Roger Keyes: "Hokusai Says"

Hokusai says Look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.

He says Look Forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself
as long as it’s interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.
He says every one of us is a child,

every one of us is ancient,
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive—
shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees.
Wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.
He says live with the world inside you.

He says it doesn’t matter if you draw, or write books.
It doesn’t matter if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your verandah or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.

It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.

Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
are life living through you.
Peace is life living through you.

He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.

"Hokusai Says" by Roger Keyes. Text as posted on Joan Spear's Authentic Adventure (7/12/2010). No bibliographic information available. If you have source information, please share.

Curator's note: From what I can gather, the poet Roger Keyes is an American professor of East Asian studies. This poem is apparently his cross-media translation of the art of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) into poetry.

Art credit: Untitled image of cutter ants at work, in silhouette, by unknown photographer.

Annie Lighthart: "The Second Music"

Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other

lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.

When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it

touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.

I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,

the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,

becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.

I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.

"The Second Music" by Annie Lighthart. Text as published in Iron String (Airlie Press, 2013). Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: Untitled image by Paranoideas, suggested by the poet.

Rosemary Royston: "Why You Should Go Outside at 4:40 amin November"

Because it is more silent than you can imagine
and above you the moon is a nickel
glinting from the unseen sun,
surrounded by broken crystals.

With the limbs of the bare trees
web-spread like arteries,
under a sky whose shade
has yet to be named

you will find your mouth agape,
eyes lifted as your knees
sink into the fallow garden,
praying, regardless of belief.

"Why You Should Go Outside at 4:40 am in November" by Rosemary Royston. Text first published by Town Creek Poetry (Spring 2013). Reprinted here by permission of the poet. Rosemary's chapbook, Splitting the Soil (2014), is available through Finishing Line Press.

Art credit: Untitled image of an ice halo around the moon, by unknown photographer.

Phil Hey: "Spring forward, fall back"

Tell time now by the frost-stiff grass
and how beneath shod feet it cracks
and heaves; by the curled leaves
skating on their edges in the street,
too late, too late; sun wheels,
trees go gold and bare, light fails
as the fat moon wanes and falls,
as great Orion girds to stand
and stride with sword and lion’s mane
across fields gleaming and gleaned.
As soon undo the flights of geese,
the first blooding of the apples
on the tree; as soon redeem
the few last ragged shards of day
and wish them whole; but summer,
the lake-deep blue silver summer’s bowl
once so lovely full, is broken.
  

"Spring forward, fall back" by Phil Hey. © Phil Hey. Text presented here by poet submission.

Art credit: "Frosty Grass," image by unknown photographer.

Zelda: "Each of Us Has A Name"

Each of us has a name
given by God
and given by our parents
Each of us has a name
given by our stature and our smile
and given by what we wear
Each of us has a name
given by the mountains
and given by our walls
Each of us has a name
given by the stars
and given by our neighbors
Each of us has a name
given by our sins
and given by our longing
Each of us has a name
given by our enemies
and given by our love
Each of us has a name
given by our celebrations
and given by our work
Each of us has a name
given by the seasons
and given by our blindness
Each of us has a name
given by the sea
and given by
our death.

"Each of Us Has A Name" by Zelda (Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky), from The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems, translated from the original Hebrew by Marcia Lee Falk (Hebrew Union College Press, 2004). Text as published by Ritualwell: Tradition & Innovation.

My thanks to Rabbi Shmuel Birnham for suggesting this poem. 

Art credit: "Faces from around the world," video published on January 26, 2014, by jarray42. Soundtrack: "The Time To Run," by Dexter Britain.

Jane Hirshfield: "Rebus"

You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life—
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?



"Rebus" by Jane Hirshfield. Text as published in Given Salt, Given Sugar (Harper Perennial, 2002).

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Octavio Paz: "Brotherhood"

Homage to Claudius Ptolemy


I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.


 
"Brotherhood" by Octavio Paz. Text as published in Octavio Paz: Collected Poems, 1957-1987, edited and translated from the original Spanish by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions, 1991).

Art credit: "Admiring the Galaxy," photograph taken on May 20, 2013, by European Southern Observatory / Alan Fitzsimmons. From the caption: "This image is a self portrait taken by astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons ... at ESO’s La Silla Observatory [located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile]."

Lao Tzu: "We Are a River"

Our life has not been an ascent
up one side of a mountain and down the other.
We did not reach a peak,
only to decline and die.
We have been as drops of water,
born in the ocean and sprinkled on the earth
in a gentle rain.
We became a spring,
and then a stream,
and finally a river flowing deeper and stronger,
nourishing all it touches
as it nears its home once again.

                                      *

Don't accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.
Sit by a river bank some time
and watch attentively as the river
tells you of your life.

"We Are a River," from The Sage's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for the Second Half of Life, William Martin's free-verse interpretation of the classic work by Lao Tzu (The Experiment, 2010).

Art credit: Untitled photograph from Autumn River, a series by Philip Brittan in which he "submerges himself and his camera in the currents of Bristol’s River Frome, capturing the movements of fallen leaves." See more of his remarkable series here. 

Margaret Gibson: "Heaven"

The leaves are turning, one by one carried away in the crisp wind.
In one letter he penned,
Coleridge turned away, calling love
a local anguish he meant to leave
behind him. Away, away,
says the blue and gold day, and no one hears it but the wind, whose law
it echoes. The dog has a red ball to chase.
You pick a flat, perfect stone for the wall you hope to live long enough
to rebuild. I prune
briars, pick burrs from the dog's fur.
I teach Come and Sit. Sit here—
a longer sit beneath the cedars. The grass is freshly cut,
sun low, all the energy
of a summer's day rushing into bulb and root.
The dog runs off, returns. The stones balance
steeply. Good work. Good dog. This is
heaven. Sit. Stay.

"Heaven" by Margaret Gibson. Text as published in Broken Cup: Poems (Louisiana University Press, 2013). © Margaret Gibson. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: "Focused," photograph taken on May 10, 2014, by Kristen Fletcher Photography.

Linda Buckmaster: "Flowering"

At the ruins of the Seven Churches Inishmore

Pick a crevice,
a homey gap
between stones
and make it
your own.

Grow a life here
from wind
rain
and the memories of ancients
embedded in limestone.

The bees will use you
for their sweet honey.
The rock will soften under
your touch.
You will draw moisture from fog
and hold it.
Your presence
will build soil.

This is all we have
in this life
all we own:
a flowering
an opening
a gap between stones
for tiny tender roots.

"Flowering" by Linda Buckmaster, from Heart Song & Other Legacies: Poems (The Illuminated Sea Press, 2006). Text as published in UUWorld (Spring, 2006).

Art credit: Untitled photograph by Monopoly Traveler.

Jack Myers: "Fragment"

Remember when you were little
and could shout like the yellow sun
on the horizon Here I Come!,
before your self-image was a light bulb
in the fridge of your self-esteem
and you weren't afraid of anything in life
because there wasn't any difference
between everything in life and you?
Remember how large you felt?

"Fragment" by Jack Myers. Source unknown. Text as published on a card the curator received in late September from subscriber Barbara Regenspan.

Curator's note: This poem is likely by the late Jack Elliott Myers, one-time poet laureate of Texas, who was quite prolific. If anyone knows the specific source for this poem, please let me know. Update 2/12/20: Thank you to Mary Rose Dougherty for informing the curator that Jack Myers wrote this poem in 2002 but never published it in a book. A colleague, Mark Cox, found it in the poet's files after his death from cancer in 2009.

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Donna Hilbert: "In Plowboy's Produce Market"

I push my cart through Plowboy’s produce market

gleaning this song for the first days of fall:

broccoli cauliflower cabbage kohlrabi

The price of red pepper is dropping.

Eggplant shines purple.

Bell pepper is green.

I watch an old couple choose stringbeans:

she fills their sack by handfuls. He frowns,

empties the bag back into the bin,

then turns each bean to the light

before dropping it in.

pattypan crook-neck pumpkin zucchini

A woman wearing a scarf tight at her chin

eats Thompson’s seedless from the grape bin.

Tokay Exotic Muscat Red Flame

At the melons, a man in white shorts, skin brown

as russet potatoes, swings a cantaloupe into his cart.

I think I’m in love.

Winesap Pippin Golden Delicious

where last week there were plums.

Old man, kiss your wife.

Wash your face in the juice of ripe fruit.

Put beans into your sack without looking.

Old man, we’re in Plowboy’s—

every bean is perfect, every bean is right.

 "In Plowboy's Produce Market" by Donna Hilbert. Text as published in Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Pearl Editions, 2004). © Donna Hilbert. Presented here by poet submission.

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Poet photograph: Sandra Chandler.

Denise Levertov: "Sojourns in the Parallel World"

We live our lives of human passions,

cruelties, dreams, concepts,

crimes and the exercise of virtue

in and beside a world devoid

of our preoccupations, free

from apprehension—though affected,

certainly, by our actions. A world

parallel to our own though overlapping.

We call it `Nature;' only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be `Nature' too.

Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,

our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,

an hour even, of pure (almost pure)

response to that insouciant life:

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices, mineral hum, wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal—then something tethered

in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch

of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.

No one discovers

just where we've been, when we're caught up again

into our own sphere (where we must

return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)

—but we have changed, a little.

"Sojourns in the Parallel World" by Denise Levertov. Text as published in Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1998 edition).

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Ryōkan: Untitled ["Before listening to the way"]

Before listening to the way, do not fail to wash your ears.
Otherwise it will be impossible to listen clearly.
What is washing your ears?
Do not hold on to your view.
If you cling to it even a little bit,
you will lose your way.
What is similar to you but wrong, you regard as right.
What is different from you but right, you regard as wrong.
You begin with ideas of right and wrong.
But the way is not so.
Seeking answers with closed ears is
like trying to touch the ocean bottom with a pole.

Untitled ["Before listening to the way"] by Ryōkan. Text as published in Sky Above, Great Wind: The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan, translated from the original Japanese by Kazuaki Tanahashi (Shambhala Publications, 2012). 

Art credit: "Remi Listening to the Sea," photograph by Edouard Boubat.

 

Edward Hirsch: "Fall"

Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s
Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.



"Fall" by Edward Hirsch. Text as published in Wild Gratitude (Knopf, 1986). © Edward Hirsch. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: "Lonely man standing in autumn forest," photograph by vitomirov.

William Stafford: "A Message from Space"

Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna—a dish
aimed at stars—and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear—suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath—

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."



"A Message from Space" by William Stafford. Text as published in On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things, edited by Tom Andrews (University of Michigan Press, 1995).

Art credit: Untitled image presented by Wallpapers Library, photographer unknown.

Mary Oliver: "Wild Geese"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
   love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.



"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver. Text as published in Dream Work (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).

Watch the poet read this poem.

Art credit: "Wild Geese in the Sunrise Sky," photograph by Christian Donges © 2008.

Michael Attie: "Mindful Loitering"

Park benches make the best Zendo.
Far superior to black cushions and blank walls.
This is what the heart looks like.
There are people passing through,
flocks of pigeons,
nannies with strollers,
old men sharing stories in the autumn air,
kids playing jump rope
and on their way to school,
Oak and Maple leaves raining on everyone.
I don’t know if I want to die of happiness
or sadness
or just fade away.
I look up.
Everyone is gone.
Time to move on
to the next park.
Find my heart again.

I’m the lazy poet
who needs to fall in love
in order to write anything.
It’s a crazy world—
there’s too much beauty
or not enough.
Either way,
the pain seems inescapable.

"Mindful Loitering" by Michael Attie. Text as published in This Smiling Heart (Neon Buddha Press, 1995). © 1995 Michael Attie. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: "Baby sitting on a bench in the park, surrounded by a lot of pigeons," photograph by artoflightpro.

Carolyn Locke: "What Else"

The way the trees empty themselves of leaves,
let drop their ponderous fruit,
the way the turtle abandons the sun-warmed log,
the way even the late-blooming aster
succumbs to the power of frost—

this is not a new story.
Still, on this morning, the hollowness
of the season startles, filling
the rooms of your house, filling the world
with impossible light, improbable hope.

And so, what else can you do
but let yourself be broken
and emptied? What else is there
but waiting in the autumn sun?

"What Else" by Carolyn Locke, from The Place We Become (forthcoming from Maine Authors Publishing, Spring, 2015). Presented here by poet submission.

Art credit: Photograph from Foto Wikimedia Commons.

Malena Mörling: "See High Above"

      You step outside
into the early morning
            in autumn—

And at the exact same instant
      a scrap of paper
floats over—

             High in the blue
blustery library
      of the air—

You look up
             and you see it rushing
and lifting

      even higher
into the transparent layers
             of the sky—

And at once,
      you know
it is a message—

             A message
that there is no message.
      The scrap of paper

is just a scrap of paper!
             It is weightless
and free—

      The world is just
the world—
             And you are exactly

who you are—
      Also floating now
high inside

             the invisible
balloon of
      another moment.

"See High Above" by Malena Mörling. Text as published in Astoria (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.