Found Poetry

 

The Barbed Heart

Takes Refuge

In a hidden Grove

of Palos Verdes

Trees

(2009)

Mary Oliver & My Laptop Remind Me

 

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately. 

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.

Or not. 

 

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

~Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses 

 

 

 

David Whyte, and Storms...........

All this petty worry

while the great cloak

of the sky grows dark

and intense

round every living thing.

What is precious

inside us does not

care to be known

by the mind

in ways that diminish

its presence.

David Whyte 

Already too many years ago I went to visit a friend who was living in Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, in that humid climate I developed  asthma, probably from mold,  and couldn't stay in her home, but had to stay in a hotel in order to visit her.  There, in a mostly deserted resort hotel by the ocean I encountered a Tropical Storm.   Today, for some reason, I'm again remembering that friend, Felicia, and that day of the Storm I met in Puerto Rico.  

My life in Tucson is mostly placid, that is, except for Monsoon Season, when the great (and beloved)  Monsoon clouds come rolling in, announcing themselves with thunder, lightning, and a downpour that swiftly comes and goes, leaving a refreshed and cooled desert. 

But the Tropics.  The tropics, it seems to me, are where life  is at its most vibrant, virulent, creative, predatory, colorful, and destructive. Life in the tropics teems.   It's impossible to be in the midst of that potency of life and not become intoxicated with it. Intoxicated or terrified, take your choice. In retrospect, experiences can be viewed as  kind of like meals. How did they TASTE? Did they fill, is the fragrance still with you?  Were they spicy, sweet,  or bitter, making one slow, dull, digestive?  The fragrance of Puerto Rico, like the taste of Bali, will always still be with me. 

                                    "The world is not with us enough - oh taste and see" 

The poet Denise Levertov wrote, and it's too often true.  How often do we stop, in the midst of this Feast of life, to really "taste and see"? 

On the Day of the Storm, I remember I had a room with a balcony at the top of a hotel  in Rincon. I arrived  off season, and it was already largely deserted, and especially with the prospect of a tropical storm advancing.  I  felt like a character from Stephen King’s “The Shining”, with a whole hotel to myself at night, empty bars filled with the ghosts of bands and booze and laughter and sex.  An empty blue pool with palm frond chairs upturned.  And wind, wind, wind moving leaves of palm trees,  the wet, heavy tropical air, wind blowing over wicker tables. 

As the sun went down, the storm advanced across the dark ocean, and the lights went out.  There were no candles, or even an attendant to ask about candles.  Just me on the second floor, looking out at the vastness of an endarkened ocean. 

So, there I sat in the state of Storm, with nothing to do but witness.

I do not think I shall ever forget that intense heavy silence, or the sounds of the koki frogs.  A woman called for her dog in Spanish,  “Limon, Limon!” as I watched the sudden illumination of lightning as it revealed an advancing mass of  clouds, rolling in from the distant ocean.  I was awed by the truth of that moment, our lives, our plans, our hopes and imaginations of "what is" - existing in the brief moments between  storms.

 

 

I know that sometimes

your body is hard like a stone

on a path that storms break over,

embedded deeply

into that something that you think is you,

and you will not move

while the voice all around

tears the air

and fills the sky with jagged light.

But sometimes unawares

those sounds seem to descend

as if kneeling down into you

and you listen strangely caught

as the terrible voice

moving closer

halts,

and in the silence

now arriving

whispers

Get up, I depend on you utterly.

Everything you need

you had 

the moment before

you were born.

~ David Whyte ~

(Where Many Rivers Meet)

~ David Whyte ~

(Where Many Rivers Meet)

'The End of the Known World "

 

In 2014 I made a  blog for my friend Nigelle, also known as Zoe, who walked the Camino de Santiago at the age of 68. I greatly admire her journey, and so often wish I had also walked the Camino, taken that Pilgrimage myself.  

The scallop shell is the symbol of the Camino, pointing the way all along the long pilgrimage route.   After achieving the great Cathedral at  Compostella, many pilgrims then continue on to Finisterre, which in English means  "Lands End", where they finish their pilgrimage before the vastness of the Atlantic ocean.   For some reason this beloved poem by David Whyte has haunted me today.  I think, sometimes, the ancient Sanskrit philosophers were right when they wrote that at old age, one should leave behind the old life and pursuits, and enter into Pilgrimage, physically or spiritually (however one wishes to look at it).  Toward the Compostella of your dreams that calls to you.  

Or, perhaps, to go just a bit farther at last, to Finisterre..........."Because now, you would find a different way to tread, and because, through it all, part of you could still walk on,  no matter how........."

FINISTERRE

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way
to your future now

but the way your shadow could take,
walking before you across water,

going where shadows go,

no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass
except to call an end to the way you had come,
to take out each frayed letter you brought
and light their illumined corners, and to read
them as they drifted through the western light;
to empty your bags;
to sort this and to leave that;

to promise what you needed to promise all along
and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here
right at the water's edge,

not because you had given up
but because now, you would find a different way to tread,
and because, through it all,
part of you could still walk on,
no matter how, over the waves.”

― David Whyte

 

**Photos by Zoe D'Ay

Masks for the New Year: The Persistance of Butterflies

 

                                   "A Mask for the Far Journey" (2025)

My own exhibit of masks (and a painting called "Seeing in the Dark")  at the Visionary Art Show  I curated with Stevens Gallery Director Betina Fink.  Butterflies, it seems to me, are a hopeful symbol of transformation.......the thing about masks is, you put them on, and then they reveal their story. 

 

"A Mask for Crossing Dimensions" (2023)

"A Mask for Becoming Lighter" (2022)

"A Mask for the Shattering of Old Paradigms" (2024)

"A Mask for the Reconciliation of Opposites" (2025)

"A Mask for Talking With the Ancestors" (2024)

"A Mask for Chaos and for Order" (2024)

"A Mask for Composting Old Dreams" (2025)

Poems for the Day of the Dead

Florence on horse, Griffith Park, 1928

 Girl and Horse, 1928

by Margaret Atwood

You are younger than I am,

you are someone I never knew
you stand under a tree
your face half-shadowed,
Holding the horse by its bridle.

Why do you smile? Can’t you
See the apple blossoms falling around
You, snow, sun, snow,
listen, the tree dries
and is being burnt, the wind

Is bending your body,
your face ripples like water
Where did you go?

But no, you stand there
exactly the same,
you can’t hear me,

forty years ago you were caught by light
And fixed in that secret place
where we live, where we believe
nothing can change, grow older.

(On the other side
of the picture, the instant
is over, the shadow
of the tree has moved. )

You wave,
then turn and ride
out of sight through the vanished
orchard, still smiling

(as though you do not notice)

GHOSTS

Where do the dead go?

The dead that are not cosmetically renewed

and boxed, their faces familiar and serene.

Or brought to an essence, pale ashes in elegant canisters.

I ask for the other dead:

those ghosts that wander

unshriven among our sleep,

haunting the borderlands of our lives.

The dead dreams,

The failed loves.

The quests, undertaken with full courage

and paid for in blood

that never found a dragon, a Grail, a noble ordeal

and the Hero's sacred journey home.

Instead, the wrong fork was somehow taken, or the road

wandered aimlessly, finally narrowing

to a tangled gully

and the Hero was lost, in the gray and prosaic rain,

hungry, weary, to finally stop somewhere, anywhere

glad of bread, a fire, a little companionship.

Where is their graveyard?

Were they mourned?

Did we hold a wake,

bear flowers, eulogize their bright efforts

their brave hopes

and commemorate their loss with honor?

A poem?

An imperishable stone to mark their passing?

Did we give them back to the Earth

to nourish saplings yet to flower,

the unborn ones?

Or were they left to wander

in some unseen Bardo, unreleased, ungrieved.

Did we turn our backs on them unknowing,

            their voices calling, whispering impotently

            behind us

            shadowing our steps?

                  Lauren Raine   1997

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

and walks outdoors, 

and keeps on walking

because of a church 

that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him
as if he were dead.

And another man,

 who remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

so that his children have to go

far out into the world

toward that same church,
which he forgot.

Rainier Maria Rilke (Translated by Robert Bly)

         On Meeting Shari After 22 Years

I see your  father's  gesture
(how is it possible, to remember him, after all these years?)
yet there it is renewed, a play of shadow and light
 flickering across your face.

You were a Milagro
that inhabited me

for a little while 
and then grew on without me.

What shall I call this door,
opening today between our lives?

Multitudes have passed this way. 

For that moment
I see them in your eyes,
then I pay the bill, finish coffee,
and descend into the subway, waving goodbye.

How can I tell you
that I am casting my love
like a daisy with petals partly plucked,
a firefall of dandelion seed
into the wind
into the world

as you must do as well

Lauren Raine (1990)

Flora with Florence (1917)

old photos,

escaping a tin box:

They are stories with wings

 butterflies, or white moths

fluttering at the glass,

ephemeral, half-glimpsed stories

lighter than air, 

these unknown memories

quietly escaping,
through 

an open window

Florence at 92