I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
How lovely.
I really like his 'Meditation on Oyster River'. Do you know it? I tried to find it on the internet but couldn't. It's a really brilliant description of the stages of deep meditation. Check it out if you can when you're next in a bookshop.
Sad to report, it's the last night of Tally's Blood tonight. Karen and I are really going to miss it now it's drawing to a close. It's been so great working together. She's a very talented lady. Feeling emotionally and mentally exhausted by the last couple of months work, and despite feeling grateful and proud for the overwhelming and enthusiastic response to the play we both somehow still wish we could have achieved even more.
I held the auditions for House of Bernarda Alba on Wednesday and cast your old pal Adrienne as Maria Josepha! :-)
But right now we know we must just let go and rest...
Are you OK? Hope you reading Roethke doesn't mean you're depressed...! How are the classes?
love and light,
Mark
I don't know it, but I will look for it! My new friend Amanda (she's in my class, but we have started to spend time together outside of it) showed me the poem. She's actually a Quaker too...isn't that nice?
You must be sad to finish your lovely show. It makes me so glad that it went so well for you and Karen and that you had such a fantastic time working together. Hopefully you'll both get to do it again soon. It was lovely to see her performance, she really really was wonderful in it, and that was even before the show went up!
I'm sure after the two of you have had a nice rest you will both get the opportunity to achieve even more in your artistic paths...But just be proud of yourselves for now, ye deserve it :-)
That's wicked you cast Adrienne! I think she will be wonderful in that part...how were the auditions otherwise?
I'm ok, Mark, thanks for asking...I was a bit depressed last week so I just kept my head down and stayed quiet...but I actually feel grand now, almost better for it. I read the most amazing book that Amanda gave me, such perfect timing for all that had been going on in my head..."The Spiral Staircase", have you read it? I know you've suggested Karen Armstrong to me before...If you haven't, I think you would like it too. Its a great story...
The classes are grand. I haven't been able to do two of the weekend workshops because not enough people committed to the places they had booked, but the weekly class is going great. Last one for this term on Wednesday!
Have you done any of your talks yet? And how is the book going? I loved the principles you laid down in your last comment.
Anyhoo, I hope you both are enjoying your free time and that things are coming together smoothly for Bernarda. Lorca is so beautiful isn't he?
Chat to you soon - I'm over from 1st to 6th December and things won't be so hectic this time, so hopefully we'll get to have a nice pre-Christmas drink! X
Amanda sounds like an interesting woman. All the Quakers I've met are such interesting souls and that's great you have someone to share spiritual stuff with.
I finally managed to find that poem! (See below.) And I've included another favourite- "The Rose" - also by Roethke.
Reading 20th century nature poetry like this prepares me for tackling Lorca. Still 2 roles left to cast, but we don't start rehearsals till February, so there's no great hurry and I can afford to take my time. I see HOBA swimming in dreamy logic, a hot, passionate ether of imagery and language, not quite surreal- but the words, and symbols, hot and gestural, with the vibrant intensity and qualities found in a lucid nightmare/vision (-borne of desire I guess, but NOT Freudian) Sorry! I think I'm just using this comment as a way of venting my head, and getting my thoughts clear about it. I just can't wait to get started! I can only hope that Adrianne and the other good ladies of Giffnock will be able to cope with the challenge of embodying these fleeting, ineffable atmospheres! We shall see...!
:-)
Am looking forward to seeing you when you're over in Scotland again. Let me know when you're free next week.
Oh and here are those 2 poems.
Take care,
Mark x
Meditation at Oyster River
I
Over the low, barnacled, elephant-coloured rocks
Come the first tide ripples, moving, almost without sound, toward me,
Running along the narrow furrows of the shore, the rows of dead
clamshells;
Then a runnel behind me, creeping closer,
Alive with tiny striped fish, and young crabs climbing in and out of the
water.
No sound from the bay. No violence.
Even the gulls quiet on the far rocks,
Silent, in the deepening light,
Their cat-mewing over,
Their child-wimpering.
At last one long undulant ripple,
Blue black from where I am sitting,
Makes almost a wave over a barrier of small stones,
Slapping lightly against a sunken log.
I dabble my toes in the brackish foam sliding forward,
Then retire to a rock higher up on the cliffside.
The wind slackens, light as a moth fanning a stone —
A twilight wind, light as a child’s breath,
Turning not a leaf, not a ripple.
The dew revives on the beach grass;
The salt-soaked wood of a fire crackles;
A fish raven turns on its perch (a dead tree in the river mouth),
Its wings catching a last glint of the reflected sunlight.
II
The self persists like a dying star,
In sleep, afraid. Death’s face rises afresh,
Among the shy beasts — the deer at the salt lick,
The doe, with its sloped shoulders, loping across the highway,
The young snake, poised in green leaves, waiting for its fly,
The hummingbird, whirring from quince blossom to morning-glory —
With these I would be.
And with water: the waves coming forward without cessation,
The waves, altered by sandbars, beds of kelp, miscellaneous driftwood,
Topped by cross-winds, tugged at by sinuous undercurrents,
The tide rustling in, sliding between the ridges of stone,
The tongues of water creeping in quietly.
III
In this hour,
In this first heaven of knowing,
The flesh takes on the pure poise of the spirit,
Acquires, for a time, the sandpiper’s insouciance,
The hummingbird’s surety, the kingfisher’s cunning.
I shift on my rock, and I think:
Of the first trembling of a Michigan brook in April.
Over a lip of stone, the tiny rivulet;
And the wrist-thick cascade tumbling from a cleft rock,
Its spray holding a double rainbow in the early morning,
Small enough to be taken in, embraced, by two arms;
Or the Tittabawasee, in the time between winter and spring,
When the ice melts along the edges in early afternoon
And the mid-channel begins cracking and heaving from the pressure beneath,
The ice piling high against the ironbound spiles,
Gleaming, freezing hard again, creaking at midnight,
And I long for the blast of dynamite,
The sudden sucking roar as the culvert loosens its debris of branches and
sticks —
Welter of tin cans, pails, old birds’ nests, a child’s shoe riding a log—
As the piled ice breaks away from the battered spiles
And the whole river begins to move forward, its bridges shaking.
IV
Now, in this waning of light,
I rock with the motion of morning;
In the cradle of all that is,
I’m lulled into half sleep
By the lapping of waves,
The cries of the sandpiper.
Water’s my will and my way,
And the spirit runs, intermittently,
In and out of the small waves,
Runs with the intrepid shore birds —
How graceful the small before danger!
In the first of the moon,
All’s a scattering,
A shining.
The Rose
There are those to whom place is unimportant,
But this place, where sea and fresh water meet,
Is important-
Where the hawks sway out into the wind,
Without a single wingbeat,
And the eagles sail low over the fir trees,
And the gulls cry against the crows
In the curved harbors,
And the tide rises up against the grass
Nibbled by sheep and rabbits.
A time for watching the tide
For the heron’s hieratic fishing,
For the sleepy cries of the towhee,
The morning birds gone, the twittering finches,
But still the flash of the kingfisher, the wingbeat of the scoter,
The sun a ball of fire coming down over the water,
The last geese crossing against the reflected afterlight,
The moon retreating into a vague cloud-shape
To the cries of the owl, the eerie whooper.
The old log subsides with the lessening waves,
And there is silence
I sway outside myself
Into the darkening currents,
Into the small spillage of driftwood,
The waters swirling past the tiny headlands.
Was it here I wore a crown of birds for a moment
While on a far point of the rocks
The light heightened,
And below, in a mist out of nowhere,
The first rain gathered?
2
As when a ship sails with a light wind-
The waves less than the ripples made by rising fish,
The lacelike wrinkles of the wake widening, thinning out,
Sliding away from the traveler’s eye,
The prow pitching easily up and down,
The whole ship rolling slightly sideways,
The stern high, dipping like a child’s boat in a pond-
Our motion continues.
But this rose, this rose in the sea-wind,
Stays,
Stays in its true place,
Flowering out of the dark,
Widening at high noon, face upward,
A single wild rose, struggling out of the white embrace of the morning-glory,
Out of the briary hedge, the tangle of matted underbrush,
Beyond the clover, the ragged hay,
Beyond the sea pine, the oak, the wind-tipped madrona,
Moving with the waves, the undulating driftwood,
Where the slow creek winds down to the black sand of the shore
With its thick grassy scum and crabs scuttling back into their glistening craters.
And I think of roses, roses,
White and red, in the wide six-hundred-foot greenhouse,
And my father standing astride the cement benches,
Lifting me high over the four-foot stems, the Mrs. Russells, and his own elaborate
hybrids.
And how those flowerheads seemed to flow toward me, to beckon me, only a
child, out of myself.
What need for heaven, then,
With that man, and those roses?
3
What do they tell us, sound and silence?
I think of American sounds in this silence:
On the banks of the Tombstone, the wind-harps having their say,
The thrush singing alone, that easy bird,
The killdeer whistling away form me,
The mimetic chortling of the catbird
Down in the corner of the garden, among the raggedy lilacs,
The bobolink skirring from a broken fencepost,
The bluebird, lover of holes in old wood, lilting its light song,
And that thin cry, like a needle piercing the ear, the insistent cicada,
And the ticking of snow around oil drums in the Dakotas,
The thin whine of telephone wires in the wind of a Michigan winter,
The shriek of nails as old shingles are ripped from the top of a roof,
The bulldozer backing away, the hiss of the sandblaster,,,,
And the deep chorus of horns coming up from the streets in early morning.
I returned to the twittering of swalllows above water,
And that sound, that single sound,
When the mind remembers all,
And gently the light enters the sleeping soul,
A sound so thin it could not woo a bird,
Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire.
I think of the rock singing, and light making its own silence,
At the edge of ripening meadow, in early summer,
The moon lolling in the close elm, a shimmer of silver,
Or that lonely time before the breaking of morning
When the slow freight winds along the edge of the ravage hillside,
And the wind tries the shape of a tree,
While the moon lingers,
And a drop of rain water hangs at the tip of a leaf
Shifting in the wakening sunlight
Like the eye of a new-caught fish.
4
I live with the rocks, their weeds,
Their filmy fringes of green, their harsh
Edges, their holes
Cut by the sea-slime, far from the crash
Of the long swell,
The oily, tar-laden walls
Of the toppling waves,
Where the salmon ease their way into the kelp beds,
And the sea rearranges itself among the small islands.
Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas,
Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself,
As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,
And I stood outside myself,
Beyond becoming and perishing,
A something wholly other,
As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive,
And yet was still.
And I rejoiced in being what I was:
In the lilac change, the white reptilian calm,
In the bird beyond the bough, the single one
With all the air to greet him as he flies,
The dolphin rising from the darkening waves;
And in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind,
Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light,
Gathering to itself sound and silence-
Mine and the sea-wind’s.
Post a Comment