a path in the woods

I don't trust the truth of memories

because what leaves us

departs forever

There's only one current of this sacred river

but I still want to remain faithful

to my first astonishments

to recognize as wisdom the child's wonder

and to carry in myself until the end a path

in the woods of my childhood

dappled with patches of sunlight

to search for it everywhere

in museums in the shade of churches

this path on which I ran unaware

a six-year old

toward my primary mysterious aloneness

Anna Kamienska

Photo:  Peter Bowers

something that happens right now

    

I haven't told this before. By our house on the plains before I was born my father planted a maple. At night after bedtime when others were asleep I would go out and stand beside it and know all the way north and all the way south. Air from the fields wandered in. Stars waited with me. All of us ached with a silence, needing the next thing, but quiet. We leaned into midnight and then leaned back. On the rise to the west the radio tower blinked - so many messages pouring by. 

    A great surge came rushing from everywhere and wrapped all the land and sky. Where were we going? How soon would our house break loose and become a little speck lost in the vast night? My father and mother would die. The maple tree would stand right there. With my hand on that smooth bark we would watch it all. Then my feet would come loose from Earth and rise by the power of longing. I wouldn't let the others know about this, but I would be everywhere, as I am right now, a thin tone like the wind, a sip of blue light - no source, no end, no horizon. 

William Stafford

The Way It Is

Photo:  Peter Bowers

funny

What's it like to be human

asked the bird

I don't know really

It's to be prisoner in your own skin

but crave infinity

to be captive of a crumb of time

but reach for eternity

to be hopelessly uncertain

and a fool of hope

to be a crystal of frost

and a handful of heat

to breathe in air

to choke without words

to be on fire

and have a nest of ashes

to eat bread

but feast on hungers

to die without love

but love beyond death

That's funny said the bird

flying lightly up into the sky

Anna Kamienska

Astonishments

Photos:  Peter Bowers

breath

 

    Breath, you invisible poem! 

    Pure, continuous exchange

    with all that is, flow and counterflow

    where rhythmically I come to be.

    

    Each time a wave that occurs just once

    in a sea I discover I am.

    You, innermost of oceans,

    you, infinitude of space.

    

    How many far places were once

    within me. Some winds

    are like my own child.

    

    When I breathe them now, do they know me again?

    Air, you silken surround,

    completion and seed of my words.

    

    

    

    

    

    Rainer Maria Rilke

    Sonnets to Orpheus

    Part Two I

    Trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

    Photo:  Peter Bowers