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.
