A Note to Strangers

Let your last April poem be a note to strangers.  Imagine putting it in a bottle to be found floating at sea.  Imagine tacking it to random rural telephone poles like a lost dog poster. What is your poem’s message to strangers?  Make it short and somehow a central learning of your life so far.

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“I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now.” ― Mary Oliver

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This Paper Boat

Carefully placed upon the future,

it tips from the breeze and skims away,

frail thing of words, this valentine,

so far to sail.  And if you find it

caught in the reeds, its message blurred,

the thought that you are holding it

a moment is enough for me.

Ted Kooser

in Valentines

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The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver

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One Loss Folds Itself Inside Another

One loss

folds itself inside another.

It is like the origami

held inside a plain sheet of paper

Not creased yet.

Not yet more heavy.

The hand stays steady.

Jane Hirshfield

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…a self in exile is still  a self,

as a bell unstruck for years

is still a bell.

Jane Hirshfield

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Kind

I hadn’t noticed

till a death took me outside

and left me there

that grass lifts so quietly

to catch everything

we drop and we drop

everything.

Leonard Nathan

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Rise up nimbly

and go on your strange journey

to the ocean of meanings

Rumi

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The Sad Game

Blame

Keeps the sad game going

It keeps stealing all your wealth —

Giving it to an imbecile with

No financial skills.

Dear one,

Wise

Up

Hafiz/ Ladinsky version

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From the beginning

the flying birds have left

no footprints on the blue sky

Miso Soseki

Translated by W.S. Merwin

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In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures.

We can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together,

learn the flowers

go light.

Gary Snyder

from For the Children

The old saying for plain, direct speech is “tell it in words of one syllable.”

Robert Pinsky

Try a poem that uses only words of one syllable.  To make it harder, you might even forbid your poem the use of any form of the verb “to be.”  This will push you into non-Latinate language and short active verbs.  It is interesting to observe how these restrictions complicate and alter expression.  It is difficult to find examples of poems written with only single syllable words.  It is less difficult to find poems you could easily translate into words of one syllable. This first poem Pinsky found is sort of dark.

Tichborne’s “Elegy”

………Written with his own hand in the tower before his execution.

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,

My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,

My crop of corn is but a field of tares,

And all my good is but vain hope of gain.

The day is gone and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,

The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,

My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,

I saw the world, and yet I was not seen,

My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,

I looked for life and saw it was a shade,

I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,

And now I die, and now I am but made.

The glass is full, and now the glass is run,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

….….……………….….….….—Chidiock Tichborne

(1558-86)

(from an article by Robert Pinsky)

How did I make it?

My heart’s not the same as yours.

If your heart was like mine

You’d get it and be right here too.

Han Shan/Gary Snyder

from Cold Mountain Poems

Monosyllabics I

I once sat on a log

at the edge of a field

in the dark with a man,

a friend, we talked.

We watched a star, a small ball

of fire,  shoot an arc

down through the night

to land in the corn.

“Oh my God!”  We yelled.

“Did you see that?”

A rock from space still sits

out there now in that field.

No one will know it if they find it.

It has turned tame and cool.

I can’t tell you the grand point,

just the gist of this small tale.

You must make your own point—

small as a rock, big as the sky.  Try.

jch 3/26/13a

II

Bright white

bounced light

great plate

eye of night

full moon.

jch 3/27/13

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April 27th

Dream Prompt

Dreams, it has been said, were the first poems and stories told around the fire in ancient tribal cultures. Write a poem about a dream, or dreams, or dreaming.

Empire of Dreams

                        Charles Simic

On the first page of my dreambook

It’s always evening

In an occupied country.

Hour before the curfew.

A small provincial city.

The houses all dark.

The storefronts gutted.

I am on a street corner

Where I shouldn’t be.

Alone and coatless

I have gone out to look

For a black dog who answers to my whistle.

I have a kind of Halloween mask

Which I am afraid to put on.

Dream

Elizabeth Bishop

I see a postman everywhere

Vanishing in thin blue air

A mammoth letter in his hand,

Postmarked from a foreign land.

The postman’s uniform is blue.

The letter is of course from you

And I’d be able to read, I hope,

My own name on the envelope

But he has trouble with this letter

Which constantly grows bigger & bigger

And over and over with a stare,

He vanishes into blue, blue air.

Sleep is the best meditation.

                                                The Dalai Lama

“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”

Bob Dylan

In Praise of Dreams

                        Wislawa Szymborska

In my dreams

I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek

and not just with the living.

I drive a car

that does what I want it to.

I am gifted

and  write mighty epics.

I hear voices

as clearly as any venerable saint.

My brilliance as a pianist

would stun you.

I fly the way we ought to,

i.e., on my own.

Falling from the roof

I tumble gently to the grass.

I’ve got no problem

breathing under water.

I can’t complain:

I’ve been able to locate Atlantis.

It’s gratifying that I can always

wake up before dying.

As soon as war breaks out,

I roll over on my other side.

I’m a child of my age,

but I don’t have to be.

A few years ago

I saw two suns.

And night before last a penguin,

clear as day.

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Aprll 28

Title Search (not for Lawyers)

“An ideal poem: every line of it

can serve as the title for a book.”

Vera Pavlova

in Heaven is not Verbose: a Notebook

Poetry Magazine April 2012

When I read the quotation above, I started a little notebook of titles.  It made me begin to hear titles everywhere.

Make a poem out of titles.  They might be:

titles of poems you have yet to write,

titles of yet unwritten songs,

imagined titles of your novels,

chapter titles for your novels or memoir,

titles for children’s books,

titles for chapters in a quirky, imagined nonfiction book.

But somehow the titles should hang together as a poem and introduce an element of mystery.  This exercise is great if you are a poet who has trouble escaping sentence structure as I do.

Table of Contents

                                     Elaine Equi

Spree

Monster Gardens

Up Close, Out Back, Down Under

Flying Backward

The Drunken Voluptuary Workers in the Sanatorium

Dove Sighting

All The Yellow in the World

A Curse I Put on Myself

Three Sides of the Same Coin

Aria

Night Cream

Good Luck With Your Chaos

The Glass Stagecoach

In the Country of Mauve

Parrots and Dictators

Slumming

Walking the Evening Back Home

A Twelve-Course Dinner of Regret

The Gap Gatherer

Burning Down the Ocean

Multiple Choice

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April 29th

A Tentative Autobiography

Write an abbreviated autobiography (like Vera Pavlova’s), a Curriculum Vitae (like Lisel Mueller’s), or a poetic evasion of your life story (as in Mary Oliver’s poem).

A tentative bio:

caught fireflies,

read till dawn,

fell in love with weirdos,

cried buckets of tears

for reasons unknown,

birthed two daughters

by seven men.

Vera Pavlova

Translated from the Russian

by Steven Seymour

Curriculum Vitae   Lisel Mueller  1992



1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.

2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into 
confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of 
course I do not remember this.

3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The 
world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.

4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building 
with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.

5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones 
and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.

7) My country was struck by history more deadly than 
earthquakes or hurricanes.

8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother 
told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.

9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights 
of adolescence.

10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun 
and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed 
behind in darkness.

11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually 
I caught up with them.

12) When I met you, the new language became the language 
of love.

13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. 
The daughter became a mother of daughters.

14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying 
threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left 
unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate 
present.

15) Years and years of this.

16) The children no longer children. An old man’s pain, an 
old man’s loneliness.

17) And then my father too disappeared.

18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my 
childhood, but it was closed to the public.

19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone’s face was younger 
than mine.

20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are 
breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.

From Dogfish

Mary Oliver

You don’t want to hear the story

of my life, and anyway

I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

To the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story

A few people just trying

One way or another,

to survive.

Mostly I just want to be kind.

And nobody, of course, is kind,

or mean

for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to

Swim through the fires to stay in

This world.

Attention

Write a poem about attention or one that directs an especially keen attention to something around you.

Attention is the rarest

and purist form of generosity.

Simone Weil

For the person with attention,

every day

becomes the very day

upon which all the world depends.

Rami M. Shapiro

To keep the constant habit

of conscious attention

would be to master

ceaseless prayer.

jch

Poetry asks of us

what we yearn for deeply —

to be present in each moment.

Baron Wormser

The saddest part of being

human is not paying attention.

Presence is the gift of life.

Steven Levine

There are no poetic subjects

only subjects to which we pay

the right kind of attention.

Marge Piercy

The moon’s the same old moon,

The flowers exactly as they were,

Yet I’ve become the thingness

Of all the things I see.

Bunan (1603-1676)

When it is over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

Mary Oliver

from When Death Comes

Sometimes,

walking for hours through the woods,

I don’t now what I’m looking for,

maybe for something

shy and beautiful to come

frisking out of the undergrowth.

Mary Oliver

                                    from  1945-1985:

Poem for the Anniversary

Witness

Denise Levertov

Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.

 Praying

            Mary Oliver

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones: just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

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 April 24th – Hearty Prompt

Your poem will come from the heart and talk about the heart.

“Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.” Gordon Lish

Go Deeper than Love

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,

love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock

molten, yet dense and permanent.

Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.

And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.

Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.

For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths

out of sight, in the deep living heart.

D.H. Lawrence

from Know Thyself, Know Thyself More Deeply)

One Heart

Look at the birds. Even flying

is born

out of nothing. The first sky

is inside you, friend, open

at either end of day.

The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening

one heart to every falling thing.

Li-Young Lee

Every morning I walk like this around

The pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart

Ever close, I am as good as dead.

Mary Oliver

from “Landscape”

…….Over and over

it does this, bends to what asks.

Whatever asks, heart kneels and offers to bear

Jane Hirshfield

from What the Heart Wants

The human heart —

That tender engine.

Love revs it;

Loss stalls it.

What can make it

Go again?

The poem, the poem.

Gregory Orr

The Heart as Origami

                        Jane Hirshfield

Each one has its shape.

For love, two sleeping ducks.

For selfless courage, the war-horse.

For fear of death, the day lily’s one-day flower.

More and more creased each year, worn paper thin,

and still it longs for them all.

Not one of the lives of this world the heart does not choose.

Every morning I walk like this around

The pond, thinking: if ever the doors of my heart

Ever close, I am as good as dead.

Mary Oliver

from Landscape

….Over and over

it does this, bends to what asks.

Whatever asks, heart kneels and offers to bear.

Jane Hirshfield

from What the Heart Wants

Poetry exists because the heart rebels

Against the suppression of its inner life

Christina Viti

Poetry is that

which arrives at the intellect

by way of the heart.

R.S. Thomas

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April 25th – The Moon on Center Stage

Write a poem in which the moon sings on center stage and is not merely part of the backdrop.

Above the quiet dock in midnight,

Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,

Hangs the moon.  What seemed so far away

Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

T.E. Hulme

Scraps of Moon

Denise Levertov

Scraps of moon

bobbing discarded on broken water

but sky-moon

complete, transcending

all violation.

Glimpse Between Buildings

Now that the moon is out of a job

it has an easy climb, these nights,

finds an empty farm where a family could live,

slides over the forest—all those

million still violins before they are

carved—and follows those paths only air

ever uses.  I feel my breath follow

those aisles and stumble on the moon

deep in forest pools….

Moon, you old unsinkable submarine,

leaf admirer, be partly mine,

guide me tonight along city streets.

Help me do right.

William Stafford

The full moon last night,

a high, huge door,

kept asking me to knock.

But though I followed

in my little red car,

and my heart reached

as the moon climbed,

I got no closer.

Would I have been happier

home in my dark bed

without this child’s task

of chase and reach?

No way!

Lift, reach, laugh –

the very gesture becomes the door

while the moon face smiles down –

and yes I have knocked,

am knocking.

jch 7/13/2003

The Moon

At dead of night

The darkness seems to have deepened,

To the call of geese

The sky is listening; across it

Appears the passing moon.

Hitomaro

Japanese 7^th century

When the moon sails out

the sea covers the earth

and the heart feels it is

a little island in the infinite.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Bly translation

Light of the moon

moves west, flowers’ shadows

creep eastward.

Buson

The inner tide —

what moon does it follow?

I wait for a poem.

Diane Di Prima

April 20th The Old Chinese Poet  II

Be an old Chinese poet or talk to or about one. Go anywhere you want with this.  The old Chinese poets were engaged with an immense wilderness. Theirs was a calm spirituality of wildness.

They had Buddhist and/or Taoist acceptance of “everything burgeoning from the emptiness through transformations and back into emptiness.” (Hinton)

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Mountain Dialogue

Li Po

Translated by David Hinton

You ask why I have settled in these emerald mountains:

I smile, mind of itself perfectly idle, and say nothing.

Peach blossoms drift streamwater away deep in mystery

here another heaven and earth, nowhere people know.

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From Cold Mountain Poems

Gary Snyder

In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place—

Bird-paths but no trails for men.

What’s beyond the yard?

White clouds clinging to vague rocks.

Now I’ve lived here — how many years —

Again and again, spring and winter pass.

Go tell families with silverware and cars

“What’s the use of all that noise and money?”

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Thoughts on a Night Journey

                  Tu Fu

Trans: Arthur Sze

A slight wind stirs grasses along the bank.

A lone boat sails with a mast in the night.

The stars are pulled down to the vast plain,

And the moon bobs in the river’s flow.

My name will never be famous in literature:

I have resigned office from sickness and age.

Drifting and drifting, what am I

But a solitary gull between earth and heaven?

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River Snow

                  Lin Tsung-Yuan

                  Translated by David Hinton

A thousand peaks: no more birds in flight.

Ten thousand paths: all traces of people gone.

In a lone boat, rain cloak and hat of reeds,

an old man’s fishing the cold river snow.

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Tu Fu

         Wendell Berry

As I sit here

in my little boat

tied to the shore

of the passing river

in a time of ruin,

I think of you,

old ancestor,

and wish you well.

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The Old Poets of China

                           Mary Oliver

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.

It offers me its busyness. It does not believe

that I do not want it.  Now I understand

why the old poets of China went so far and high

into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

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April 21st

A Simple Form with Candor

Write a poem in the simple form of the poem below.  The trick is to make it meaningful, not merely simplistic.  The form has four-syllable lines and four-line stanzas.  Try one with only four stanzas.

The poem below has a funny/serious flickering of candor/condor in the content as well as lots of playing with sound.

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Save the Candor

Amit Majmudar

Every tripod-

toting birder

knows it never

nests on urban

girders. Even

fences set its

scalded-crimson

head askew, its

waddle swinging,

wings akimbo.

Few have got it

on their lists and

fewer still have

caught it singing,

this endangered

North American

candor, cousin

of the done in

dodo, big-eyed

Big Sur tremor-

Tenor — only

ten or twenty

hang glide over

Modoc County.

Humbly numbered

(as their days are)

for us crazy

crown- and throat – and

belly-gazers.

Any niche as

fragile as a

candor’s renders

its extinction

certain.  We can

sabotage its

habitat with

half a laugh or

quarter murmur,

fluster coveys

worth of candors

off their branches,

which, abandoned,

soon are little

more than snarking-

grounds for minor

birds, the common

snipe, the yellow-

bellied bittern.

Poetry magazine

March 2013

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April 22nd

More Starting Places

Bounce off these, incorporate several, use one as an epigraph, work from them any way you choose to arrive at your poem.

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Talking too much about yourself is like

wearing your clothes inside out.

Anna Kamienska

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….even our names are made of fire

and we feed on night.

W.S. Merwin

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The house shakes with the rumble of trains.

Carol Lem

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The root of all that dazzles you is in your heart.

Nancy Willard (translating Francis Ponge)

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When my heart falls out of my pocket,

It cracks like an egg on the sidewalk

Deborah Brown

————————————————————

If you think you hear somebody knocking

On the other side of the words pay

No attention.

W.S. Graham

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Night comes so people can sleep like fish

in black water.

Rumi/Barks

—————————————————————-

Take the tiny pieces and see if you

Can make a life from them, I mean

One you could love.

Deborah Brown

———————————————————

I hear I’ve been made the match vendor

of the great dark night of the soul.

Charles Simic

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Late birds rowing home across bright spaces

W.S. Merwin

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…I have woven a parachute out of

everything broken: my scars

are my shield.

William Stafford

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What a war must be fought for

simplicity

Dean Young

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Poems are paperweights

Ballast to keep our words

From floating away.

Elaine Equi

——————————————————

One must have a mind of many breezes

to fly a kite…

Dean Young

——————————————————-

Let one by one things come alive like fish

And swim away into their future waves.

William Stafford

———————————————

Just because we have birds inside us,

we don’t have to be cages.

Dean Young

———————————————

Something is always tumbling

Down the steps in my chest

Carrying a birthday cake.

I want what I get.

Dean Young

The trimeric is a form that I understand was invented by Dr. Charles A. Stone. They are fun to write. A trimeric has four stanzas.  The first stanza is four lines.   The second, third and fourth stanzas are each three lines long.

The second line of the first stanza becomes the first line of the second stanza.

The third line of the first stanza becomes the first line of the third stanza.

The fourth line of the first stanza becomes the first line of the fourth stanza.

It is a very simple form, but moves down the page like a slinky on the stairs, in much the same way that a pantoum does.

If we wait every day

on poetry’s front porch,

sooner or later

something surprising appears.

On poetry’s front porch

the worn rockers know

the rhythms of life.

Sooner or later,

as you rock the rhythms,

the word children gather.

Something essential appears —

the word children shout and run out

toward it with open hearts.

jch 9/21/2012b

Do you have

to be no one

to enter

the emptiness?

To be no one

one must step

beyond ego.

To enter

the eye of the needle

unload your camel, your baggage.

The emptiness

is really the fullness.

Don’t you just love paradox?

jch 9/24/2012a

Telling Time

Jeanne Poland

Introduced the “clock-man” to my 4 year old:

Little hand, big hand, forward move: one, two, three.

Time passes on the clock, on the calendar too

But touchstones stay the same for you and me.

Little hand, big hand, forward move: one, two, three.

Tick-tock, click-clock arrows speed to lead

Us to the dreams we paint: the hopes, the deeds.

Time passes on the clock; on the calendar too

Weeks, to months, to years, to lives…

Then on to memories worn on our hides, insides, tribes.

But touchstones stay the same for you and me.

The elders molt to spirits; the new reach for our care

Our nostrils scent the musk of need and nurture everywhere.

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Just Beyond Words

In a poem, talk about the attempt to put into words that which is essentially ineffable.  Fill your poem with image.

A Tao of Poetry

(an excerpt) Sam Hamill

Each word carefully

tied to the next, the poem

is a net, and no

single knot is strong enough

to bear the burden alone.

Some nets are small, cast

for shrimp or herring.  Some nets

are meant to hold whales.

In the ecology of

the poem, the fish is not

prey, but the surprise

catch of the day, a diamond

in the coal, a way

of awakening to something

just beyond what words can say.

Let’s go in search

of the nearly silent poem

which delivers us

to the blue door

and smiles

gentle encouragement

as we struggle out

of our everyday thoughts

to try on

the ineffable

extraordinary,

always dancing

outside any circle

words can draw.

jch 1/17/2009

Everything

I want to make poems that say right out, plainly,

what I mean, that don’t go looking for the

laces of elaboration, puffed sleeves.  I want to

keep close and use often words like

heavy, heart, joy, soon, and to cherish

the question mark and her bold sister

the dash.  I want to write with quiet hands.  I

want to write while crossing the fields that are

fresh with daises and everlasting and the

ordinary grass.  I want to make poems while thinking of

the bread of heaven and the

cup of astonishment; let them be

songs in which nothing is neglected,

not a hope, not a promise.  I want to make poems

that look into the earth and the heavens

and see the unseeable.  I want them to honor

both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;

the gladness that says, without any words, everything.

Mary Oliver

(New and Selected Poems Volume Two)

Writing the Poem

                  Gary Holthus

Trying for some

Clean economy

These things I left out…

The arduous journey, the drifts,

The boots, the pain;

Any discussion of death.

What was left was hope

For essence of

Movement, of cold;

Of emptiness and loss.

The idea, lean

As a needle

Sharp as the edge

Of shadow

Trying to close

That thing straining toward me

The ultimate openness

The poem without words

The indelible thing itself

Prompted into Happiness

Write a happiness poem rich in image.

If happiness is elusive, not quite imaginable for you right now, write about its very elusiveness.

———————————————————————————

Today I was Happy

So I Made This Poem

                                 -   James Wright

As the plump squirrel scampers

Across the roof of the corncrib

The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,

And I see that it is impossible to die.

Each moment of time is a mountain

An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,

Crying

This is what I wanted.

 ———————————————————————————–

Why I am Happy

-  William Stafford

Now has come an easy time. I let it

roll.  There is a lake somewhere

so blue and far nobody owns it.

A wind comes by and a willow listens

Gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer. I laugh

and cry for every turn of the world,

its terribly cold, innocent spin.

That lake stays blue and free;

it goes on and on.

And I know where it is.

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from  Happiness

                       - Raymond Carver

Happiness.  It comes on

unexpectedly.  And goes beyond, really,

any early morning talk about it

So Much Happiness  (middle stanza)

Naomi Shihab Nye

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But happiness floats.

It doesn’t need you to hold it down.

It doesn’t need anything.

Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,

and disappears when it wants to.

You are happy either way.

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house

and now live over a quarry of noise  and dust

cannot make you unhappy.

Everything has a life of its own,

it too could wake up filled with possibilities

of coffee cake and ripe peaches,

and love even the floor which needs to be swept,

the soiled linens and scratched records….

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Why

                  - Wendell Berry

Why all the embarrassment

about being happy?

Sometimes I’m as happy

as a sleeping dog,

and for the same reasons,

and for others.

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from Happiness

                        - Jane Kenyon

There’s no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away

Write a poem about darkness, within or without — physical darkness or the dark night of the soul.

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Out of whatever we have been

We will make something for the dark.

Philip Levine

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If a man wishes to be sure of the road

he treads on, he must close his eyes

and walk in the dark.

Saint John of the Cross

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Near Sheridan

                                   - Robin Becker

How neatly the world divides

in half after sunset in Wyoming.

All the loneliness

sinks below the plush, dark

silhouette of buttes and cottonwoods.

Into the huge, light sky rises

Hope, our best intentions,

tomorrow’s weather.

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Night Hike 

-Meg Hutchinson

You do not know the woods

Til you’ve wandered them at night

I go there at dusk

So my eyes will adjust to the slowly dying light

I hug the lake when I practice this

I’ve learned to step my feet high

The dressage of navigating rocky paths,

In this I must resemble some awkward horse

Half prance, half stumble

I never bring a light I would forget to see the forest,

My friends do not approve of this

They mention coyotes and the psychopaths, the mother bear

They’ve never been out here

Felt the heat the stones hold long after the sun’s gone down

Sat so quiet they could hear the hiss of bat wings

Watched the path grow luminous beneath their feet

I’m always startled when I reach the car

Looking back over my shoulder

The woods so black now

It seems impossible I’ve just come through

It’s best to practice darkness

A little each day

One year it lasted months

And I was not ready.

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Eye Mask

            Denise Levertov

In this dark I rest,

unready for the light which dawns

day after day

eager to be shared.

Black silk, shelter me

I need more of night before I open

eyes and heart

to illumination.  I must still

grow in the dark like a root

not ready, not ready at all.

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…the candles flutter on the stairs of your voice

gold in the dark…

W.S. Merwin

——————————————————————————

To fling my arms wide

In some place of the sun,

To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done.

Then rest in cool evening

Beneath a tall tree

While night comes on gently

Dark like me —

That is my dream!

Langston Hughes

Somehow like Brautigan  

Write a short poem or several poems with a warm, earnest absurdity like the poems below — an absurdity that isn’t random but dances with the shadow of whatever truth you see.

————————————

A Candlelion Poem

-       for Michael

Turn a candle inside out

and you’ve got the smallest

portion of a lion standing

there at the edge of the shadows. - Richard Brautigan

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I Cannot Answer You Tonight in Small Portions

I cannot answer you tonight in small portions.

Torn apart by stormy loves gate, I float

like a phantom facedown in a well where

the cold dark water reflects vague half-built 
stars

and trades all our affection, touching, sleeping

together for tribunal distance standing like

a drowned train just beyond a pile of Eskimo

skeletons.

Richard Brautigan

From ‘The Pill v. the Springhill Mine Disaster.’

———————————-

In the dark

money is like

the dreams of

the fish repairman.

Reed Mollins

————————————————————

The train rattles orange.

I forgot something.

I knew I would forget it.

The bag had a brush and a clock

and a candle.

All practical and expensive.

I hear orange.

The train.

Slink Moss  April 28, 2012

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Karma Repair Kit: Items 1—4

                                    Richard Brautigan

1.     Get enough food to eat

and eat it.

2.     Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,

and sleep there.

      3.   Reduce intellectual and emotional noise

                                 until you arrive at the silence of yourself,

                        and listen to it.

      4.

Exercise in Conversing with Trees

Go ahead, talk to the trees in your poem.

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What I like about the trees is how

they do not talk about the failures of their parents,

and what I like about the grasses is that

they are not grasses in recovery

and what I like about the flowers is

that they are not  flowers in need of

empowerment or validation. - Tony Hoagland in “Social Life”

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Always

-William Stafford

Inside the trees, where tomorrow

hides along with years, tomorrow

stirs.  And there my sisters

never born touch lips to bark

and begin to sing.

Brother of Air, Brother of Sun,

please tell our story, that we

may live in the brief wind.

Wherever I stand I hear the trees

petition so.  By listening

I know I’m born.  By turning

The forest back toward itself

I live as a friend of trees:

Listen together; be ready

You may be born. I touch the bark

And call deep as I can:

Part of me.

—————–

Song of the Trees

The wind

only

I am afraid of.

Native American

Translated by Frances Dansmore

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jch 7/10/2003

Teach Me, Trees

Shadows rule

the early day

before the trees

rein them in

to the corrals

beneath their

canopies.

Teach me, trees,

your dancing secrets:

how to swing

shadow partners

while you keep

your radiant

faces

lifted.

With undulating limbs,

you whisper

wind harmonies

for ever so small

an audience

or none.

Teach me.

What Berryman Said to Merwin

just one time he suggested

changing the usual order

of the same words in a line of verse

why point out a thing twice

W.S. Merwin

in  “Berryman”

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(he said)…you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don’t write

W.S. Merwin

in  “Berryman”

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Write a poem that messes with the expected word order in your lines to the effect that sense is not totally obscured but that the poem’s mystery is enhanced.    You might write your poem first in a more conventional linear language and then experiment with minor jumbling and omissions.  Work with one of your earlier April poems, if you wish, to create a tangled twin. (exercise credit Janet Cady Hutchinson)

At the top of the veins I hear

the finger on the bowstring

I hear my feet continuing

upward I hear you

hair in wind

I learn from you of the bare slope

where you are nowhere in sight

so we climb the mountain together after all

even with it between us

W.S. Merwin - from” Kore”

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A second option would be to write about not knowing the worth of your creations in this lifetime.

I don’t need to know, do you?

we write just because we do —

same as we climb out of bed

or pull on socks.

jch 3/13/13c