As I Sit Staring...

As I sit staring out of my window
Wasting time which the traffic does not waste,
Nor any of the passers by in the street
Who keep time with time as they go
Measuring the seconds with their feet,
In their minds riding the crested tide
On white horses of pursuant days I think of you, James, at another window
With your stubby hands relaxed and your blue gaze
Invaded by a sense of emptiness,
Startled as if a gust of air,
Had blown through the interstices
Of your mind and hair,
Ruffling your forehead with a puzzled despair.
But I have learned lately that the spaces
And the timeless loneliness
Of the unfruitful waste spaces,
The desert, the untidy room, and the hour
Between waking and sleep,
Are windows opened onto power
Where we become most what we are,
When the conscious eye and ear
Are severed from what they see and hear
And in the hollow silent blackness deep,
Living tunes and images flower.

- Stephen Spender

"In the church there were always few people;

Natasha and Mrs. Belov would stand in their usual place before the icon of the Mother of God, built into the back of the left-hand choir, and a new feeling of humility would come over Natasha before the great, the unknowable, when at this unaccustomed hour of morning, looking at the blackened face of the Mother of God lit by candles and the light of the morning coming from the window, she listened to the words of the service, which she tried to follow and understand. When she understood them, her personal feeling, with its nuances, joined with her prayer; when she did not, the sweeter it was for her to think that the wish to understand everything was pride, that it was impossible to understand everything, that she only had to believe and give herself to God, who in those moments—she felt—was guiding her soul.”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”

When the Moon is Out in the Daytime

I was born at six in the morning so I’ve known more days

than nights. They’re piled up behind me like Corvettes

fit for the crusher; to embrace the absence

out of them, to make more room for the days to come.

Fact: if all the empty space between our electrons

and protons were squeezed out, you and I would fit

in this bucket.

You look injured, moon; a third empty, and two-thirds full

of bright white snake oil. Maybe that’s why you’re up

in the corner of the afternoon, too broken to rest.

Your nightshift starts in a few; rocking the oceans to and fro.

I’ve got plans for tonight: I’ll drive into its blankness

and just maybe it’ll be a classic. A night as perfect

as a racehorse or a fresh layer of frost.

When the day has finally talked itself out, we’ll co-create

a romance. Your bloodglow a searchlight; me revving

the engine. The radio’ll be playing and it’ll go like this:

- Tim Craven

A Map of Love

Your face more than others’ faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.

- Donald Justice

Primer

And what if you have nothing?

I pick up a stick. Yes, that’s always first.

And next? I see what I can see around me.

Find the sun or moon. Find high ground.

Find north by where the moss grows.

Yes. Now close your eyes. Find them.

The sun’s behind. I can feel it

on my neck. High ground’s to my right.

North’s ahead. Yes. And the wind?

The wind’s west. It cools my left temple.

Yes. And next? If I can bug out

I bug out. Otherwise I go high

and dig a foxhole and tie something bright

above me. You forget something.

Right—first I cut my name in the dirt,

then I go high. Yes. And next?

I walk a loop with my bright thing in sight.

If I find a better stick I switch for it.

Yes. And if you need to cry?

I crawl inside my foxhole and cry.

And what do you tell yourself as you cry?

Someone’s coming. Yes. And what if

no one comes? Each hour I call

in all directions. I listen. Yes.

And what do you listen for?

Sounds that shouldn’t be there. Yes.

Sounds that should be there but aren’t.

Yes. And what have you heard

since we started? A bird. Yes. Another bird

far away. Yes. A gust in the trees.

Yes. Your voice, if your voice counts.

Yes, my voice counts.

- Anders Carlson-Wee

At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop

I, detaching myself from the human I, Henri,
without thick eyeglasses or rubberized white skin,
stretched out like a sinewy cat in the brown grass
to see what I felt, wrapping my tail around me,
hiding my eyes.
                I slept. I waited. I sucked air,
instead of milk. I listened to pigeons murmuring.
Scratching my ear, I couldn't tell if I was male or female.
The bundled energy of my life drifted along
somewhere between pain and pleasure,
until a deerfly launched an attack
and anger, like a florist's scissors,
pinched the bright chrysanthemum of my brain.
Overhead, the long enfolding branches,
weighted down with Venetian green,
suffused the air with possibility.
I felt like a realist, recovering from style.
Grief and dignity swirled around discreetly,
transferring to me an aura of calm,
as I lay in a shawl of gold light,
licking my paws, licking my throat,
my smooth imperturbable face revealing nothing,
even when I thought about my first loves,
surface and symbol, rubbing against me,
humping in the shadows, making my whole body tremble.
I purred, watching an iridescent blue beetle
imbibe chlorophyll from a leaf.
I flared my nostrils, hearing a starling
splash in an amphora of rainwater.
With my paws in the air, exposing my ripe belly,
I rubbed my spine, a little drunk on the ultraviolet rays
and on myself, I confess.
Then the sky cleared. Birds were flying.
I felt a deep throbbing, as from a distant factory,
binding me to others, a faint battering of wings against glass
that was the heart in the lovely dark behind my breast,
as I was crouching to tie my shoelaces,
feeling strange in the meaty halves of my buttocks,
until I sprinkled a little earth on my head,
like Hadrian reunited with the place he loved.

- Henri Cole

From I Corinthians

“For the body is not one member, but many.

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.

And if they were all one member, where were the body?

But now are they many members, yet but one body.

And the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.

Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble. are necessary:

And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.

For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to the part which lacked.

That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another.

And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.”

- I Corinthians 12:14 - 12:26

Nikolushka and his upbringing, Andre, and religion

were Princess Marya’s comforts and joys; but, besides that, since every human being needs his personal hope, Princess Marya had in the deepest recesses of her soul a hidden dream and hope, which provided the main comfort of her life. This comforting dream and hope were given her by the people of God—the fools for Christ and wanderers who visited her in secret from the old prince. The longer Princess Marya lived, the more of life she experienced and observed, the more astonished she was at the shortsightedness of people who sought pleasure and happiness here on earth; who worked, suffered, struggled, and did evil to each other to achieve this impossible, illusory, and fallacious happiness. “Prince Andrei loved his wife, she dies, it’s not enough for him, he wants to bind up his happiness with another woman. Father doesn’t want it, because he wants a more aristocratic and wealthy marriage for Andrei. And they all struggle and suffer, and torment and ruin their souls, their eternal souls, to achieve blessings that last a moment. Not only do we know it ourselves—Christ, the Son of God, came down to earth and told us that this life is a momentary life, a trial, yet we keep holding on to it and hope to find happiness in it. How is it no one understands that?” thought Princess Marya. “No one except these contemptible people of God, who come to me at the back door with bags over their shoulders, afraid of being noticed by the prince, not because they would suffer from him, but so as not to lead him into sin. To leave family, birthplace, all cares for worldly goods, so as to walk, without clinging to anything, in coarse rags, under an assumed name, from place to place, without harming people, and praying for them, praying for those who persecute and for those who protect: there is no truth and life higher than this truth and life!”

There was one woman wanderer, Fedosyushka, a fifty-year-old, small, quiet, pockmarked woman, who had been walking barefoot and in chains for thirty years already. Princess Marya had a special love for her. Once, when in the dark room, by the light of the icon lamp, Fedosyushka was telling about her life, the thought that Fedosyushka alone had found the right way of life suddenly came to Princess Marya with such force that she herself decided to go wandering. When Fedosyushka went to bed, Princess Marya thought about it for a long time, and finally decided that, however strange it was, she had to become a wanderer. She confided her intention only to her father confessor, the monk Akinfy, and the monk approved of it. Under the pretext of a gift for the wanderers, Princess Marya provided herself with a full wanderer’s outfit: a shirt, bast shoes, a kaftan, and a black kerchief. Often, going to the secret chest, Princess Marya would pause, unable to decide whether the time had come to fulfill her intention.

Often, listening to the stories of the women wanderers, she would become excited by their simple talk, mechanical for them, but full of deep meaning for her, so that several times she had been ready to drop everything and flee the house. In her imagination, she already saw herself and Fedosyushka in coarse rags, walking with a stick and a bag down a dusty road, guiding her wandering without envy, without love of human things, without desires, from one holy place to another, and in the end to the place where there is no sorrow or sighing, but eternal joy and bliss.

“I’ll come to one place and pray; before I have time to get used to it and love it, I’ll go on. And I’ll keep going until my legs give out, and I lie down and die somewhere, and come finally to that eternal, quiet haven, where there is no sorrow or sighing!…” thought Princess Marya.

But then, seeing her father and especially little Coco, her intention would weaken, she would weep in quiet and feel she was a sinful woman: she loved her father and her nephew more than God.

- Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”

Manna

I do remember some things
times when I listened and heard
no one saying no, certain
miraculous provisions
of the much prayed for manna
and once a man, it was two
o’clock in the morning in
Pittsburg, Kansas, I finally
coming home from the loveliest
drunk of them all, a train chugged,
goddamn, struggled across a
prairie intersection and
a man from the caboose real-
ly waved, honestly, and said,
and said something like my name.

- James Tate


A Short, Slow Life

We lived in a pocket of Time.
It was close, it was warm.
Along the dark seam of the river
the houses, the barns, the two churches,
hid like white crumbs
in a fluff of gray willows and elms,
till Time made one of his gestures;
his nails scratched the shingled roof.
Roughly his hand reached in,
and tumbled us out.

- Elizabeth Bishop

Peaches

There were signs, I suppose. First she stopped lining up with the other kids for ice-cream sandwiches and chocolate bars. No dessert, she said.

Then it was her hair: too greasy, she said, and her skin too shiny. At the drugstore she wanted many things.

Later her eyelids were lapis and her lips were cherries. Something glinted in her navel. She was ready to go, she said.

Still later she folded into herself, unmoving, her skin pale as milk.

A bunch of them clustered at the stove, lustrous as peaches. I could almost see the sap surging up, stretching and curving them, and I tried not to panic. The magazines, the billboards, the boys, the men, a whole world full of sirens and songs.

Oh, my girls, my girls, caws the crow from high in the branches. How short and fragile the spring.

- Marion Winik

Dutch Elm

I miss the elms, their "crowns of airy dreams,"
as Virgil calls them, their towering cathedral branching
spread into a ceiling above the lonely sidewalks of Ohio
where the first elm deaths were reported in America.
I miss in particular the perspective looking down
the distances of all those Elm-named streets disappearing
into dusk, the last sun turned the stained blue of church windows.
I miss standing there, letting the welcome dark make me invisible.
I miss the birds starting to sleep, their talking in their songs becoming
silent, then their silence. I even miss not standing there.
And I miss a life of nothing but such moments, as if they'd never
happened and all you had to go on was their memory
and the feeling in the memory forgotten but brought back
again and again because you miss someone you loved forever.

- Stanley Plumly

Lines for Winter

for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself — inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars. And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are.

- Mark Strand

From Romans

“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?

But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.”

Romans 8: 23 - 25

"Having read to this point, he crumpled the letter and threw it down.

It was not what he read in the letter that made him angry; what made him angry was that the life there, now foreign to him, could excite him. He closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead with his hand, as if driving away all concern for what he had read, and began listening to what was happening in the nursery. Suddenly he seemed to hear some strange noise behind the door. Fear came over him; he was afraid something had happened to the baby while he was reading the letter. He tiptoed to the door of the nursery and opened it. The moment he went in, he saw that the nanny was hiding something from him with a frightened look, and that Princess Marya was no longer by the crib.

’My friend,’ he heard behind him what sounded like the desperate whisper of Princess Marya. As often happens after long sleeplessness and long anxiety, a groundless fear came over him: it occurred to him that the baby had died. Everything he saw and heard seemed to him to confirm his fear. ‘It's all over,’ he thought, and cold sweat broke out on his forehead. Bewildered, he went over to the crib, certain that he would find it empty, that the nanny was hiding the dead baby.

He opened the curtain, and for a time his frightened, unfocused eyes could not find the baby. At last he saw him: the red-cheeked boy lay sprawled across the crib, his head lower than the pillow, smacking and moving his lips in his sleep, and breathing regularly. Prince Andrei, on seeing the boy, was as glad as if he had already lost him. He bent down and, as his sister had taught him, tested with his lips whether the baby had a fever. The tender forehead was moist; he touched his head with his hand—even the hair was wet: the baby had sweated so much. Not only had he not died, but it was obvious now that the crisis was past and that he was getting well. Prince Andrei wanted to snatch up, to squeeze, to clutch to his heart this helpless little being; he did not dare to do it. He stood over him, gazed at his head, his arms, his legs outlined under the blanket. He heard a rustling beside him, and some shadow appeared under the canopy of the crib. He did not turn and, gazing at the baby's face, kept listening to his regular breathing. The dark shadow was Princess Marya, who had come over to the crib with inaudible steps, raised the canopy, and lowered it behind her. Prince Andrei recognized her without turning to look, and reached his hand towards her. She pressed his hand.

‘He's been sweating,’ said Prince Andrei.

‘I was coming to tell you that.’ The baby stirred slightly in his sleep, smiled, and rubbed his forehead against the pillow. Prince Andrei looked at his sister. Princess Marya's luminous eyes, in the dim halflight of the canopy, glistened more than usual from the happy tears that welled up in them. Princess Marya leaned towards her brother and kissed him, catching slightly in the canopy of the crib. They shook their fingers at each other and stood a little longer in the dim light of the canopy, as if reluctant to part with that world in which the three of them were separated from everything on earth.”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace'“

Of the Surface of Things

I

In my room the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
            hills and a cloud.

II

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
“The spring is like a belle undressing.”

III

The gold tree is blue.
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

- Wallace Stevens