Afterwards: Mary Oliver’s journey

From this amazing interview with poet Mary Oliver at 75, talking about carrying on after her life partner of 40 years died. The big choices:

I had decided I would do one of two things when she died. I would buy a little cabin in the woods, and go inside with all my books and shut the door. Or I would unlock all the doors—we had always kept them locked; Molly liked that sense of safety—and see who I could meet in the world. And that’s what I did. I haven’t locked the door for five years. I have wonderful new friends. And I have more time to be by myself.

Women spinning the wheel

Autumn’s Mabon here but I revel in images of spring in the northern hemisphere. This morning I read that religion is believed to be going extinct in nine countries. Well, many wonderful living creatures, plants, organisms are going extinct and that concerns me more deeply. I have no fear that mystery will go extinct, or mysticism, or the power of loving attention or the hunger for justice. Women everywhere are turning the wheel and spinning straw into gold and gold into straw, whatever may be more needed. Photochrome found here.

And a poem for the northern spring and for renewed mystery.

The May Apple

by Cynthia Zarin

Or mandrake. By the brook   

I bent and parted the leaves.   

Clefts. Veins. Smell

of musk, of mud. Tongue   

slide of sap propelled,   

shaking under the green.

Stung Io, her sentries

pale udder behind a bower—

day moon a white brow,

a chin sheer in water.

I wanted to put my face   

to it, to its sheen

more animal than flower.

A road heading for the wilderness

Such dignity and restraint amidst catastrophe, such courage.

Subaru

by Tunimura Shinji

With my eyes closed, I see nothing
With sorrow in my heart, I open my eyes
A road heading for the wilderness
And nothing else other than what I see.

Ah, all you stars, destined to shatter into pieces
At least you can quietly shed a light on me

I’ll go onwards, even if my cheeks turn pallid
I’ll go onwards, bidding farewell to the stars

With every breath I have in my chest,
And the cold wind continues to howl
Even so, my heart holds the passion
To keep on pursuing my dream

Ah, all you stars, each nameless among many,
Glowing gloriously as you shatter into pieces

I’ll go onwards, as my heart commands
I’ll go onwards, bidding farewell to the stars

Ah, someday, someone will walk this road
Ah, someday, someone will walk this road

I’ll go onwards, even if my cheeks turn pallid
I’ll go onwards, bidding farewell to the stars.

I’ll go onwards, bidding farewell to the stars

Parthenon moon

Every now and again I come across an image that raises goosebumps on my flesh. The beauty of this brilliant enormous moon hovering above the Parthenon. Such beauty above the ruined and  broken world, such a reminder of  what it might be like to live in a society that has reverence for nature, what it would be like to live and breathe and love in harmony and oneness with elemental forces, to feel at one with the suffering earth. Image by Anthony Ayiomamitis.

And as I sit here at my desk, there are images streaming of the bombing of Libya, of a stricken nuclear power plant, of survivors in a muddy wasteland in north-east Japan. Down the road there are evicted and homeless people crowding into informal settlements without running water or  electricity, destitute and near starvation. On the other side of the mountain there are luxury spas and golf courses and  baroque shopping malls reached on four-lane highways. Perched between the First World and the Third World, I sit in my valley waiting for Mabon. Which means the beginning of the winter rainfall, the eagerly awaited rains of April. In the early mornings we have mountain mists and  drifting woodsmoke, heavy dew. The sun burns off the mist and  the cattle  begin lowing down by the river. Followed by hot dry winds and  blazing heat, warm nights with a few cicadas still thrumming away in the camphor trees. The hope of rain as rivers and  streams dwindle and roadside grasses bleach brittle.

And the moon hovering so low and so bright, another kind of hope.

The bill come due

Writer Kazumi Saeki  from Sendai in Japan in an op-ed in the NYT,  going to the heart of nuclear threat:

We lacked both water and gas, and our only illumination that night came from candles and the moon. With the lights of the city extinguished, stars shone brightly in the night sky. When I looked out toward the ocean the next morning, I saw in horror that neighborhoods close to the sea had simply vanished. Many of our friends lived in those areas. In the distance, I could see only the trees planted to protect the shore.

I found my elderly mother, who lives nearby and had taken temporary refuge at an emergency shelter, where she said that everyone complained of the cold while sharing rice balls. Many were coughing. The shelter was overflowing, and my mother decided to come home with my wife and me. On my way to and from the shelter, I passed a gasoline station where people lined up, hoping for a small amount of rationed fuel. Reports of a catastrophe at the nuclear power plant in neighboring Fukushima Prefecture, involving hydrogen explosions and radiation leaks, have come in. Now an invisible pollution is beginning to spread. People have acquired a desire for technology that surpasses human comprehension. Yet the bill that has come due for that desire is all too dear.

Even as I write, strong aftershocks continue. As he left, Ben spoke of a “calm chaos.” It is true that faced with this calamity, the people of Sendai have maintained a sense of calm. This is perhaps due less to the emotional restraint that is particular to the people of the northern countryside, and more to the hollowing out of their emotions. In the vortex of an unimaginable disaster, they have not yet had the time to feel grief, sadness and anger.

Watching, waiting

What is there to say? Watching, waiting, hoping, longing to be able to help in some way –

Although the Wind…

by Izumi Shikibu

Although the wind

blows terribly here,

the moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

All you can do

Emailed a friend in Tokyo who said her apartment was bucking like a surfboard with aftershock tremors.

What are you doing? I asked. Stupid pointless question.

Oh you know, she said. Grounding. The usual.

From Marukami Haruki:

“If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark”

I love rejoining you in the depths of the sea

Sitting out in the autumnal garden eating plums and reading (blissfully) the poet Duo Duo. A special kind of magic emerges when we open a book of poems and finds ourselves transformed. I make time for reading poetry as I do for creating rituals, for making love, for singing out loud all alone, for enjoying supper with friends, for playing with dogs, for writing myself into a new world, for swimming underwater, for caring for a sick friend.

Duo Duo is the pen name of Li Shizheng, who was born in Beijing in 1951. He started writing poetry in the early 1970s as a youth during the isolated, midnight hours of the Cultural Revolution, and many of his early poems critiqued the revolution from an insider’s point of view. After witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Duo Duo left China and did not return for more than a decade. He currently teaches at Hainan University and divides his time between Hainan and Beijing. In his acceptance speech for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Duo Duo said:

Perhaps pondering words is also a form of seeking justice. If a monologue can invite a chorus, then perhaps it can speak for others as well. Poetry is self-sufficient in its uselessness, and therefore it is contemptuous of power.

…

After experiencing the cacophony of revolution, subversion, experimentation, and deconstruction, what can the poet still hear? Inside this word that has burst out from the riddle—silence—is our common condition: on the level of a completely material world, on a human physical level, we are allowing a dysfunctional intelligence to peck at and eat away the landscape; it is a continuation of slogans; a sustainable violence is using memory as fuel, and what has been replenished is the echo of our condition, because the exile of words begins here.

Promise
Duo Duo

I love, I love my shadow
Being a parrot, I love eating
What it loves eating, I love giving you what I don’t have
I love asking: Do you still love me?
I love your ear, and it loves listening: I love adventures

I love this enamored house inviting us to lie down and     make its roof
I love lying on my side, casting a shadow for a straight line
Leaving a string of small villages for a voluptuous body
I want that birthmark closest to your lips
To know, this is my promise

I love the intelligence in my dreams being an ambitious     groom
I love eating raw meat, gazing straight at hell
But more I love secretly playing the violin in your arms
I love turning off the lights early, waiting
For your body to illuminate this room once again

I love when I sleep, my pillow covered in plums
Waking up, the plums all have returned to their branches
I love all night long the waves attracting the front deck of     the ship
I love shouting: You will come back
I love torturing the harbor, torturing words, in this way

I love controlling myself in front of the desk
I love thrusting my hands into the sea
I love my five fingers stretching open at the same time
Holding tightly the edges of a wheat field
I love my five fingers still being your five boyfriends

I love memory being a life, less
But still more than what has been left out when a woman
Walks toward me, as if thirty years ago
In the sunset, on the street, that girl carrying her violin case
Still smiling at me for no reason

I love even more that we are still a pair of torpedoes
Waiting for someone to launch us again
I love rejoining you in the depths of the sea, you
Are mine, only mine, I
Still love speaking like this, like this, singing of my promise –

An end to fracking, now!

In Pennsylvania. In Arkansas. The Karoo basin. Wherever.

See Fracking: Art and Activism Against the Drill to March 25.

Hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is a means of gas extraction that accesses gas trapped more than a mile below the earth’s surface. When a well is fracked, small earthquakes are produced by the pressurized injection of millions of gallons of fresh water combined with sand and chemicals, releasing the gas, as well as toxic chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive materials that contaminate air and water.

Image from Jacques del Conte.

Libya, between hope and fear

From Libyan poet Khaled Mattawa:

EAST OF CARTHAGE: AN IDYLL

1.
Look here, Marcus Aurelius, we’ve come to see
your temple, deluded the guards, crawled through a hole
in the fence. Why your descendent, my guide and friend
has opted for secrecy, I don’t know. But I do know
what to call the Africans, passport-less, yellow-eyed
who will ride the boat before me for Naples, they hope.
Here the sea curls its granite lip at them and flings a winter
storm like a cough, or the seadog drops them at Hannibal’s
shores, where they’ll stand stupefied like his elephants.
What dimension of time will they cross as the Hours loop
tight plastic ropes round their ankles and wrists?
What siren song will the trucks shipping them back
to Ouagadougou drone into their ears? I look at them
loitering, waiting for the second act of their darkness
to fall. I look at the sky shake her dicey fists.
One can be thankful, I suppose, for not being one of them,
and wrap the fabric of that thought around oneself
to keep the cold wind at bay. But what world is this
that makes our lives sufficient even as the horizon’s rope
is about to snap, while the sea and sky ache to become
a moment to peel itself like skin off fruit, and let us in
on its sweetness as we wait, smoking or fondling provisions,
listening to the engine’s invocational purr. In an hour
that will dawn and dusk at once, one that will stretch
into days strung like beads on the horizon’s throat,
they will ride their tormented ship as the dog star
begins to float on the water, so bright and still,
you’d want to scoop it out in the palm of your hand