Art is a journey into the most unknown thing of all - oneself. Nobody knows his own frontiers… I don’t think I’d ever want to take a road if I knew where it led.

Louis Kahan
Wislawa Szymborska: Utopia

wonderfulambiguity:

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

From “A large number”, 1976, Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

(Source: nobelprize.org)

    

Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear
moonbeams striking on the windows.

In my chest,
a strange voice is awakens
and a song plays inside me
a longing that is not mine.

They say that ancestors, dead before their time,
with young blood still in their veins,
with great passion in their blood,
with the sun still burning in their blood
come,
come to continue to live
within us
their unfinished lives.

Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear
moonbeams striking on the windows.

O, who knows, soul of mine, in which chest you will sing
you also, after centuries,
in soft ropes of silence,
on harps of obscurity - the drowned longing
and the pleasure of living torn? Who knows?
Who knows?
    

Fear

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,
As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling,
And there is no sign of the wind.
» Journal of a Nobody: A Few Words on the Soul by Wislawa Szymborska

journalofanobody:


We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

— translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

» A Poet Reflects: The center isn’t a point. If it were, it would be easier to locate....

apoetreflects:

The center isn’t a point.
If it were, it would be easier to locate.
It’s not even the reduction of a point to its infinity.

The center is an absence,
of a point, of infinity, even of absence,
and it can be located only by absence.

Look at me after you’ve gone
even though it’s only a moment since I was there.
Now the center has taught me not to be here
but later this is where the center will be.

—Roberto Juarroz, poem “6” of Second Vertical Poetry in Vertical Poetry, translated from the Spanish by W. S. Merwin (North Point Press, 1988)

» this room and everything in it: No Edge, No Falling

rabbit-light:


after Elizabeth Bishop



Here not waterfalls: scrubby plats of gorse and heather
—a few stray dabs of yellow torn
by stinging winds. We’ve come
cross rutted track and granite stiles,
along the apertures of fields,
“to stare at some inexplicable old stonework”—
nineteen huddled rocks, nineteen obelisks,
a ring of stones in ancient reformation.

Stark and pricked, wayward:
every footpath this late autumn leads
to stonework ruins draped by fog-ghosts
—the lanky beauties rising cross the heath
not oak but chimney stacks, hearth-less and chill.
If hungering for anything, we’re hungering for fire—
a burst of red to break the endless heath,
a bonfire to warm these age-old stones.
But listen, in the wind there is a voice—
it isn’t only hardship that I offer.

Not only, but ocean dusted blue
which crests against striated crops of granite,
a rocky, disbelieving headland;
and there, beyond, a horizon line so far, so smudged
there is no edge or falling.

Geri Doran

from New England Review Volume 33, Number 3 / 2012

apoetreflects:

The bell is full of wind
though it does not ring.
The bird is full of flight
though it is still.
The sky is full of clouds
though it is alone.
The world is full of voice
though no one speaks it.
Everything is full of fleeing
though there are no roads.

Everything is fleeing
toward its presence.

—Roberto Juarroz, from Vertical Poetry, translated from the Spanish by W. S. Merwin (North Point Press, 1988)

    

Trees

I Tthink that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
    

In the city where it rains for just about three days a week
City dwellers, on the sidewalk,
Stroll hand in hand and cheek to cheek,
In the city where it rains for just about three days a week,
From under the old umbrellas, which moan and squeak
And can’t sustain
The wet burden of the rain,
City dwellers on the sidewalk,
Look like automatic puppets, straight out of the window shop.

In the city where it rains for just about three days a week
Just one sound will fill the sidewalk:
It’s those walking hand in hand and cheek to cheek,
Counting
In their head
The cadence of the rain drops
Dripping from umbrellas,
From water pipes,
And from the brink
Of the sky, like a drink
Giving life—
Jaded,
Futile,
Full of strife.

In the city where it rains for ust about three days a week
An old man and an old lady –
Two mechanic, broken toys –
Walk hand in hand and cheek to cheek.
    

We have time for everything
Sleep, run back and forth,
regret we made an error and err again
judge others and absolve ourselves,
we have time to read and write,
edit what we wrote, regret what we wrote,
we have time to make projects and never follow through
we have time to dwell in illusions and stir through
their ashes much later.

We have time for ambitions and diseases,
to blame destiny and details,
we have time to look at the clouds, at the ads, or some random accident, we have time
to chase away our questions, postpone our answers, we have time
to crush a dream and reinvent it, we have time to make friends,
to lose them, we have time to take lessons and forget them
soon after, we have time to receive gifts and not understand them. We have time for everything.

No time, though, for a little tenderness.
When we’re about to do that, too, we die.
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