[ Soul and Tears ; Laurel Burch ]

 

 

Canto XXXIII

--Dan Beachy-Quick

slow gold, everlasting

forsythia behind the eyes it’s spring

spare no arrows, sparrows

empty the quiver of song

swallows quick allow the earth

a slow life never touched

hyacinth with his head wound never healing

a purple wound in the long spring behind the eyes

owl loud in the old dark wood

who darkens the night and how

in the galingale a lonely hour

the nightingale keeps awake all night

cassandra burns her hand on the cornerstone

the widow looks out the window

pulling apart her grief an empty loom

in the fig trees that fringe the field warblers

sing the dust that blurs the war

the crow puts on another crow’s armor, borrows

a crown, limps away to battle

how surrender but not submit is this the ethic

arms around the knees of whom, who’s there the air

the thrush from distant epochs hushes

the fatherless epic where the child cries

a jar on a hill fills with darkness, the nightjar

sucks milk from a sleeping goat

the logic of dew in the morning is not the logic of noon

a heedful retreat in the face of being

what dampens the blade dampens the root

the earth’s bitter turn, the wind blows west

and the wheat bends, but not the bittern

once again the robin woke me at dawn…

once again the robin woke me…

the cloud is a rock spiritually magnified

the mind is a cloud condensed truth forgets itself

what is narcissus doing now still looking down

into the pool so long ago become air what is the rain

 

Onta

--Dan Beachy-Quick

No ceremony for the initiation into facts—

Only patience that is not time. The fist

Of the mind grows roots and greens into a fern.

The fern of the mind suffers a solar age

And becomes what it suffers—the sun is not

A star, but a flower. A voice in the eternal

Honey says, What is needed is to think with the flower

Of the mind. Suffer is a word meaning many words—

Endure, experience. The flower endures the sun

By eating it. I only say I when no other word

Will do. What is the world is the world, what is

Not is not. That is the nectar thought. A hive

Or is it a cloud, knowledge gathering darkly above,

Hiding lightning, hiding stings. When the air

Clenches its fist and strikes a blow the sky is clear

Again. More clear than it’s ever been. The day-shy

Stars peek out behind the blinding veil, so very faint,

The snail’s glistening path draws her singular line

West behind the mountains, and already, it’s true,

The eye on its delicate horn trembles up in the east,

That snail, the moon. The humble mind hums.

Gnosis knows. There are no words. Just a tune.

 

Final Lesson in First Philosophy

--Dan Beachy-Quick

The sun brightens the clouds before it breaks

them apart. On the far side of the ocean

there are marble ruins of the broken

temples: the temple each cloud is. Ruin

is faith’s consequence—to house the force

that tears the house apart. The sun is

the yellow shield buckled on to the throat

of the sun-throated warbler—it says

with no words song’s unspeakable fact.

Silence is faith’s consequence—a world of

knowing that knowing is a world of not.

The book called The Sun held a fact one could love

but have no faith in. Close the book. Think,

thinker, in the dark. Moon—quiet the lark.

 

[ Morning ; Mikhail Vrubel (1897) ]

 

 

Clear Morning

--Louise Glück

I've watched you long enough,

I can speak to you any way I like--

I've submitted to your preferences, observing patiently

the things you love, speaking

through vehicles only, in

details of earth, as you prefer,

tendrils

of blue clematis, light,

of early evening--

you would never accept

a voice like mine, indifferent

to the objects you busily name,

your mouths 

smal circles of awe--

All this time

I indulged your limitation, thinking

you would cast it aside yourselves sooner or later,

thinking matter could not absorb your gaze forever--

obstacle of the clematis painting

blue flowers on the porch window--

I cannot go on

restricting myself to images

because you think it is your right

to dispute my meaning:

I am prepared now to force

clarity upon you.

 

Matins

--Louise Glück

The sun shines; by the mailbox, leaves

of the divided birch tree folded, pleated like fins.

Underneath, hollow stems of the white daffodils, Ice Wings,

........Cantatrice; dark

leaves of the wild violet. Noah says

depressives hate the spring, imbalance

between the inner and the outer world. I make

another case — being depressed, yes, but in a sense passionately

attached to the living tree, my body

actually curled in the split trunk, almost at peace, in the evening rain

almost able to feel

sap frothing and rising: Noah says this is

an error of depressives, identifying

with a tree, whereas the happy heart

wanders the garden like a falling leaf, a figure for

the part, not the whole.

 

Snowdrops

--Louise Glück

Do you know what I was, how I lived?  You know

what despair is; then

winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,

earth suppressing me. I didn't expect

to waken again, to feel

in damp earth my body

able to respond again, remembering

after so long how to open again

in the cold light

of earliest spring--

afraid, yes, but among you again

crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

 

[ Apple Blossoms ; Octav Bancila ]

 

 

Were the endlessly dead

to awaken some symbol,

within us, to indicate

themselves, they might

point to the catkins

dangling from the leafless

branches of the Hazel trees.

Or speak in drops of rain

falling to dark earth

in early spring.

Then we,

who have known joy

only as it escapes us,

rising to the sky,

would receive the

overwhelming benediction

of happiness descending.

--from Tenth Duino Elegy; Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Robert Hunter)

 

 

 ......even the most visible

of joys cannot be seen

until transformed-within.

Nowhere, beloved, does any

world exist save that within.

Life spends itself in

the act of transformation,

dissolving, bit by bit,

the world as it appeared.

Where stood a solid house

now stands a mental construct,

entirely conceptual, as though

its rafters supported a

rooftop in the very brain.

The spirit of our time has raised

storehouses of infernal powers,

edifices shapeless as the primal force

he wrenches from creation.

Temples are unknown to him.

It is we who try in secret

to perpetuate such wasteful

luxuriance of the heart.

Yes, if one thing survives

before which we genuflected,

which we served or worshiped,

it passes intact into the invisible.

Many, perceiving it no more,

fail to seize the chance to

build it up anew, with greater

pillars and more commanding statues

than in days of yore-within!

--from Seventh Duino Elegy; Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Robert Hunter)

 

Who are these rambling acrobats,

less secure than even we;

twisted since childhood

(for benefit of whom?)

by an unappeasable will?

A will which wrings, bends,

swings, twists and catapults,

catching them when they fall

through slick and polished air

to a threadbare carpet worn

ever thinner by their leaping:

lost carpet of the great beyond,

stuck like a bandage to an earth

bruised by suburban skies.

--from Fifth Duino Elegy; Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. by Robert Hunter)

 

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke; from The Selected Poetry Of Rainer Maria Rilke: Bilingual Edition [trans. by Stephen Mitchell]

[ Spring Call ; Xu Beihong (1938) ]

 

 

Haiku- Winter 2025/2026

that freight train driving

an obliviousness through

clouds of icy cold

what's brighter than all

the holiday christmas lights,

December's full moon

slowly oh slowly

the garbage can is filling

fresh with white snowfall

my mom's birthday--

all those branches holding strong

the weight of the snow

 

    Let It Be Song

As It Can Be Known

Outside With Yesterday

Snow as a rhythm

of color for the cold,

pale blue tone

that rests the ground 

of a prior time

that had a path

that is now blown

pointless direction,

side-to-side waiver, 

is such a dance, bound

to downward matter.

 

Inside With Today

Every word, each song

to a moment, flutters

this sheltered place 

with fabric emotion

from the cubbyholed

heart and its beating

codes of expression

which, being exaggerated,

also is all awhile waiting

upon a simplification

of silent starlight.

 

A Future With Tomorrow

Leave it to glow slowly

crepuscular, matutinal

and vespertine both,

a depth measured

not by numbers but

abundant light years

fathomed widely as

murmuring sounds,

applaused by shadows,

a distant forever 

timed in with color.

 

[ Melting ; Laszlo Mednyanszky ]

The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog

--Robert Bly

I never intended to have this life, believe me—

It just happened. You know how dogs turn up

At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain.

It’s good if you can accept your life—you’ll notice

Your face has become deranged trying to adjust

To it. Your face thought your life would look

Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten.

That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.

Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.

Sparrows in winter, if you’ve ever held one, all feathers,

Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee.

You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you,

But you can’t quite get back to the winter sparrow.

Your life is a dog. He’s been hungry for miles,

Doesn’t particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.

 

Within the circles of our lives

we dance the circles of the years,

the circles of the seasons

within the circles of the years,

and the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,

the circles of our reasons

within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,

changed, changing. Hands

join, unjoin in love and fear,

grief and joy. The circles turn,

each giving into each, into all.

Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.

In the hold of hands and eyes

we turn in pairs, that joining

joining each to all again.

and then we turn aside, alone,

out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

--for Guy Davenport; Wendell Berry

 

II. Cardinals

--Kevin Young

Today I do not know

       what the trees will do—

barely believe tomorrow

they will bloom

       whites & blues, the dogwood

winking at you.

Reed about

       my waist. Tomorrow

something will give way—

green will crowd

       the winter out—

but today all brown, the sky

& ground devour

       each other, swallow

us down. What lives

in the buffeting

       must bend.

The cedar out-

lasting winter—

       how it leans, sheds

limbs like a soldier.

 

Intimacy

-Jen Levitt

On the morning of the new Q train, we passed

a woman’s body slumped against a wall. 

White liquid poured from her mouth like snow, 

until the paramedics showed up, for which 

everyone was grateful. In my mind I was busy

riding a Palomino through a forest, solving 

an equation in air. My thoughts hard & soft, 

a terrain. All week I wanted to talk to you 

about this small sad thing, the woman’s purse 

at her side, hands trembling like my horse

at the stream while we looked & kept walking, 

these details, which make up a poem, a life, 

& could help you know me. All this time, 

I wanted you to understand the emptying in me, 

below the earth, where someone was singing.

 

[ Ten P.M. ; Jennifer Bartlett (1992) ]

 

Love in A Flat

--Lauren K. Alleyne

 

after Dean Young

Dean in a story about Coltrane:

how one time in a recording, he hit

a wrong note—a real clam.

In the second take, he hit it again,

this time harder, longer.

The third time, it became the heart—

the sound all the other notes wrap themselves around,

a different understanding of the melody—

the song beneath the song: the stubborn beat

holding up the heaviness of flesh.

 

 

Everything Changes

--Bertolt Brecht (tr. John Willett)

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

But what has happened has happened. And the water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again, but

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

 

 

In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _______. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.

— from “Winter Hours”; Mary Oliver

 

[ Winter Landscape ; Valerius de Saedeleer ]

 

I Saw Winter's Witches

--Tricia Knoll

More than one, those scraggly black locusts

lining the gravel road to the white farmhouse

and a collapsing barn. Barren: winter unveils

twisted fingers of eerie malaise

planted for fenceposts rumored to

last longer than stone. Suckering up

as toxic clones that scratch wicked

turns of withered phrases on pewter sky.

That fence hems the pasture, last

effort to contain the emptiness

of a low sun setting on fallow pasture. If

winter witch seems too fanciful, 

thorns too cruel, wind too stiff to break,

remember locusts’ white droops

beguile honeybees in soft seasons –

witches hide in green leaf-ery. 

 

 

ice and lights

drawing cards

of mid-winter shuffle

--Tricia Knoll

 

Walking on Water

 --Tricia Knoll

      

Wait for ice to paralyze

the pond, for the crackling

thinness to thicken

so the under-water moans.

Scuffle through rice-snow

where slush went solid

around someone else's boot.

Hike around the hockey rink

and the men and children ice fishing

beside coolers of beer and chips.

Let the lake lure you

away from the eyes of cabins,

from smoke signals

fanning from chimneys.

January's water strider,

as small as the lake makes you

hidden in a hooded coat.

 

 

[ Hope ; George Frederick Watts (1886) ]