Resurrecting my Billy Collins crush.

Naomi Shihab Nye: "nod briefly and become a cabbage"

Too Many Names (by Pablo Neruda)

(“Demasiados Nombres” translation Heidi Fischbach)

Monday tangles up with Tuesday
and a week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your tired scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed away by the night.

No one can be called Pedro,
nor Rosa, nor María.
All of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain within rain.
I’ve been told of Venezuelas,
of Paraguays and of Chiles,
and I don’t know of what they speak:
I know the skin of the earth
and it has no last name.

When I lived among roots
they pleased me more than flowers,
and when I spoke to a stone
it rang out like a bell.

Springtime is so long
when it lasts all winter:
time has lost his shoes,
a year contains four centuries.

Every night when I sleep,
what am I called or not called?
And when I awake, who am I
if I was not myself while I slept?

What this means is that just
as we’re stepping foot in life,
just as we are newly being born,
let us not fill our mouths
with so many insecure names,
with so many sad labels,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much yours and so much mine,
with so much signing of papers.

I intend to confuse things,
to join them and newly birth them,
mix them up, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the oneness of the ocean,
a generous vast wholeness,
a fragrance that crackles.

I ask for silence (Pablo Neruda)

(Translation Heidi Fischbach
Read Neruda’s original, inimitable “Pido Silencio” here!)

Now if you’d leave me in peace.
Now if you’d get on without me.

I am going to close my eyes

And I only want five things,
five favorite roots.

One is love without end.

Second is to see autumn.
I cannot be without leaves
flying and returning to earth.

Third is grave winter,
the rain I loved, the caress
of a fire in a wilderness of cold.

In fourth place is summer
round like a watermelon.

The fifth thing is your eyes,
Matilde, my love, my beloved,
I would not sleep without your eyes,
I don’t want to be without your seeing me:
I’d trade springtime
for your gaze still upon me.

My friends, all of that is what I want.
Nearly nothing and nearly everything.

And now if you wish you may go.

So much have I lived that one day
you’ll have to will yourselves to forget me,
erasing the blackboard of me:
my heart was endless.

But just because I ask for silence
don’t go thinking I’m about to die:
it’s quite the contrary:
as it turns out I’m going to be lived.

It just so happens that I am and I keep being.

I will not be dying for within me
grains will grow,
first the kernels that break through
the earth to see light,
but mother earth is dark:
and inside me I am dark:
I am like a well in whose waters
the night sky leaves her stars
and goes on alone through the fields.

This is about my having lived so much
that I want to live another much.

Never have I felt such resonance,
never have I had so many kisses.

Now, as always, it is early.
The light takes flight with her bees.

Leave me alone with this day.
I raise my hand to be born.

The hour is striking (Rainer Maria Rilke)

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All my becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.”

-Rilke’s Book of Hours
(translated by Johanna Macy & Anita Barrows)

Adage (by Billy Collins)

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

(from Ballistics by Billy Collins 2008 Random House)

Check out my blog entries related to Billy Collins: Me and Billy Collins and Laughing with Billy Collins

August moon

I fell asleep with a full moon
beaming on my leg
and I could not sleep
without putting moon on paper
so I wrote this in the dark
by light of said moon
while a fan whirled moon-air
onto moon-beamed leg
and I said to myself:
it is good to be alive.

——————
© Heidi Fischbach, 2007

For the anniversary of my death

(by W.S. Merwin)

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

(Read Heidi’s musings inspired by this poem)

Gate C22 (Ellen Bass)

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching —
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after — if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now — you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

(from The Human Line a collection filled with “intimate images, and wild metaphors, [bringing] attention to life’s endearing absurdities”)

Secret Places (Rumi)

Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.

Reason says, Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.

Love says, There are.

Reason sets up a market
and begins doing business.
Love has more hidden work.

Hallaj steps away from the pulpit
and climbs the stairs of the gallows.

Lovers feel a truth inside themselves
that rational people keep denying.

It is reasonable to say, Surrender
is just an idea that keeps people from leading their lives.

Love responds, No. This thinking
is what is dangerous.

Using language obscures
what Shams came to give.

Every day the sun rises
out of low word-clouds
into burning silence.

(in Rumi Bridge to the Soul)

Failure (c. k. williams)

Maybe it’s not as bad as we like to think: no melodramatic rendings, sackcloths, nothing so acute as fantasies of conscience chart in their uncontrollably self-punishing rigors and admonitions.

Less love, yes, but what was love: a febrile, restless, bothersome trembling to continue to possess what one was only partly certain was worth wanting anyway, and if the reservoir of hope is depleted, neither do distracting expectations interfere with these absorbing meditations on the frailties of chance.

A certain resonance might be all that lacks; the voice spinning out in darkness in an empty room.

The recompense is knowing that at last you’ve disconnected from the narratives that conditioned you
to want to be what you were never going to be, while here you are still this far from “the end.”

—in Flesh and Blood

Hide-and-Seek, 1933 (Galway Kinnell)

Once when we were playing
hide-and-seek and it was time
to go home, the rest gave up
on the game before it was done
and forgot I was still hiding.
I remained hidden as a matter
of honor until the moon rose.

(appears in The Best American Poetry 2007)

The Man Watching (Rainer Maria Rilke)

(translation by Robert Bly)

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

(appears in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: a poetry anthology, p. 298 — fair use intended)

Wilderness (by Carl Sandburg)

THERE is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess … I pick things out of the wind and air … I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers … I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates … I scurried with shoals of herring … I blew waterspouts with porpoises … before land was … before the water went down … before Noah … before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me … clambering-clawed … dog-faced … yawping a galoot’s hunger … hairy under the armpits … here are the hawk-eyed hankering men … here are the blond and blue-eyed women … here they hide curled asleep waiting … ready to snarl and kill … ready to sing and give milk … waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want … and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

The Art of Disappearing (Naomi Shihab Nye)

When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.

Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say we should get together.
say why?

It’s not that you don’t love them any more.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

(read a transcript of Bill Moyers interviewing Naomi Shihab Nye here)

Archetypes (C. K. Williams)

Often before have our fingers touched in sleep or half-sleep and enlaced,
often I’ve been comforted through a dream by that gently sensitive pressure,
but this morning, when I woke your hand lay across mine in an awkward,
unfamiliar position so that it seemed strangely external to me, removed,
an object whose precise weight, volume and form I’d never remarked:
its taut, resistant skin, dense muscle-pads, the subtle, complex structure,
with delicately elegant chords of bone aligned like columns in a temple.

Your fingers begin to move then, in brief, irregular tensions and releasings;
it felt like your hand was trying to hold some feathery, fleeting creature,
then you suddenly, fiercely, jerked it away, rose to your hands and knees,
and stayed there, palms flat on the bed, hair tangled down over your face,
until with a coarse sigh almost like a snarl you abruptly let yourself fall
and lay still, your hands drawn tightly to your chest, your head turned away,
forbidden to me, I thought, by whatever had raised you to that defiant crouch.

I waited, hoping you’d wake, turn, embrace me, but you stayed in yourself,
And I felt again how separate we all are from one another, how even our passions,
Which seem to embody unities outside of time, heal only the most benign divisions,
That for our more abiding, ancient terrors we each have to find our own valor.
You breathed more softly now, though; I took heart, touched against you,
and, as though nothing had happened, you opened your eyes, smiled at me,
and murmured—how almost startling to hear you in your real voice—“Sleep, love.”

———————
© 1999 C. K. Williams, Repair. Fair use intended.

Longing and Wonder (Myra Shapiro)

“Talk to Myra you talk to the wall,”
Mama announced when I lived

so long in my head. Behind
my lids was where I fit.

O world, be small enough to hold me,
slow enough to let me swallow.

Maybe I belonged back inside her. Or
beneath the spine of a book. Maybe

among tall buildings to incubate
between their legs. The warm kitchen

was never for me though I wanted
to shine. Passion I called

the pressure wrestling underneath.
Yesterday, in an audience listening to

my first book of poems,
a full professor asked me: “Longing,

how is it different from wonder?”
Astonished, jack-lit as a robber

caught with the goods, I felt my eyes
struggle to withdraw—and then

in longing you close your eyes,
but in wonder you open them.

When those words went
ZINGing through the lovely room,
you bet your sweet ass they opened.

———-
-Myra Shapiro, published in The Best American Poetry 1999 © 1999 Simon & Schuster. Fair use intended.

The Uses of Sorrow (Mary Oliver)

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

—Mary Oliver in Thirst

Quiet Friend (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be the bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself into wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.

——————
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part 2, XXIX

Shadow and Light (by Rumi)

How does
a part of the world
leave the world?
How does wetness
leave water?

Don’t try to put out fire
by throwing on more fire!

Don’t wash a wound
with blood.

No matter how fast you run,
your shadow keeps up.

Sometimes it’s in front!

Only full overhead sun
diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow
has been serving you.

What hurts you,
blesses you.

Darkness
is your candle.

Your boundaries
are your quest.

I could explain this,
but it will break
the glass cover
on your heart,
and there’s no fixing that.

You must have
shadow and light source
both.

Listen,
and lay your head
under the tree of awe.

When from that tree
feathers and wings
sprout on you,
be quieter than a dove.

Don’t even open your mouth
for even a coo.

From The Soul of Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks.
© Copyright, 2001, Harpercollins. Fair use intended.