I am the rabbit

Soon we will be leaving the year of the tiger and entering the year of the rabbit. The rabbit, symbol of endurance and an uncanny wisdom. To inspire you for your rabbit year, here is Joseph Pintauro’s beautiful book, the Rabbit Box. We have a copy of this one at home, and it always thrills me and frightens me.."All of the daring to live that you were not afraid of, that is my name, I am the rabbit."

Images with thanks via the snail and cyclops and booklust

Last Seen Wandering Vaguely: Quite Of Her Own Accord

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
"Mother," he said, said he;
"You must never go down to the end of the town
If you don't go down with me."

James James
Morrison's Mother
Put on a golden gown,
James James
Morrison's Mother
Drove to the end of the town.
James James
Morrison's Mother
Said to herself, said she:
"I can get right down to the end of the town and
be back in time for tea."

King John
Put up a notice
"LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES
MORRISON"S MOTHER
SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.
LAST SEEN
WANDERING VAGUELY:
QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD,
SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN TO THE END OF
THE TOWN - FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!

-Excerpt from A.A. Milne's "Disobedience"

I've spent the past week watching my little son and his friend with this poem rattling about in my head. It's quite accurate, as you may know, little boys do keep close track of their mothers. I found myself wondering, how had it been decided that I was the one who needed to be watched closely, rather than the other way around?

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Moon Seeking Soup

Last night when the December moon was closer to the Earth than it had been in years, huge on the horizon, blazing hills and craters, I saw it too late, too high in the sky. Still, I could almost count the peaks that held the sun.

Tonight, after slicing red potatoes, yams, carrots, onions, and a garlic into a base of chicken broth; after shaking a delicate rain of basil and tarragon onto the surface and stirring those sweet spices in - while the soup simmered, I threw on a jacket over my nightclothes and ran out to look for the moon. My slippered feet were cold as I searched the sky, wanting to raise my face into white light.

But there was no moon, no glow over the apartment roofs to say it was rising, so I came back in and stirred my soup, raising the ladle to my lips to taste again and again the dark fruits of the Earth.

moon-seeking soup -
my own face reflected
in the broth.

Penny Harper "Moon Seeking Soup"
Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose - Issue 1. Summer 2009

Image of and via anabotezatu

A Myth of Devotion

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn't everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—

That's what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there'd be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn't imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone's Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you're dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

-Louise Glück

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the wheel

Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come ---
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but our longing for the tomb.

W.B. Yeats "The Wheel"

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all the singing is in the tops of the trees

 

 

In winter

    all the singing is in

         the tops of the trees

             where the wind-bird

with its white eyes

    shoves and pushes

         among the branches.

             Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,

    but he's restless—

         he has an idea,

             and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings

    as long as he stays awake.

         But his big, round music, after all,

             is too breathy to last.

So, it's over.

    In the pine-crown

         he makes his nest,

             he's done all he can.

I don't know the name of this bird,

    I only imagine his glittering beak

         tucked in a white wing

             while the clouds—

which he has summoned

    from the north—

         which he has taught

             to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall

    into the world below

         like stars, or the feathers

               of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,

    that is asleep now, and silent—

         that has turned itself

             into snow.

 

-Mary Oliver "White Eyes"

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You in the shade of a tree

For some time now I have been aware
of your eyes fixed on me from the shade of a tree.
You, so fondly treasured by your husband,
are radiant with a fair glow like a Renoir
or a Titian.
I have been tempered by toilsome sparks of fires
all by myself, gasping for air.
Now I stand tall on my ground
managing to speak with your husband.
I am no longer embarrassed
I behave simply as a wholesome human being –
Yet I am aware.
Your eyes, so blue they look dewy, glisten
with worries and apprehensions.
My proud heart grows tender
deeply moved by women’s frailty
I slowly hang down my head.


Your husband is truly exceptional;
It is a small joy for me to stand before him,
as your keen insight tells you.
You see clearly
my tempered skin glowing gold.
Beyond that, you know that I came
in a blouse with many frills like clouds.
Also you know I am wearing a brand-new hat.
You are intent on seeing through everything.
A wistful tide surges inside me.
Honestly I am not trying to take anything from you.
I am simply pleased to be able to speak to him
as a self-reliant person,
ah, not disturbed by anything malicious –

My heart slowly gradually wilts
To think, ah why is it, how frail we are, we women –


-Kiyoko Nagase
Translation: 2009, Takako Lento

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it's dried.

As pain after it’s ended stays in the body:

A woman moves her hands oddly

because her grandfather passed through

a place he never spoke of. Making

instead the old jokes with angled fingers.

Call one thing another’s name long enough,

it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.

Call it a tree whose shape of   branches happened.

Call what branching happened a man

whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.

Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples,

to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking.

Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence. 

Jane Hirshfield "Seawater Stiffens Cloth"

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sunlight absence

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

-Seamus Heaney Personal Helican

We have a sunlight absence here in the Northwest. Like Ireland, I tell myself, only here the eye concedes to a horizon of firs rather than bogs. There is much that is familiar in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. And today, this dark gloomy day is sweet Tadzio's birthday. Like all small children, he approaches our foul weather with good cheer and delight. Before cake and presents he is bundled up in his raincoat and boots, attending the model train show with his Papa.

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From the Person of the Playful Star

We roll the dice
And play our game, we the people
Of the playful star
Doing the forbidden and
Turning the skies round and round

Born as we are onto
This playful star of deep green
Why is it we do
Not dedicate ourselves to
Playing for all we are worth?

-Excerpt From Chimako Tada's "Tanka From the Person of the Playful Star "
Translation by Jeffrey Angles

Translator's Note: The words “playful star” are a literal rendering of the word yūsei (遊星) meaning “planet.” (Ancient Chinese astronomers saw the planets as “playful stars” that wandered across the heavens according to their own whimsical logic. This word, inherited from Chinese, is still used in modern Japan.)

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in order to arrive at what you are not

In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.


T.S. Eliot "East Coker" No. 2 of "Four Quartets"

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to cuddle and to clutch you

When the days grow short and dark, we disappear into our books, and, perhaps best of all, theater. Last night we took Tadzio to see Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. The most interesting and enchanting scene of the whole opera for me was the scene in the haunted forest with Hansel, Gretel, and the Sandman. The lighting, music, acting and movement of this scene were beautiful. The Sandman's solo is haunting and lyrical.

Fly you fool

The Himalayan legend says
there are beautiful white birds
that live completely in flight.
They are born in the air,

must learn to fly before falling
and die also in their flying.
Maybe you have been born
into such a life

with the bottom dropping out.
Maybe gravity is claiming you
and you feel
ghost-scripted.


For the one who lives inside the fall,
the sky beneath the sky of all.

Jennifer K. Sweeney "In Flight"

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she learned her hands in a fairy-tale

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Witch Wife"

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occupational hazards

Butcher
If I want to go to pieces
I can do that. When I try
to pull myself together
I get sausage.

Bakers
Can't be choosers. Rising
from a white bed, from dreams
of kings, bright cities, buttocks,
to see the moon by daylight.

Tailor
It's not the way the needle
drags the poor thread around.
It's sewing the monster together,
my misshapen son.

Gravediggers
To be the baker's dark opposite,
to dig the anti-cake, to stow
the sinking loaves in the unoven-
then to be dancing on the job!

Woodcutter
Deep in my hands
as far as I can go
the fallen trees
keep ringing.

David Young's Occupational Hazards

Reflecting on my work week, I was reminded of this poem. Such a life requires fortitude...

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My parents have come home laughing

From the feast for Robert Burns, late, on foot;
They have leaned against graveyard walls,
Have bent double in the glittering frost,
Their bladders heavy with tea and ginger.
Burns, suspended in a drop, is flicked away
As they wipe their eyes, and is not offended.

What could offend him? Not the squeaking bagpipe
Nor the haggis which, when it was sliced, collapsed
In a meal of blood and oats
Nor the man who read a poem by Scott
As the audience hissed embarrassment
Nor the principal speaker whose topic,
"Burns' View of Crop Rotation," was intended
For farmers, who were not present,
Nor his attempt to cover this error, reciting
The only Burns poem all evening,
"Nine Inch Will Please a Lady," to thickening silence.

They drop their coats in the hall,
Mother first to the toilet, then Father,
And then stand giggling at the phone,
Debating a call to the States, decide no,
And the strength to keep laughing breaks
In a sigh. I hear, as their tired ribs
Press together, their bedroom door not close
And hear also a weeping from both of them
That seems not to be pain, and it comforts me.

-Mark Jarman "My parents have come home laughing"
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moreover, the moon

Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.

Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.

Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,

touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles

Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf.

Mina Loy
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we will lie under different stars

So you'd sing a lullaby to get me to sleep
So it's no surprise my eyes are never heavy
For i've not seen you in the flesh for so long
That i'm not sure we would know each other at all

Oh the weight it must be light wherever you are
And i know you don't think twice wherever you are
Oh the weight it must be light wherever you are
And i know you don't think twice wherever you are

So i will hum alone, too far from you
All that i say now is nothing to you
We will lie under different stars
I am where i am and you're where you are, you're where you are.

Oh the weight it must be light wherever you are
And i know you don't think twice wherever you are
And i'd ask if you're all right wherever you are
And do you think of me, you might, wherever you are.

-Different Stars Trespassers Williams

what might have been and what has been

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

-Burnt Norton T.S. Eliot from Four Quartets


In the mornings I've been listening to Ralph Fiennes reading the Four Quartets. Utterly beautiful.

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rickshaw

I have never seen a group of people denied a rickshaw ride just because of their numbers.

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test pony

I am given a pony for my birthday, but it is the wrong kind of pony. It is the kind of pony that won’t listen. It is testy. When I ask it to go left, it goes right. When I ask it to run, it sleeps on its side in the tall grass. So when I ask it to jump us over the river into the field I have never before been, I have every reason to believe it will fail, that we will be swept down the river to our deaths. It is a fate for which I am prepared. The blame of our death will rest with the testy pony, and with that, I will be remembered with reverence, and the pony will be remembered with great anger. But with me on its back, the testy pony rears and approaches the river with unfettered bravery. Its leap is glorious. It clears the river with ease, not even getting its pony hooves wet. And then there we are on the other side of the river, the sun going down, the pony circling, looking for something to eat in the dirt. Real trust is to do so in the face of clear doubt, and to trust is to love. This is my failure, and for that I cannot be forgiven.

Test Pony by Zachary Schomburg

long hair

When I was twelve years old, I wore my hair in two long braids that swished through the air around me like whips. These I used indiscriminately as ribbons to make the cat play, brushes to be dipped in paint, or as ropes from which to hang things. I would get up extra early each morning while my mother brushed and combed my nodding head. From these morning I date my current reservations about long hair. Long hair, barbaric accessory, hair that one cherishes in secret for secret purposes, that one displays twisted or braided and conceals when it is disheveled. Unbound it irritates sensitive skin, confuses a wandering hand.

There is just one moment, in the evening, when the pins are withdrawn and the shy face shines out for an instant from between the tangled waves; and there is a similar moment in the early morning. And because of these two moments everything I have just written against long hair counts for nothing at all.

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when landscapes sleep

There is a time, between night and day, when landscapes sleep.Only the earliest riser sees that hour; or the all-night traveller, letting up the blind of his railway carriage window, will look out on the rushing landscape of stillness, in which trees and bushes and plants stand immobile and breathless in sleep - wrapped in sleep, as the traveller himself wrapped his body in his great-coat or his rug the night before... All night - moonit or swathed in darkness - the garden had stayed awake; now, after that night long vigil, it had dozed off.

Nomenus
Tom's Midnight Garden

Loonie

A Canadian loon for luck and nostalgia. By Adornments NYC

the reader

Before I was anything else, I was a reader. During my childhood Saturday mornings would find me, then toward ten o'clock, still in bed and reading. Always pale and absorbed, I read in a grim kind of way, with a cup of chocolate grown cold beside me. Despite cries of "get up sleepyhead" coming from down the hall, I would read on, mechanically twining my long braided hair around my wrist and sometimes looking at my sister or brother with the unseeing glance of the obsessed.

Now as an adult I still read in a grim kind of way. I have responded to my own child's cries of "look at the rocket, mama!" with that unseeing glance, that ageless glance of the obsessed, full of obscure defiance and an incomprehensible irony. Like any other reader, I am susceptible to romantic insomnia. This past week I induced it in myself with the following: The Thirteenth Tale (this started the madness), Jane Eyre, Le Grand Meaulnes (this fed it) and Tom's Midnight Garden (for the child). I tried sprinkling Bright Star into the mix but I am a reader, not a film girl. I am exhausted...

Anyway, I recommend all of the books listed above if you find yourself with a hankering for secret gardens, troubled families, confused identities, crumbling mansions, and tragedy. My only warning is that you may find yourself drinking lots of hot cocoa as you go.

a token

My lady
fair with
soft
arms, what

can I say to
you—words, words
as if all
worlds were there.

A Token by Robert Creeley

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channel black

Inlet into from
the way a river does,
the mouth of a black dog
lapping
at the bowl of the bay.

The same kid
always wins at monopoly,
shows up in the right
wrong places,
another makeshift town

tucked in his pocket.
Fog, that thief,
unravels landscape,
changes the rules,
watches the bank,

chasing an orange dog,
a crown,
a boat with a single oar,
a bigger boat,
the rising tide.

Channel Black by Valerie Lawson 

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the last few days

We are in love with Vancouver Island. We finished the last few days of our summer eating oysters, collecting shells, and watching the seals and whales. I found Lisa Hebden's work one night in the Sooke Harbour House. Would I dare to move to such a beautiful place?

Painting "The Dare" by Lisa Hebden

midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core

-Yeats "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

We are leaving for Vancouver Island, Canada for a last bit of summer.

When we get back it will be time rid the house of all of the sand that seems to keep appearing in our beds, put on scratchy school uniforms, rent instruments, and get serious about a few projects.


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Calling all you hungry hearts

Last night we went looking for ghosts. We walked through the forest with softly glowing lanterns, singing this poem.

Calling out to hungry hearts.
Everywhere through endless time.
You who wander you who thirst.
I offer you this heart of mine.
Calling all you hungry spirits.
Everywhere through endless time.
Calling all you hungry hearts
All the lost and left behind
Gather round and share this meal
Your joy and sorrow
I make it mine.

We passed by trees and watched as closely as air. We were there as part of a local Jizo-bon festiival. Jizo is the guardian of children and the patron of all beings caught in the uncertainties of life's transitions. The festival is traditionally held in the third week of August, shortly after Obon. It is a festival for children. The ghost-seeking came after dinner, cookies, and a puppet show.

We found a few ghosts, hiding there in that spooky forest. Tadzio even took one by the hand and led it away. I was terribly proud of him. He is still only a four-year-old, and the ghost he found looked a bit like it was out of a Butoh performance. It was hiding in the brush with tangled hair and ghost-white face, shrieking and huffing. Przemek and I both found ourselves thinking of the experimental theater of Jerzy Grotowski.

I counted six ghosts total. Part of the festival is to give the poor creatures some relief from their suffering. You find them and feed them and try to bring them back to the temple. If you think of them as a psychological rather than a physical state, hungry ghosts might be thought of as people with addictions, compulsions and obsessions. Greed and jealousy lead to a life as a hungry ghost.

We finished the night with fireworks. This morning we had breakfast together and studied last night's lantern, musing over our interesting and magical night. I can't say I was entirely comfortable with it, but I liked the poetry and I would do it again.

Calling all you hungry hearts
All the lost and left behind
Gather round and share this meal
Your joy and sorrow
I make it mine.

Images by Spring Night plus here and here.

into the grass

In my family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

Go back two generations and the names and lives of our forebears vanish into the grass. All we could get out of mother was that her grandmother had met her grandfather at a lumber mill; and sometimes in my father's expansive histories his father died an early death shortly after abandoning the family.

Sometimes I'm not sure if they actually said these things, or if these are stories that I have told myself. The only certainty is that I come from a set of storytellers.

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make my heart sing sing

 
Oh, sheer blue oxygen, in perfect calmness, you create
These forms, and make
My heart sing, sing
Of the thin moon, sing of the summer fragrance.

-Excerpt from Fragrant Summer by Zheng Danyi.

I hope you are enjoying these last few weeks of summer. Keep dreaming, I'll be reading your poetry.

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Nikolai Kuzmitch

 
"Nikolai Kuzmitch," he said benevolently, and imagined himself sitting without the fur coat, thin and shabby on the horsehair sofa; "I do hope, Nikolai Kuzmitch," he said, "that you won't get a swelled head from your new fortune..."

In fact, he didn't make any changes in his modest, regular way of life, and he now spent his Sundays putting his accounts in order. But after a few weeks it became obvious that he was spending an incredible amount. I will have to economize, he thought. He got up earlier, he washed his face less thoroughly, he drank his tea standing up, he ran to the office and arrived much too early. He saved a little time everywhere. But when Sunday came around, there was nothing left of all this saving. The he realized that he had been duped.


And one ugly afternoon, he sat down in the corner of the sofa, waiting for the gentleman in the fur coat, from whom he meant to demand his time back. He would bolt the door and not let him out until he had forked over the whole amount. "In bills," he would say, "of ten years, if you don't mind." Four bills of ten and one of five, and the rest he could keep and go to hell with.


Ranier Maria Rilke The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

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child in red

She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,
half-turns around...
and, all while dreaming, shakes her head
for or against.

Then she dances a few steps
that she invents and forgets,
no doubt finding out that life
moves on too fast.

It's not so much that she steps out
of the small body enclosing her,
but that all she carries in herself
frolics and ferments.

It's this dress that she'll remember
later in a sweet surrender;
when her whole life is full of risks,
the little red dress will always seem right.

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one
anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long
time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

Excerpt from "Child in Red" by Rilke

Photo by Nikaa

I've seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence

And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that
They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense
In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear
She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without
It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when
You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of
A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets
So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds
With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter
About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on
The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp
I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry
If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire
So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them
To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you

Excerpt from "In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden" by Matthea Harvey

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It is a simple garment, this slipped on world

We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair -
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task
we've taken on,
though also vast;
from dusk to dawn.

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.

Jane Hirshfield "The Task" from the October Palace
Image via Sabino