Monday and Missing

I am missing any responses to my renewed blogging. As I have said I want to hear what others are saying and doing. Otherwise I am talking to the ether. I can do that without all this laborious one handed typing!  So far spending my morning on the IPad. Sent Brandy to buy some more food that fits my eating program. Not missing the sugar as much as the starches. Checked the market(making money this week) and also tuned in to the latest Trump madness. Read some of Gurdjieff and Game of Thrones. Played some video games. My window shade remote needs batteries. Won't go up so I have no view of the outside world. Miss it too. Took a couple of quizzes. One of them telling me I must have an IQ of 150c. I doubt this. Most of my good marks in school  came from hard work. Scored high on a grammar test which surprised me as I hated it when in school.Hope the ether is enjoying this as I doubt anyone else is. I will just grump off❗️

Saturday Musings

I am delighted with our warmer weather as I can get out in my powerchair and enjoy some fresh air and a change of scenery. I hope to soon make my first trip to the mall to see all the changes done by the renovation. I mean solo trip. I have gone enough with Brandy that I  am familiar with where I can ingress and egress the sidewalk . My adventures are small but they still feel like adventures. I am watching the Pebble Beach golf tournament this weekend. The weather has been bad so the course is not presenting as beautiful as usual. Must be one of the most beautiful sites in the world. Welcomed my niece, Eileen Sartell as a friend on FB this morning. Happy to see that at least one Mullen is anti Trump!  I have been increasingly enjoying my new friend, Aaron Arce. We email and exchange poetry and talk for long periods on the phone. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever met and although he now lives in San Diego I hope to meet him some day. He has had some unique spiritual experiences and is familiar with all the notables in spirituality and psychology. I was disappointed this week when my friend Sharon had to care for a sick husband and had to cancel our outing to Desert Botanical to see the new Buttrtfly show. Marth and I saw it a few years ago and it was a delight. Have some medical stuff coming up soon, dentist, nephrologist, primary care and cardiologist. May also include dermatologist. No serious problems, just checkups.  Looking forward to our celebration party for Sara's birthday hosted here by Amy. Love, loyalty and
a love of celebration all a big factor in our family. We are blessed! Must announce my return to blogging in my status if I want any dialogue going on. Happy Saturday to all my FB family!

Here Again

I retrieved my old blog today and are continuing it. I look forward to posting new poems and random thoughts. Hope to engage readers in conversation about whatever  I may introduce. Here we go!

Still. Here(apologies to Ram Dass)

A Bouquet of Poetry

The image above is  of The Garden of the Poets located in Seville, Spain. It  is an appropriate image for the bouquet of verses that I choose to share with you today. In a recent poem, Ode to Rilke and Other Poets Who Go Deep, I thanked these poets for the tools they used to help wake me up. I will be showing you examples of these tools by selecting verses that I find especially powerful. (I know some of you are not poetry fans so you might want to stop reading right here).

I'll begin with a very young poet whose life was very short. In his poem "About the Author" he writes:

I am Mattie J.T. Stepanek
My body has light skin,
Red blood, blue eyes and blond hair.
Since I have mitachrondrial myopathy,
I even have a trach, a ventilator and oxygen.
Very poetic, I am and very smart, too.
I am always brainstorming idea and stories.
I am a survivor, but some day I will see,
My two brothers and one sister in Heaven.
When I grow up I plan to become
A father, a writer, a public speaker,
And most of all a peacemaker.
Whoever I am and whatever happens,
I will always love my body and my mind,
Even if it has different abilities
Then other peoples' bodies and minds.
I will always be happy, because
I will always be me.

Michael Ondaatje makes a contribution as he calls to one of my favorite poets Rilke.

Oh, Rilke, I want to sit down calm like you
or pace the castle, avoiding the path ot the cook, Carlo,
who believes down to his turnip soup
that you speak in the voice of the devil.
I want the long lines my friend spoke of
that bamboo which sways muttering
like wooden teeth in the slim volume I have
with its childlike drawing of Duino Castle.
I have circled your book for years
like a wave combing
the green hair of the sea
kept it with me, your name
a password in the alley...........


And in a poem entitled Light he remembers various family members whose tintype photos line his walls..

Midnight storm. Trees walking off across the fields in fury
naked in the spark of lightning,
I sit on the white porch on the brown hanging cane chair
coffee in my hand midnight storm midsummer night.
The past, friends and family, drift into the rain shower,
Those relatives in my favourite slides
re-shot for old minute photgraphs so they now stand
complex ambiguous grainy on my wall.

This is my Uncle who turned up for his marriage
on an elephant. He was a chaplain..........

My Grandmother, who went to a dance in a muslin dress
with fireflies captured and embedded in the cloth, shining
and witty. This calm beautiful face
organized wild acts in the tropics..........

Adyashanti in his poem I Will Not Whisper challenges us like a sword run through the heart.

I want to speak to you about Love
about how you deny yourself
its slightest entry
about how much you truly fear
Love's silent embrace.

I want to talk to you
about what you will not
allow yourself to see---
about that beauty inside
that you turn your face from.

Yes, I want to talk to you
You who have somehow
found a way to hide within a sliver of darkness
cast upon the pure light of Being.

I want to talk to you.
I will not whisper.............

More straight talk in A Tendency to Shine

If you prefer smoke over fire
then get up now and leave.
For I do not intend to perfume
your mind's clothing
with more sooty knowledge,
No, I have something else in mind.

Today I hold a flame in my left hand
and a sword in my right.
There will be no damage control today.

For God is in a mood
to plunder your riches and
fling you nakedly
into such breathtaking poverty
that all that will be left of you
will be a tendency to shine..........

Robert Bly, noted poet and translator offers the following comment in his translation of Tomas Transtromer's The Half-finished Heaven. Transtromer recently received the Nobel prize for poetry.
Bly writes:  "It was Rilke who created the metaphor that poets are "bees of the invisible."  Making honey of the invisible suggests that the artist remains close to his own earthly history,but moves as well toward the spiritual and the invisible.  As an artist, Transtromer seems to be steadied by such effotst, and by the example of other European poets who have done so."

An excerpt from one of Transtromer's poems-

The five instruments play. I go home through warm woods
where the earth is springy under my feet,
curl up like someone still unborn, sleep, roll on so weight-
lessly into the future, suddenly understand that plants
are thinking.....

a musician himself and very influenced by music he addresses Listz:

When Liszt plays tonight he holds down the sea-pedal so that
the ocean's green force
rises through the floor and penetrates every stone of the building.
Good evening to you, beautiful deep!

And of himself he writes:

I dreamt that I had sketched piano keys out
on the kitchen table. I played on the without a sound.
Neighbors came by to listen.

Joe had a friend and teacher at Loyola, Fr. Ed Ingebretsen, SJ. Ed is a gifted poet. He gave me the gift of a book containing the drafts of poems soon to be published in a book entitled Psalms of the Still Country.
Here is a poem he wrote to Joe in 1981


The grace of surprise--
as perhaps sudden rain
to my heart is,
as the quick quiet of peace
is, following the storm.

Joseph
it rains in my heart
and the winds blow a choir
when I consider
how you surprise me.

You teach me beauty
and its one great terror:
Longing.
How our hands reach
always beyond what they catch.

In your image all I long for
--the eternals and meanings
of the good, final God--
take form, flesh,
stretch into sudden possibility.

You have the seasons
of the sea: the churn
and toss, the restlessness
of water going deep.
May I say: you remind me
of me, without the tatters.

Joe, I've always feared
to come undone--that is,
touched by God
and made over--
and love
always undoes me
like a shoelace.

thank you.

I spent a summer up in Taos some years ago. My neighbor, Mary Johnson was a poet. From her book Comets and Carnelians I have chosen the poem Stone Rabbit. He was very familiar to me as I gazed upon him outside my window for two months as I worked on my book Mstory,

Stone Rabbit

Beneath the giddy hollyhock,
In scarlet, gold and lavender of garden
opulence,
He sits immobile but alert,
One glassy eye attentive to the gate
Where children shout their way from school
on Don Fernando Road.
His paws immersed in sweet alyssums's foam,
His nose impervious to insect cavalcade,
He stolidly endures the sumer sun.
The dousing of the careless watering can
And all the weather's vagaries
Until the day when frigid temperatures
Persuade us that it's time to come indoors.
(Why should his cousins, basking, bronze,
beside the fireplace
Not share that winter warmth?)
And so while gardens dream their grateful
sleep in featherbeds of snow,
The two of us - I restlessly,
Stone rabbit imperturbable--
Wait out the months to hyacinthine spring.


And why not add a bit of the exotic  with some of of Allen Ginsberg's Footnote to Howl?

------The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphmi! the madman is
holy as you my soul are holy!

And on and on he gloriously goes.

And speaking of glory here is some Rilke--

I have many brothers in the South.
Laurels stand there in monastery gardens.
I know in what a human way they imagine the Madonna,
and I think often of young Titians
through whom God walks burning.

Yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself
my God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred  roots, that drink in silence.

And-

I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep.
My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying...
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that the one that will be still the soonest.
...in the dark interval, reconciled
--they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.

I will complete the bouquet with a bit of Rumi. More gloriousness.

What I most want
is to spring out of this personality,
then to sit apart from that leaping.
I've lived too long where I can be reached

I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from
 the inside!

My work is to carry this love
as comfort for those who long for you,
to go everywhere you've walked
and gaze at the pressed-down dirt.

For those of you who love poetry as I do inhale the perfume of today's bouquet sent to lift your heart.

Finding Our Voice

Finding Our Voice
This is a very rough draft but I wanted to make a beginning when this poem began to speak. It will need a lot more work.

Finding Our Voice

Like thousands of leaves
on a tree
no two alike,
we flutter in the
winds of the world.

Yet how early
we lose our voice,
forget who we are.

 Other voices
form us.
Tell us who we are.
Soft whispers of kindness
Sometimes the cutting
indifference of silence
or the searing scorn of
"You will never be
enough."

But do we go into
the dying of Autumn?
The voices turning
red, gold and the dead
brown
of so many leaves
falling to the ground.

Leaving us standing
naked,
Winter's stark tree,
against an empty sky.

Do we look deep within
the living core
 down
past the roots
where our own voice
in darkness
waits to speak?

Bummed over ASU's loss last night. Seems after all the hype that they have a ways to go as a team to stay ranked.
Watching the Cards play the Redskins this afternoon and also the final round of the BMW at Cog's Hill in Chicago. Delighted to see Phil Mickelson in full ASU colors at the ASU game last night. He had no more to smile about than the state of his golf game of late.
Still fighting the virus I have had for three weeks. Some days feeling pretty good, some dreadful. I am doing a liquid diet today to give the intestinal tract a rest.
Busy week coming up. Ralph over on Monday to see what he can do about repairs to my T-Bird.
Phil and Marth to work on Tuesday. Blood lab at one. Stop at Walgreen's for a bunch of birthday cards. Christy over in the evening to watch the series opener of NCIS with me. Wednesday free.
Thursday Phil comes to work again. Friday Shauna will come to meet with Danny and I. We may have lunch. Possible movie that evening with Dorothy. Saturday brunch with Ame at Arcadia and Sunday brunch at the Biltmore with the Keenan's and the Mike Welty's to celebrate the birthdays of Joe and Jim. Where is my hermit life????

Ode to Rilke (and the poets who go Deep)

I have been moved to reread Robert Bly's translation from the German of a selection of Rilke's poems.
I will write more about that later. Today is a busy chore day and includes both golf and football. But I was inspired to do a first draft of a poem and want to get it down while I can still hear it's voice.


Ode to Rilke (and the poets who go Deep)

I want to thank the poets
whose soft-seeming words
become hammers of steel,
iron feathers of fierce grace,
tools to wake me up.

But I sit like a bird
in the golden cage
of my twenty-four seven life.
Gazing with yearning
at the open door,
afraid to fly.

I feel the agony
of being torn
between the safety
of the known
and the roaring desire
to shed Rilke's "husk"
to lie down at Adya's words
"Rest and be taken."

More on Rilke and Bly after chores, golf and football.