™
Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.
Not good for the land, not good for the sea
There’s nothing biodegradable about it
But it does make one hell of an outfit.
Jessyka Stinston, “Tinsel Me Pretty”
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
™
Look
what happens to the scale
when love
holds
it.
It
stops
working.
™
Swore that two lives should be like one
As long as the sea-gull loved the sea,
As long as the sunflower sought the sun,—
It shall be, I said, for eternity
‘Twixt you and me!
But cease thy tears, bid ev’ry sigh depart,
And cast the load of anguish from thine heart:
From the cold shell of his great soul arise,
And look beyond, thou native of the skies.
™
Who sayes that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
™
Yet haste the era, when the world shall know,
That such distinctions only dwell below;
The soul unfetter’d, to no sex confin’d,
Was for the abodes of cloudless day designed.
™
All we can touch, swallow, or say
Aids in our crossing to God
And helps unveil the soul.
Man is a shop of ruses: a well truss’d pack,
Whose every parcel under-writes a law.
Lose not thyself, nor give thy humors way;
God gave them to thee under lock and key.
™
The church is put in fault;
The prelates been so haut,
They say, and look so high
As though they would fly
Above the starry sky.
But now, with new and open eyes,
I see beneath, as if I were
above the skies.
Without sound we live in.
Where we are, really, climbing
the sides of buildings to peer in like spiderman,
at windows not our own.
And coward Love, then, to the heart apace
Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk and ’plain,
His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.
™
Who calls me that
As I go further into emptiness
I find something greater emptied
Something greater than heaven emptied.
™
Rash is the man, when the black banners blow,
What weds wi’ the Queen o’ the Castle o’ Crow.
™
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
When reading all those thick books on the life of god,
It should be noted that they were all written by men.
™
She cries loudly for us to come! We hear,
for the night’s many tongues
carry her cry across the sea.
It is certain
We who bear your creation seek re-creation.
Plant in your people a love and respect for your land.
Plant in your people a love and respect for your land.
™
Life smooths us, rounds, perfects,
as does the river the stone,
and there is no place our Beloved is not flowing
though the current’s force you may not always like.
What? Not done complaining yet?
™
All the false notions of myself that once caused fear, pain, have turned to ash as I neared God.
™
To goe to heaven, we make heaven come to us.
We spur, we rein the starres, and in their race
They’re diversely content t’obey our pace.
™
Light came from the east, bright signal of God, the sea became still so that I might see the headlands, the windy walls of the sea. Fate often saves an undoomed man when his courage is good.
™
But Oh! What Human Fortitude can be
Sufficient to Resist a Deity?
Shall you have all or nothing
take half or pass by untouched?
™
Our passions help to lift us.
I loved what I could love until I held Him,
for then-all things-every world disappeared.
™
The shell must break before the bird can fly.
Look within
O kill kill kill kill kill
Those who advertise you out.
™
And with a beck ye shall me call,
And if of one that burneth always
Ye have any pity at all,
Answer him fair with yea or nay.
They seem anxious to know
What holds up heaven nowadays.
™
Like water in goblets of unbaked clay
I drip out slowly,
and dry.
My soul whirls. Dizzy. Let me
discover my home.
™
God Damn you God damn me my misunderstanding of you.
™
Alas! It is a fearful thing
To feel another’s guilt!
™
Even so you can see in full dawn
The ground there lifts
a foreign thing desertless in origin.
Next, sip this weak wine
From the green glass flask,
with its stopper.
™
A coin, a dot, the end of a sentence,
the end of the long improbable utterance
of the holy and human.
™
We are resident inside the machinery,
a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus.
™
You sing in my mind like wine. What you
did not dare in your life you dare in mine.
™
Crossed your bridge with your big word and your huge silence.
The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows!
The past—the infinite greatness of the past!
For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?
™
This piece of food cannot be eaten,
nor this bit of wisdom found by looking.
There is a secret core in everyone not
even Gabriel can know by trying to know.
™
Is like a sieve, that does, alone, retain
The grosser substance of the worthless brain.
™
Thy lust and liking is from thee gone.
Thou blinkard blowboll, thou wakest too late.
These are the tranquillized Fifties
And I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
™
The people I love the best jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
™
you can be a good girl
and stop
telling everyone what you’re doing
when you are abusing
drugs and men
and bodies
that look something like your own
™
Man is all symmetrie
Full of proportions, one limbe to another,
And all to all the world besides:
Each part may call the farthest, brother
None thither mounts by the degree
Of knowledge, but humility.
™
To rack old Elements,
Or Dust;
and say
Sure here he must needs stay
Is not the way, nor Just.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
No darkness then did overshade,
But all within was Pure and Bright,
No Guilt did Crush, nor fear invade
But all my Soul was full of Light.
The only war that matters
is the war against the imagination.
™
Suffering is what was born
Ignorance made me forlorn
Tearful truths I cannot scorn
™
Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think.
Is it the same with you?
™
A spark of recognition and she
Mouths the words
Takes his hand
™
This Planet will survive only if
All recognize a Common Mission.
She cries loudly for us to come!
We hear, for the night’s many tongues
carry her cry across the sea.
™
tonight I am the only one who knows me
and I hallucinate.
™
Isis is the original recycler.
She recycled her man, Osiris
And added a gold phallus
Rethink what you want to do.
™
Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing,
In joy and woe, as in a doubtful ease,
For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring:
But by and by, the cause of my disease
Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,
I touch my palm. I touch it again and again.
I leave no fingerprint. I find no white scar.
It must have been something else,
Something enormous, something too big to see.
Try again
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
My dear, then I will serve.
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.
™
he would rather have clean sheets,
than my poem, but as long as I don’t bother her, she’s glad
to know I care.
The rage of courts, and noise of towns;
Contented breaths his native air,
In his own grounds.
™
I hear the bells in the sky crying, “Every being is blest.”
™
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
™
What signature shapes the vector of breath
Flowing outward?
™
And, better yet when the night is over
she can curl right up in her dress and go to sleep.
For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.
™
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
™
We are but farmers of ourselves, yet may,
If we can stocke ourselves, and thrive, uplay
Much, much deare treasure for the great rent day.
™
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known
The weariness, the fever, and the fret.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark.
™
If You wish me to leap joyfully,
Let me see You dance and sing—
Then I will leap into Love—
And from Love into Knowledge,
And from Knowledge into the Harvest,
That sweetest Fruit beyond human sense.
There I will stay with You, whirling.
The answer is yes
The wind goes nattering on,
Gossipy, ill at ease, in the damp room it will air.
I count off the grace and stays
My life as come to, and know I want less.
What you do is how you get along
What you did is all it ever means.
™
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
™
Just more waiting, with bells on,
And that Truth, is it only the FACT of WAITING,
the flash at the end.
™
I said to God, “I will always be unless you cease to Be,”
and my Beloved replied, “And Iwould cease to Be if you died.”
And the more souls who resonate together,
the greater the intensity of their love,
and, mirror-like, each soul reflects the other.
™
Where God has built his blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker’s glory seen.
™
The generations labor to possess
And grave by grave we civilize the ground.
™
Now you feel how nothing clings to you; your vast shell reaches into endless space, and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
™
Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.
Presently my soul grew stronger,
Hesitating then no longer.
™
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
™
There, in the windless night-time,
The wanderer, marveling why,
Halts on the bridge to hearken
How soft the poplars sigh.
™
We play in its skeletal maze to find
A warm rabbit moving in a deep hole.
Get up and walk out
into the first light.
I think I am going to climb back down
And open my eyes and shine.
™
May wide and towering heaven collapse upon me in all its
bronze and terror, catastrophe to the peoples of the earth,
on that day when I no longer stand by my companions,
on that day when I cease to harry my enemies.
™
He held radical light
as music in his skull: music.
™
All poets pass,
but poetry remains.
™
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
™
Once
I saved my dreams
in a jar under my bed for a week.
™
I know what we call it
Most of the time.
But I have my own song for it,
And sometimes, even today,
I call it beauty.
™
That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Need,
and need not gratified
has helped me understand
why the suicide can do it
and the alcoholic can
transcend and thereby end
his limit.
™
The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body.
™
I have no heart for wars I can’t fight
Or bombs that destroy.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.
The age
Requires this task:
Create
A different image:
Re-animate
The mask.
™
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
™
Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
™
I became You, Lord, and forgot You.
™
There’s no way out.
You were born to waste your life.
You were born to this middleclass life.
Love me in the lightest part,
Love me in full being.
™
What does not perish
Lives in thee.
Don’t wait
Futile the winds
To a heart in port—
Done with the compass,
Done with chart.
™
Even in the black waters there is the luminescence
of one who has been saved.
™
We shall remember, when our hair is white,
These clouded days revealed in radiant light.
The state of man does change and vary,
Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary,
Let the night bee too dark
for me to see Into the future.
Let what will be, be.
It is not fitted with a brake,
And endless are my verses,
Nor any yarn I start to make
Appropriately terse is.
™
The Strangler’s ear is alert for the names of Orpheus,
Cuchulian, Gawain, and Odysseus…
My first love gave me singing.
My second eyes to see,
But oh, it was my third love
Who gave my soul to me.
™
Once my life is Your gesture,
how can I pray?
™
Don’t panic
Just keep it organic.
™
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
™
Sometimes you want
A vaguer touch: I understand and won’t give assertion up.
Love rules
Nothing will be the same as once it was.
™
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
™
The calm hand holds more than baskets of goods
from the market.
™
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
™
One hour with thee! When sun is set,
Oh, what can teach me to forget
The thankless labors of the day.
The darkness from the darkness.
Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
™
A basis rock-like of love & friendship
For all this world-wide madness seems to be needed.
™
My roots are brandish’d in the heavens,
my fruits in earth beneath.
Surge, foam and labour into life, first born and first consum’d!
™
Illuminated in your infinite peace, a billion stars go
spinning through the night
™
In a hummingbird’s dance there is no bird,
only movement.
No love
No compassion
No intelligence
No beauty
No humility
Twenty-seven years is enough
™
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed
It is madness
Says reason
It is what it is
Says love.
Let be be final of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,
Dances like Italy, imagining red.
™
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
™
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
™
Where has fail’d a perfect return, indifferent of lies or the truth?
Is it upon the ground, or in water or fire? or in the spirit of man? or in the meat and blood?
™
You have forty-nine days between death and
rebirth if you’re a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim.
Maybe
Millions of observers guess all the
time, but each person, once, can say, “Sure.”
™
Let it go inside of me
and touch God.
Don’t be shy, dear.
Every aspect of Light we are meant
to know.
™
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world’s gentleman, he said.
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
™
Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be.
Love likes a gander, and adores a goose.
™
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
™
A poem spread
Across the Universe
To divine a prophecy
And affirm your dream.
™
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore,
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.
The answer is yes
O, may it be that far within
My inmost soul there lies
A spirit-sky, that opens with
Those voices of surprise?
™
If you can’t be interesting at least you can be a legend
™
The cross is up with its crying victim, the clouds
Cover the sun, we learn a new way to lose.
™
And I see you and you’re divine
and I see you and you’re a divine animal
and you’re beautiful.
™
And the man who feels superior to others,
that man cannot dance, the real dance.
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
™
the core directed to its essence.
™
Who lives in these dark houses?
I am suddenly aware
I might live here myself.
Everything changes
O, unto the pine-wood At noon of day
Come with me now, Sweet love, away.
I’d ne’er entangle
My heart with other fere,
Although I mangle
My joy by staying here.
™
My hand knows a thing of two
(remember what turned the wheel? What melted away?)
I can ask it to pluck a rose,
I can ask it to try the doors of mystery.
™
I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.
™
A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.
Imagine it, a Sophocles complete,
The lost epic of Homer, including no doubt.
His notes, his journals, and his observations
On blindness.
™
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
™
God blooms from the shoulder of the elephant
who becomes courteous to the ant.
™
How is this possible? How?
Because divine love cannot defy its very self.
Divine love will be eternally true to its own being,
and its being is giving all it can,
at the perfect moment.
No one saw your ghostly
Imaginary lover
State through the window,
And tighten
The scarf at his throat.
The calm soul knows more than
anything this world can offer
from her beautiful womb.
It is most true that the eyes are formed to serve
The inward light, and that the heavenly part.
™
Need is not quite belief.
™
My friend, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground; the quiet mind
If it but be a world of agony.—
“Whence camest though & whither goest thou?
How did thy course begin,” I said, “and why?”
™
For only cool techniques
Can forge the blue-sheened steel
And train the sword-arm’s skill.
™
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells…
™
If such a tincture, such a touch,
So firm a longing can impour,
Shall thy own image think it much
To watch for thy appearing hour?
Except the bee
Who in its
Gluttony drank
All the toxic
Honey
™
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame.
™
Tell fortune of her blindness;
Tell nature of decay;
Tell friendship of unkindness;
Tell justice of delay.
Try again
He knew it, instantly.
He consented, himself, to
The finality of
An event.
In the groves of Africa from their natural wonder
The wildebeest, zebra, the okapi, the elephant,
Have entered the marvelous.
No greater marvelous
Know I than the mind’s
Natural jungle.
™
Make feast therefore now all this live long day,
This day for ever to me holy is,
Poure out the wine without restraint or stay,
Poure not by cups, but by the belly full.
™
If through the effect we drag the cause,
Dissect, divide, anatomize,
Results are lost in loathsome laws,
And all the ancient beauty dies.
™
Truth may seem, but cannot be,
Beauty brag, but ’tis not she,
Truth and Beauty buried be.
But words came halting forth wanting Invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
“Fool,” said my muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
™
Some winter nights impel us to take in
Whatever lopes outside, beastly or kind.
™
Venemous thorns that are so sharp and keen
Bear flowers, we see, full fresh and
fair of hue:
Poison is also put in medicine,
And unto man his health doth oft renew.
The answer is no
Think of the still and the flowing.
Sometime during eternity
Some guy shows up.
™
I tell myself.—It’s dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting darker.
It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy.
™
You could say
we live in
a life vest mentality
swim for life.
™
I am the breeze that nurtures all green.
™
There is value
Underneath
The gold and silver
In my teeth.
I planted you and I will pluck you
When it’s time, said the Lord.
™
If evil did not exist
She would create it.
™
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things,
There is no armour against fate,
Death lays his icy hand on Kings.
The time is right
We breathe and
don’t breathe, lie, pass in the hall, fall
into our arms, live again gone soon.
Please call me by true names,
So I can wake up.
And so the door of my heart can be left open.
The door of compassion.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
Every morning I forget how it is.
I watch the smoke mount
In great strides above the city.
I belong to no one.
™
You ask
Why I perch
On a jade green mountain?
No virtue can be thought to have priority
Over this endeavor to preserve one’s being.
™
I saw Eternity the other night:
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright.
™
when they scraped me clean of you
i pretended
i had done this before.
™
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him
or her who shall be complete.
The answer is most definitely
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will come new pleasures prove,
Of golden sands and crystal brooks,
With silken lines and silver hooks.
Once drinking deep of the divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?
™
I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours.
™
O hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold?
™
Ask me no more where those starres light,
That downwards fall in the dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there,
Fix’ed become as in their sphere.
™
I would rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.
Pure of heart! thou needest not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be!
™
The day we die
The wind comes down
To take away
Our footprints.
™
Wet your whistle with wine now, for the dog star,
wheeling up the sky,
brings back the summer, the time all things are parched
under the searing heat.
™
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
™
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory.
Outcome likely
Wait upon it for
The edge only it gives.
™
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men
that are dying, remember him.
™
Even such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust,
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days,
And from which earth, and grave, and dust
The lord shall raise me up, I trust.
™
Nothing is free and in this truth lies the reality
that freedom is nothingness.
These two were rapid falcons in a snare,
Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
™
When we would go moving
as people do with purpose
would take apart this room stone by stone
and set ourselves outdoors
to mate with the sun.
™
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
Twelve nations
Bleed. Because I love, because
I need cherries, I cannot help them.
My happiness, bought cheap, must last forever.
™
I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the
grasses to laugh with joy of life.
™
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high.
™
With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done.
Confidently proceed
Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music.
™
When the mind becomes
Your mind, what is left to remember?
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
™
But like everyone else I learned
each time nothing new, only that
as it were, a music, however harsh, that held us
however loosely, had stopped, and left
a heavy thick silence in its place.
™
what well have you crawled out of
what wall have you recalled
From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory.
™
But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
For strong the infection of our mental strife.
™
After hours of giddy drinking and wild abandon
she found herself under the table
in only her shoes!
™
And the ground spoke when she was born.
™
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That life is ever lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own!
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
™
It isn’t true about the lambs. They are not meek.
™
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
Forgive
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb.
™
Every day I wake far away
from my life, in a foreign country.
Powered by words,
a company of voices.
In a fury he spins himself
turning upon the spit of his own burning rays,
and in a passion sings the room ablaze.
™
When the bonny blade carouses,
Pockets are full, and spirits high,
What are acres? What are houses?
Only dirt, or wet or dry.
Little think’st thou
That thou to-morrow,
ere that sun doth wake,
Must with this sun,
and me a journey take.
The living record of your memory.
’Gainst death and all-obvious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all prosperity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
™
Knowledge always deceives.
It always limits the Truth, every concept and image does.
™
The sun may set and rise:
But we contrarywise
Sleep after our short light
One everlasting night.
™
All extremes must meet;
As some old poet has said:
Out of a little earth
And heaven, was Adam made.
Be true
This morning I learned
There are no birds in Guam.
How come?
™
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
™
SUTTER MARIN swam in PLAYA ANGEL
made a pact with the angels all mad to be reborn.
™
Fearing making guilt making shame
Making fantasy and logic and game and
Elegance of covering splendour
Emptying memory of the event.
All you need to do is
Look good, and show a little skin.
™
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
™
Man is all symmetrie
Full of proportions, one limbe to another,
And all to all the world besides:
Each part may call the farthes, brother.
Don’t wait
Perhaps that’s how
It’s supposed to be?
™
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,
Hath done the wearied cords great hinderance.
Who on Love’s seas more glorious wouldst appear?
Like untuned golden strings all women are,
Which long time lie untouched, will harshly jar.
Vessels of brass, oft handled, brightly shine.
™
Only that Illumined One
Who keeps
Seducing the formless into form
Had the charm to win my heart.
She ran away in everybody’s dreams calling out like a booming flame running running into the lines
of bards and lions lovers and birds running with her arms out wide into the bright flapping dark.
™
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.
“In my youth,” father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”
™
Be still, I am content,
Take back your poor compassion
Joy was a flame in me
Too steady to destroy.
™
To your eyes, ears, and tongue, and every part.
If then your body go, what need you a heart?
In the end the devil
He always wins
You think you can out run him
But Lord how he can swim.
True love in every moment praises God.
Longing love brings a sorrow sweet to the pure.
Seeking love belongs to itself alone.
Understanding love gives itself equally to all.
Enlightened love is mingled with the sadness of the world.
™
Sad true lover never find my grave
To weep there.
™
I laugh
But say
Nothing
My heart
Free
Like a peach blossom
™
Live television of what—is a lie.
Exterminator does his job, takes his money, leaves.
In the long run of things, he knows who will survive.
™
But don’t worry!
What must come, comes.
Face everything with love,
as your mind dissolves in God.
™
One word is too often profaned For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it.
™
The night knows nothing of the chants of night
It is what it is as
I am what I am.
™
And lives go on.
And lives go on.
Like sudden lights
At street corners.
I love the dark race of poets,
And yet there is also happiness. Happiness,
If I can stand it, I can stand anything.
™
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasure might me move
To live with thee, and be thy love.
Don’t doubt yourself
I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams.
™
And that each thing exactly represents itself,
and what has preceded it.
™
And now we talk of the “inner life,”
And I ask myself, where is it?
If you have a spirit, lose it.
Lose it to return where with one word,
we came from.
Now, thousands of words, and we refuse to leave.
™
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
™
That I, above all, am chosen—even I
Must find that strange. I who was always
Disobedient, rebellious—smoked in the dining car.
™
The whimpering airs that cry by night and never
find their rest
Are sobbing to be taken in and soothed upon my breast.
The heavens say yes
How did the rose ever open its heart
and give to this world all of its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light against its being,
otherwise we all remain too frightened.
™
But where is he, the Pilgrim of my song,
The being who upheld it through the past?
™
I admit to being, at times,
Suddenly, and without the slightest warning,
Exceedingly happy.
™
I have always been at the same time
woman enough to be moved to tears
and man enough
to drive my car in any direction.
When the mind is consumed with remembrance of Him something divine happens to the heart that shapes
the hand and tongue
and eye into the word Love.
™
From cage to cage the caravan moves, but I give thanks,
for at each divine juncture my wings expand and I touch
Him more intimately.
™
Love touches love
the temple and the god are one.
™
Best of all is to be idle,
And especially on a Thursday,
And to sip wine while studying the light.
It’s your last chance
Each creature God made must live in its own true nature;
How could I resist my nature, that lives for oneness with God?
™
Love alters not with his brief hour and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
™
And an old woman with a witch’s stare
Cried “Praise the Lord!”
She vanishes on a bus
With hissing air brakes, like an incubus.
But selfless love bears an effortless fruit, working so quietly even the body cannot say how it comes and goes.
™
The miracles that magic will perform
Will make thee vow to study nothing else.
The answer is yes
For we support all, fuse all,
After the rest is done and gone, we remain.
™
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
™
But by and by the cause of my disease
Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,
When that I think what grief it is again
To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.
™
Bills, bills, bills
Thrills, thrills, thrills
Skills, skills, skills
Sometimes afraid of reunion,
Sometimes of separation:
You and I,
So fond of the notion of a you and an I,
Should live as though
we’d never heard those pronouns.
™
Peace is always beautiful,
The myth of heaven indicates peace and night.
Believe
God, whose love and joy are present everywhere, can’t come to visit you unless you aren’t there.
™
For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give
In the fire of its making,
Gold doesn’t vanish:
The fire brightens.
™
Thy liberality, exceeds my power,
Suffice it, that I thus record thy gifts,
And bear them treasur’d in a grateful mind!
Hope smiled when your
nativity was cast.
Be well assured that on our side
The abiding oceans fight.
™
As for the people—see how they neglect you!
Only a poet pauses to read the inscription.
Quoth the raven, “Nevermore”
™
How do I listen to others?
As if everyone were my Master
Speaking to me
His cherished last words.
Maybe
Wisdom is sweeter than honey, brings
more joy than wine, illumines more
than the sun, is more precious
than jewels.
™
A flower unplucked is but left to the falling,
And nothing is gained by not gathering roses.
™
I knuckled under, no regrets
but I’ve always wondered.
Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch.
In the taking of it breathe
Prayer for all who lie beneath.
Look within
Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.
™
Love is the funeral pyre where I have laid my living body.
™
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud.
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
I say them, woman-who-signifies
I light the fire
I sit like a Buddha
I feed the animals outside the door
I blow out the lamp.
™
By the high verandah pillars, by the rotting bloodwood gates.
Crowded town or dreary seaboard, everywhere some woman waits!
™
Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.
™
By the high verandah pillars, by the rotting bloodwood gates.
Crowded town or dreary seaboard, everywhere some woman waits!
The Difference Between a good artist
And a great one Is:
The novice
Will often lay down his tool
Or brush
Then pick up an invisible club
On the mind’s table
And helplessly smash the easels and
Jade.
Whereas the vintage man
No longer hurts himself or
Anyone and keeps on
Sculpting
Light.
™
The roses in the gypsy’s window in a blue vase,
look real, as unreal.
™
But O! the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!
John Milton, “Lycidas”
Ironic, but one of the most intimate
acts of our body is death.
So beautiful appeared my death—knowing who
then I would kiss,
I died a thousand times before I died.
A fish cannot drown in water,
a bird does not fall in air.
‘Is thine own heart to thine own face affected?
Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left?
™
And olden memories
Are startled from their long repose
Like shadows on the silent snows.
™
While the milder fates consent,
Let’s enjoy our merriment.
I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams
™
in egypt
they tell the days
by the strings in their beads.
™
This poem is not addressed to you.
You may come into it briefly,
But no one will find you here, no one.
You will have changed before the poem will.
™
The sky is always ours,
even though we are crowded together.
™
And out-lived illusions rise,
And the soft leaves of the landscape
Open on my thoughtful eyes.
Yearn for the good
Only a moment, as clocks can reckon,
Dwells the soul at that height of heights.
™
And grateful, that by nature’s quietness
And solitary musings, all my heart
Is softened, and made worthy to indulge
Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind.
™
Love is that that never sleeps,
nor even rests, nor stays
for long with those that do.
Love is language
that cannot be said,
or heard.
Only a Perfect One
Who is always laughing at the word
Two
Can make you know
Of
Love.
™
I was delighted with myself,
having offered everything I had;
my heart my faith, my work.
“And who are you,” you said,
“to think you have so much to offer?
It seems you have forgotten
where you’ve come from.”
™
You in whose ultimate madness we live,
You flinging yourself out into the emptiness,
You—like us—great an instant,
O only universe we know, forgive us.
Look to the weather bow,
Breakers are round thee;
Let fall the plummet now,
Shallows may ground thee.
™
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
™
All speaks of change: the renovated forms
Of long-forgotten thins arise again.
™
Such sailing and gilding,
Such sinking and sliding,
Such lofty curvetting,
And grand pirouetting
So for this night I linger here,
And full tossings to and fro,
Expect still when thou wilt appear
That I may get me up, and go.
Perhaps
I shall prosper,
I shall yet remain alive.
™
I watched you lay your athletes body down
Across the railroad earth
To make a bridge for souls
™
The rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood,
that poetry, by which I lived?
Drumsound rises on the air,
its throb, my heart.
A voice inside the beat says,
“I know you’re tired, but come.
This is the way.”
There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast.
™
Found a family, build a state,
The pledged event is still the same.
™
Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!
The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.
™
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host.
™
Poetry, he don’t work for the city.
He dumps your garbage onto a blank page.
You don’t recognize it.
You call it beautiful.
™
O, or that full bliss of though allied,
Never to mortals given,
O, la thye lovely dreams aside,
Or lift them unto heaven!
Try again
Again!
Come, give, yield all your strength to me!
™
For we are the same things our fathers have been;
We see the same sights that our fathers have seen.
™
Children can easily open the drawer that lets
the spirit rise up and wear
Its favorite
costume of mirth and laughter.
™
We know nothing until we know everything.
™
Insects on a bough floating downriver, still singing.
There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies grow;
A heavenly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
™
Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight.
™
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
™
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
It is the rain
And all the sadness in the world
Won’t make it stop.
™
I strive to mix some gladness with my strain,
But the sad strings complain,
And will not please the ear.
All signs point to yes
Loosened from the minor’s tether;
Free to mortgage or to sell.
™
In moons and tides and weather wise,
He reads the clouds as prophecies.
™
The still air moves, the wide room is less dim
Cannibals love their food and don’t hate anyone
Cannibals sing at the smell of dinner cooking
Listen to their happy music.
™
I do not own an inch of land,
But all I see is mine.
™
Slow, slow, fresh fount, keepe time with my salt teares.
™
What now?
any moment the question—the only answer!
™
He thought as a sage, though he felt as a man
™
My mind was once the true survey
Of all these meadows fresh and gay.