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.

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.

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)

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

——————
© Heidi Fischbach, 2007

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)

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”)

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)

—in Flesh and Blood

(appears in The Best American Poetry 2007)

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)

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.

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)