There was this really smart scientist guy who said that people can learn a lot from dogs. He said that when someone you love walks through the door, even if it happens five times a day, you should go totally insane with joy.
[Ben Moon, Denali]

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing the shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

It spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.

When it find itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.





[Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt. My favorite line is “Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy.”]

Percy does not like it when I read a book.
He puts his face over the top of it and moans.
He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.
The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.
The tide is out and the neighbor’s dogs are playing.
But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!
The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories
that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.
Let’s go.

[another Mary Oliver poem, from Red Bird]

[from SMBC]

Some of Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical essays are collected in a book called Moments of Being. There is one essay called “A Sketch of the Past,” in which Woolf talks among other things about losing both her parents in short succession by the time she was fifteen, and having to move from their country estate to a London house, where their older stepbrother became Virginia and Vanessa’s guardian, and also molested them. It was not an easy adolescence. Here she is puzzling over the possible value of pain–and I appreciate that she doesn’t come out and say “yes, this suffering was good for me, this made me an artist.” She stays in the puzzling.

“But at fifteen to have that protection removed, to be tumbled out of the family shelter, to see cracks and gashes in that fabric, to be cut by them, to see beyond them—was that good? Did it give one an experience that even if it was painful, yet meant that the gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking one seriously; and giving one a job which they would not think it worthwhile giving, say to Meg and Imogen Booth, say to Ida and Sylvia Milman? I had my visual way of putting it. I would see (after Thoby’s death) two great grindstones (as I walked round Gordon Sqe) and myself between them. I would typify a contest between myself and “them”—some invisible giant. I would reason, or fancy that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was at any rate, the real thing. Nobody could say that I had been fobbed off with an unmeaning slip of the precious matter. So I came to think of life as something of extreme reality. And this, of course, increased my feeling of my own importance. Not in relation to other human beings: in relation to the force which had respected me sufficiently to make me feel what was real.”

[Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” Moments of Being, p. 118.]

(Congratulations! And in honor, here a gradeschool watercolor of his:)

(My favorites: lightning *nearly* striking church; transparent doors and windowframes; TV antennae on houses; German patchwork fields.)

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.

[This is another poem by Mary Oliver, from Red Bird. I read it twice before I realized the “she” is actually sorrow — I thought it was about loving someone who is difficult to love and needs care, like a sick child or a sick person who is like a child. (Which of course, is in one way exactly what it is about even though it’s about sorrow.) I like it a lot as a poem because sadness so often has to do with stories ending, with not feeling like there is anywhere to go from here. And telling a story about yourself with sorrow as a character is an ingenious way to re-start time, and to re-start a sense that it is worth paying gentle attention to your own life.]

I have been saving a small stack of library books for several months (you can do this with academic libraries) because I was wanting to type up passages from them. One of the books is Mary Oliver’s Red Bird, and here is one poem from it.

OCEAN

I am in love with the Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is

always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each one of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.

“Nope.

They’re not.

They’re dead.”