Five Branch Tree
2024-10-27
2024-10-25
--Maurice Manning
A gang of crows was chasing off
a hawk. The little stream was laughing
and shushing itself. The hawk's reflection
briefly blurred a pool of water
and then the pool went back to waiting
for nothing or the next reflection.
The maple trees were yellow and red,
but redder farther up the stream.
I wanted especially to share
the cloud of redder leaves upstream
with the little girl I had with me,
but she was sleeping. Walking home,
I thought the willow trees around
the pond were standing up like brooms
to sweep the sky. That was the voice
in my head describing the willow trees
as brooms, a thought to stop the world
for a moment's moment. She might have thought
the willows looked like lashes winking
around a deep-green eye,
but as I say, she was asleep
for this excursion in the world.
And she hasn't told me yet about
the voice inside her head. For the moment
that voice is learning how to listen
to its own mysterious silence. I expect
it's like a sanctuary in there
with a candle glowing at the back of the room
and violets dotting the grass outside.
2024-10-23
--Maurice ManningYou wouldn't have believed it, howthe man, a little touched perhaps,set his hands together and prayedfor happiness, yet not his own;he meant his people, by which he meantnot people really, but trees and cows,the dirty horses, dogs, the foxwho lived at the back of his place with her kits,and the very night who settled downto rock his place to sleep, the placehe tried so hard to tend he foundhe mended fences in his sleep.He said to the you above, who, let'sbe honest, doesn't say too much,I need you now up there to givemy people happiness, you letthem smile and know the reason; hearmy prayer, Old Yam. The you who's youmight laugh at that, and I agree,it's funny to make a prayer like that,the down-home words and yonder reachof what he said; and calling Godthe Elder Sweet Potato, shucks,that's pretty funny, and kind of sad.
2024-10-21
--Maurice ManningWell, this is nothing new, nothingto rattle the rafters in the noggin,this moment of rememberingand its kissing cousin the waking dream.I wonder if I'll remember it?I've had a vision of a womanreclining underneath a tree:she's about half naked and little by littleI'm sprinkling her burial moundswith grass. This is the kind of workI like. It lets me remember, and soI do. I remember the time I laidmy homemade banjo in the fireand let it burn. There was nothing elseto burn and the house was cold;the cigar box curled inside the flames.But the burst of heat was over soon,and once the little roar was done,I could hear the raindrops plopping upthe buckets and kettles, scattered outlike little ponds around the room.It was night and I was a boy, aloneand left to listen to that old music.I liked it. I've liked it ever since.I loved the helpless people I loved.That's what a little boy will do,but a grown man will turn it allto sadness and let it soak his heartuntil he wrings it out and dreamsabout another kind of love,some afternoon beneath a tree.Burial mounds—that's hilarious.
2024-10-17
--Li-Young Lee
Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
And don’t be afraid
when, eyes closed, you look inside you
and find night is both
the silence tolling after stars
and the final word
that founds all beginning, find night,
abyss and shuttle,
a finished cloth
frayed by the years, then gathered
in the songs and games
mothers teach their children.
Look again
and find yourself changed
and changing, now the bewildered honey
fallen into your own hands,
now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.
Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.
And time? Time is the salty wake
of your stunned entrance upon
no name.
2024-10-15
--Li-Young Lee
That scraping of iron on iron when the wind
rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t
quit with, but drags back and forth.
Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just
beyond the screened door, as if someone there
squats in the dark honing his wares against
my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing,
nothing and anything might make this noise
of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning
of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust,
or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows
that should not bend. Something stiffens that should
slide. Something, loose and not right,
rakes or forges itself all night.
2024-10-13
--Li-Young Lee
1.
Through the night
the apples
outside my window
one by one let go
their branches and
drop to the lawn.
I can’t see, but hear
the stem-snap, the plummet
through leaves, then
the final thump against the ground.
Sometimes two
at once, or one
right after another.
During long moments of silence
I wait
and wonder about the bruised bodies,
the terror of diving through air, and
think I’ll go tomorrow
to find the newly fallen, but they
all look alike lying there
dewsoaked, disappearing before me.
2.
I lie beneath my window listening
to the sound of apples dropping in
the yard, a syncopated code I long to know,
which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know
the meaning of what I hear, each dull
thud of unseen apple-
body, the earth
falling to earth
once and forever, over
and over.
2024-10-11
2024-10-09
--Ursula K. Le GuinYears do odd things to identity.What does it mean to sayI am that child in the photographat Kishamish in 1935?Might as well say I am the shadowof a leaf of the acacia treefelled seventy years agomoving on the page the child reads.Might as well say I am the words she reador the words I wrote in other years,flicker of shade and sunlightas the wind moves through the leaves.
2024-10-07
--Ross GayIf you find yourself half nakedand barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that saysyou are the air of the now and gone, that saysall you love will turn to dust,and will meet you there, do notraise your fist. Do not raiseyour small voice against it. And do nottake cover. Instead, curl your toesinto the grass, watch the cloudascending from your lips. Walkthrough the garden's dormant splendor.Say only, thank you.Thank you.
2024-10-05
3You'll be driving along depressed when suddenlya cloud will move and the sun will muscle throughand ignite the hills. It may not last. Probablywon't last. But for a moment the whole worldcomes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutationsof burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.It won't last, you don't want it to last. Youcan't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop.It's what you've come for. It's what you'llcome back for. It won't stay with you, but you'llremember that it felt like nothing else you've feltor something you've felt that also didn't last.--from Leaves; Lloyd Schwartz
2024-10-03
2024-10-01
--Dmitry BlizniukHere, in the countryside, death is simple and unpretentious.It goes without makeup, anda chipped log rattlesunder a dented axe.This low, big-boned tree stump(be careful, watch your step)is a guillotine for chickens.Feathers and down are stuck in the notches in the wood,like last unlit cigarettes before execution,or unsent letters to beloved ones…And autumn birches pose nude around the house:armfuls of freckles are thrown up to the cloudsand hang there,on the long, equine face of October.
2024-09-29
--Dmitry Blizniuk
There’s something about destiny
that resembles a dentist’s work:
sterility, perseverance, carefulness,
consistent cruelty,
disposable whiteness.
One day, you enter the kitchen and suddenly realize
that you’ve lost forever
this smiley summer,
this milky cloudy planet,
this slim nervous woman with green eyes.
And you put on the final movement of the Moonlight Sonata,
having no faith at all in art.
You throw a lousy witch into a fire,
expecting her to spit, swear, kick her legs.
Hah! The angered melody will soar up,
emitting smoke, the smell of sackcloth,
and the fume of uncombed felty gold of the hair.
And frightened, you close yourself off,
but the music will seep in even through the shuttered windows.
Its poisonous vapor will worm its way in.
Your body will start sweating at once,
getting covered with small drops of fright,
like hot chicken meat in a clear bag.
Oh, great music,
you work wonders
and nightmares.
2024-09-27
--Dmitry Blizniuk
Someone walks within the word Autumn,
walks on high red heels,
one floor above,
one understanding above.
Someone stops at the window,
pulls the curtains open,
and secretly admires the suntanned horsemen of the falling leaves
that prance, rearing up on their hind legs, golden and flared.
The willow at the lamp post has lost its mind;
it mourns with bowed head,
dropping green saliva on the ants.
Then, later,
late at night,
the moon will come up,
it will be thin like an eyelid —
a teacher with a birthmark on her face
will take a crowd of stars-second-graders
on a trip above the night city.
2024-09-23
When the immense drugged universe explodesIn a cascade of unendurable colourAnd leaves us gasping naked,This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal loveWhich alone, as we know certainly, restoresFragmentation into true being.--Robert Graves; Ecstasy of Chaos
2024-09-21
--Donald Justice
The lights in the theater fail. The long racks
Of costumes abandoned by the other dancers
Trouble Celeste. The conductor asks
If she is sad because autumn is coming on,
But when autumn comes she is merely pregnant and bored.
On her way back from the holidays, a man
Who appears to have no face rattles the door
To her compartment. How disgusting, she thinks;
How disgusting it always must be to grow old.
Dusk falls, and a few drops of rain.
On the train window trembles the blurred
Reflection of her own transparent beauty,
And through this, beautiful ruined cities passing,
Dark forests, and people everywhere
Pacing on lighted platforms, some
Beating their children, some apparently dancing.
The costumes of the dancers sway in the chill darkness.
Now sinking into sleep is like sinking again
Into the lake of her youth. Her parents
Lean from the rail of a ferryboat waving, waving,
As the boat glides farther out across the waves.
No one, it seems, is meeting her at the station.
The city is frozen. She warms herself
In the pink and scented twilight of a bar.
The waiter who serves her is young. She nods assent.
The conversation dies in bed. Later,
She hurries off to rehearsal. In the lobby,
Dizzy still with the weight of her own body,
She waits, surrounded by huge stills of herself
And bright posters announcing events to come.
Her life—she feels it closing about her now
Like a small theater, empty, without lights.
2024-09-19
--James Davis MayIt’s rare, but it happens:A waterspout forms near landand raptures the fish to the sky.We’re not quite sure what happens next.Well, we know that many die,that some are shredded by the winds,that some are frozen into chunks of ice,and that some, some surviveeven after the cyclone stops,and they exist up there a while.Maybe they’re pummeledbut supported by the currentsin the clouds, the way you keepa tennis ball in the airwith a single racket—kept upuntil they aren’t and fall,and even then some surviveto drown on land. What must it be liketo die after that ascension?Before, life was so much hungerand short-lived satisfaction,but mostly buoyancywithout knowing that wordor any word. Yes, they’re dumb,but surely they know or sensesomething is ending,one eye focused on the groundthe other on the lost sky—and the water an absence,a memory they can’t remember,while that human sound of wonderstarts up when they’re foundand can’t, I imagine, help them.
2024-09-17
2024-09-15
--William StaffordEven in the cave of the night when youwake and are free and lonely,neglected by others, discarded, loved onlyby what doesn’t matter—even in thatbig room no one can see,you push with your eyes till forevercomes in its twisted figure eightand lies down in your head.You think water in the river;you think slower than the tide inthe grain of the wood; you becomea secret storehouse that saves the country,so open and foolish and empty.You look over all that the darknessripples across. More than has everbeen found comforts you. You open youreyes in a vault that unlocks as fastand as far as your thought can run.A great snug wall goes around everything,has always been there, will alwaysremain. It is a good world to belost in. It comforts you. It isall right. And you sleep.
2024-09-13
--William E. StaffordYou will walk toward the mirror,closer and closer, then flowinto the glass. You will disappearsome day like that, beingmore real, more true, at last.You learn what you are, but slowly,a child, a woman, a man,a self often shattered, and piecesput together again, till the end:you halt, the glass opens--A surface, an image, a past.
2024-09-11
Everything that happens is the message:you read an event and be one and wait,like breasting a wave, all the while knowingby living, though not knowing how to live...And sometimes no one is calling but we turn upeye and ear—suddenly we fall intosound before it begins, the breathingso still it waits there under the breath—And then the green of leaves calls out, hillswhere they wait or turn, clouds in their frenziedstillness unfolding their careful words:“Everything counts. The message is the world.”— William Stafford, from "A Message From Space"
2024-09-09
2024-09-03
2024-09-01
EverydaySome ideas don't hide in the hillsexisting because we are intendedto go find them, but fly the sameas wind does what it does, as seaslift on spaces called by the moon.It is not an effort it is somewherehere nearby where time is patiencefor its own dissolve, for what isdefinable by what resides beingspontaneous inside the common.Today at breakfast followed alongwith a cup of coffee which is music.Or a form of stillness presented informs of phrases and measures, setto the length of feeling attention.So, yesterday then tomorrow as realas tomorrow that becomes yesterday,both folded within the cover livingthrough the present, only graspedby a mutual exchange of milliseconds.What makes for a draft of historywhile I then chart my own routesbut those too, those too.... simplestnews with sunlight, quartered silence,hover of irreconcilable fragments.None too different than a left shoenot knowing the pace of its direction.Have it be meek or might, this leadsas it does and defined in the spiritof choice and what follows is next.Sunset again, a drink from the earthsatiated with original natural color.Memory of a child who felt thoughtgrowing relation as an imaginationof grass, dewdrops born with stars.
2024-08-30
2024-08-28
--Muriel RukeyserIt's like a tap-danceOr a new pink dress,A shit-naive feelingSaying yes.Some say Good morningSome say God blessSome say PossiblySome say yes.Some say NeverSome say UnlessIt's stupid and lovelyTo rush into Yes.What can it mean?It's just like life,One thing to youOne thing to your wife.Some go localSome go expressSome can't waitTo answer yes.Some complainOf strain and stressThe answer may beNo for Yes.Some like failureSome like successSome like Yes YesYes Yes Yes.Open your eyesDream but don't guess.Your biggest surpriseCome after Yes.
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