Like tangled hair,
The circular delusion
Of beginning and end,
When straightened out,
A dream no longer.
~ Dōgen
***
“Tangled Up In Blue” by Bob Dylan
Category: Music
“Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches” by Mary Oliver
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives —
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?
Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
Well, there is time left —
fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!
To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!
To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened
in the night
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!
A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.
Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?
And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.
That was then, which hasn’t ended yet.
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge.
I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.
“Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches” by Mary Oliver, West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
“Tangerine” by Christy Anna Jones
Stop.
Dry your eyes
go sit on the porch
in your favorite rocking chair
the one that reminds you of
tangerines and peach ice cream
of Nina Simone and mandolins
of her.
Drink in your sorrow from a paper cup
and watch as the sinking sun
slips away into an infinite pool
of cloud and sky.
Streaks of orange and red as rich as the
over-ripe peaches you would pick
with her
for ice cream.
Look into your cup
see the deep orange swirl of the sorrow you drink.
Notice the taste on your tongue
sweet like a juicy tangerine.
Feel the evening breeze against the fine hair on
your bare arms and
on your sun-kissed shoulders.
Breathe in
and then let it go.
See the breeze blow specks of orange and gold
like tangerine dust
into the world around you.
Look into your cup of sorrow,
once full, now empty.
The air smells sweet
like Tupelo honey and sunshine
like mandolins and peach ice cream
like tangerines.
Does she still remember times like these?
* “Tangerine” by Christy Anna Jones via The Voices Project.
“Tangerine” by Led Zeppelin
“Letter to a Lost Friend” by Barbara Hamby
There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened
between us, like ostyt, which can be used
for a cup of tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room,
and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet,
which is to want something so much over months
and even years that when you get it, you have lost
the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky,
“It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me.”
What is the word for someone who looks into her friend’s face
and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has left
the station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights
at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men,
who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young
and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wrote
all night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke
in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, books
everywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné,
so that now, on a train in the taiga of Siberia,
I see what she sees — all my books alphabetized and on shelves,
feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins,
neck crumpled like last week’s newspaper, while her friends
are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies’,
and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved
for even a moment, though I can’t help but feel like Pushkin,
a rough ball of lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books
and saying, “Goodbye, my dear friends,” as those volumes
close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding
the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.
Source: Poetry (January 2013).
*
Eleni Mandell – “Dear Friend”
“A Few Of The Crimes You’ve Committed Against My Heart” by Dara Wier
Arson. Most of all arson. Tongues of flame flare lick, lick and like
So many others of us, I like fire and I like water & a good flaring.
Larceny. A little bit of larceny.
Treason. Exquisitely executed, the ultra high kind. Peppered
With a few petty kickbacks. Like in a self-serve brain surgery
In and Out Same Day Service Bargain Up Way. Buy One, Get One
Free. You committed fog against me. You committed horses
Against me. You attacked me with hummingbirds.
You ambushed me with iridescence. You scapled me
With seeds. You blindsided me with stars. You pushed me over
The edge with bumblebees. You strangled me with my own heart.
You broke into me with gills. Me with lungs under my wings.
With books you electrocuted me. With words you tore me to pieces.
With inferotemporal neurons you swindled me.
You hung me with sattelites. With time and distance you slay me.
You pepper-sprayed me with music. You took out my eyes, so you
Said, to polish them up a bit. You stole my petticoat, my pretty chemise.
You over-salted me with blizzards. You deserted me at noon.
You committed rain against me. You committed sharks against me.
With rivers and meadows, you lied to me, with canyons and the tops of fog
Shrouded mountains. You put ravens in there to kidnap me. You
Burned me with songbirds & nightfall & morning. You scalded me with
Flocks, you stole my tongue with tides. With all of this you put me down.
– Dara Wier via Notnostrums
*
“Criminal” by Fiona Apple
Words ... for the Time Being 