Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?
By Mary Oliver
(1935 - )


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.

Listen to what your version of the sock puppet monkeys are urging you to do

What influences do you really, really need to say goodbye to? The next six months will provide you with ample motivation and opportunity to finally bid those farewells. What long-term cycle really, really needs to be drawn to a close, no more hemming and hawing, all loose ends tied up and all mixed signals clarified? Again, the time between now and the middle of June will bring you the necessary inspiration to make it happen. But it'll take deep thought and sustained work and an expanded sense of humor, so get started soon.

One of my favorite landscape painters makes a livable wage from selling her art. She has had many gallery showings and has garnered much critical acclaim. That's the good news. The bad news is that she feels obligated to keep churning out more landscape paintings -- even when her muse nudges her to take a detour into, say, abstract expressionism or surrealistic portraits. Galleries don't want anything from her except the stuff that has made her semi-famous. "Sometimes I fantasize about creating a series of 'Sock Puppet Monkeys Playing Poker,'" she told me. If she were an Aries, I'd advise her to do what I think you should do in 2010: Listen to what your version of the sock puppet monkeys are urging you to do. 

~ Rob Brezsny

the universe is trying to tell me something out there superearth covered in 40 mile deep oceans boiling ~ lush life more than this we hope to see with the naked telescope a holiday on the rocks out there someone just like us except more creative maybe a little kooky keep us on our toes perhaps they see with eyes on stalks and speak by slapping faces

cathedral galaxies my mind wanders to dodge reality a life stunted bad habits making decisions changing course to maintain the same orbit but newton's laws give way at high enough speeds liquid freezes or floats away you know what to do do what you know do it punk

~ me

after midnight step into blue what is the mission ?  Norway saw a spiral sign in the sky ~ things fell apart pretty quickly after that what was lost was never found again ~ light bends near the sun all color is light's disruption ~ if there is free will then why am i this way ?  nothing numbs the feel the spiral the refraction buoyancy sinks big waves busted odyssey lucid calm so fleeting

~ me

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

By Wallace Stevens

(1879 - 1955)

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections,

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

there are worlds out there that have fallen into their sun or been set free into nothingness ~ a year may be three days ~ mars is covered in carbon dioxide ice ~ dust devils can be seen from space ~ gullies ripples streaks endless silence ~ nearby earth tugs a wobbly sun ~ 5 second films what happens in a compressed instant ~ each thought falls further back into orbit ~ a full moon fades away and comes back ~ i dont know anything my mind a sieve coated in midori i dont know anything crave something will slip through your fingers an LHC symphony a street fight a situationist riot so tired so mad so

 ~ me

they found water on the moon today it was clear green and tasted like absinthe ~ no one couldve predicted this ~ a spoon stirs in a reservoir glass michael collins saw it from space just him and nobody else

all of my past selves are at the party tonight i go for the shins suddenly with my telescoping steel baton its a 100 decibels in here the glasses clink the world quakes blood and spit and the things i break i crack the shell poke my beak through finally

~ me

in space no one can hear the ice in your whiskey ~ nothing dispels my darkness it just comes and goes as it pleases ~ a vine that strangles the tree ~ the sun is in the right place rising and falling gears interlocking everything perceived Sol illuminates feeds cradles rocks to sleep ~ a candle's skin glows from the burn underneath ~ the surface will crack give way ~ further magnification brings more to light ~ atoms stacked upon atoms piles of color rioting in the streets ~ what has been leaves an orbit trail of debris ~ ahead the path is clear if not seen

- me

“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”

~ Ludwig van Beethoven

“ The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.”

~ Frank Zappa

kick your own ass

"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of

colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the

night." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"It is essential to have Knowledge; it is also essential to escape the

Known." - J. Krishnamurti

HEALING SHOCKS

Many of us are essentially asleep, even as we walk around in broad daylight. We're so focused on the restless narratives and repetitive fantasies unfurling in our heads that we only dimly perceive the larger story raging in all of its chaotic beauty around us.

To have any hope of permanently breaking out of our fuzzy trance, we require regular shocks. A single jolt might cause us to briefly come to attention and see the miracle of creation for what it is, but once the red alert has passed, we relax back into our fixation on the dreamy tales our mind never stops telling us.

In the course of its conspiracy to shower us with blessings, life does its best to provide us with a steady flow of healing shocks. But because it tends to err on the side of tenderness, its prods may be too gentle, allowing us to ignore them. Gradually, life will up the ante, trying to find the right mix of toughness and love, as it encourages us to WAKE UP!

But our addiction to the phantasmagoria is tenacious. The stream-of- conscious narratives and ever-bubbling fantasies, even when they're racked with torment and terror, are perversely entertaining. And so we may avoid responding to the kind shocks for so long that life finally has to resort to stronger medicine. Then we might get sick or lose our job or muck up our closest relationship.

It doesn't have to be that way. We could cultivate in ourselves a sixth sense for the wake-up calls life sends us. We might develop a knack for responding with agile grace to the early, gentler ones so that we wouldn't have to be visited by the more stringent measures.

There's also another possibility: With hungry intent, we could seek out and hunt down invigorating jolts. We wouldn't wait to have our asses kicked, but would kick our own asses -- over and over again, with a creative ingenuity that would be the envy of a great pronoiac novelist or musician or filmmaker. Who knows? We might even master the art of inducing shocks that feel really good.

~ Rob Brezsny

"It is eternity now; I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is immortal life."

- Richard Jefferies

8

what happens when time passes? oceans shift mammoth volumes of water grainy reality interlocking Mayan cycles 4 sides of 91 steps platform peak = 365 to create the space for time to unwind feed the sun with blood sustain light it's up to us


at the mouth of the Well of the Itza the world tree cave the spin of the earth is never the same each day ~ our burning sun is eight minutes in the past ~ the first day didn't have a yesterday back in time we eventually suddenly run out of structure rewind the expansion and it spirals out of existence all of time has always existed the future is a black jaguar on the dark side of the moon


the edge of space is tied up in ribbons of Andromeda's hair ~ the heliosphere twirls in churning orbits her movements collect the solar winds in a ballerina's skirt Cassini could not see it Voyager passed between the knots the scent of Fuji apples and kiwi a massive fruit stand ring embraces all of us freed from the rocks it's ok the beyond is not empty rather colorful has a sweet laugh and smells good


~ me

tethered to the sun

tethered to the sun a true god if ever there was one molten strands hold the orbit a pirouetting charred neutrino pyre 864,938 miles high radiant creme brulee every Beatles song John Lennon ever wrote

what our ancestors knew about the stars cave painting by firelight this is the ritual ecliptic paleolithic narcissistic houses in the sky we worshiped but the gods couldn't care less

black gives way to blue cosmos cornflower aerial release fairy rings 1500 year old trees string theory matter's notes universe as a symphony plucked strings there is a block the size of Rhode Island the mind cannot comprehend but can hear the tones

the laws of physics break down at the instant of creation vibrating entanglements 11 dimensions membrane theory m theory madness

~ me

Xxxxx stout

Xxxxx stout down the grist maw from the hopback to the mash tun old books you can smell the pages the stacks are martian canyons kept alive with an origami stent if you could not fail what then?  take the red pill the humidor is open she has whatever you need

- me

purkinje cell manifesto

"I want to live and I want to love
I want to catch something that I might be ashamed of"
my coffee black like Miles
my Martini clean and dry
my Ruger SP-101 .357 in a Galco ankle holster
my Bond Connery or Craig but Moore was the first
1977 means Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind
my neurons forming and signaling and receiving
a night I couldn't sleep
a drive-in theater in my skull
hyper-drive streaks blast marks too precise
tie-fighters impacting on the surface
my Saturday afternoons Star Trek reruns
photographing Lego masterpieces
that B-29 super fortress I never finished
my New Order Substance
my Smiths The Queen is Dead
on cassette tape
I was kicked out of a club once I think
and called the bouncer an asshole
I was told he was 2 steps from going Chuck Norris
we probably went to see a DraG Queen show after
or composed mad manifestos on drink napkins with a black fountain pen
when you're drunk everything is amplified now but sketchy later

in my dream the great whale wars of 2012
Hope Sandoval riding a humpback across the edge of the sea
her battle cry a series of guttural tones at 163 decibels
when the calendar ends water logged covered in barnacles
goo goo g'joob
warm inventions: Mole Sauce, Neko Case, Irish Whiskey
an orchid wants you to make love to it NOW
adaptation crustacean foucault pendulums
no matter the universe is the iris in a cat's eye
postal cereal moon beans spacial doorstop
opulent mess whiskers petals animals scents

"methodically knocking people's hats off"
that's the goal
drowning in buoyant chaos
last words on the rocks



- me

Poetics

By A. R. Ammons
(1926 - 2001)



I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper -- though
that, too -- but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

Waking

By Kalidasa
(350? - 430?)

English version by W. S. Merwin & J. Moussaieff Masson



Even the man who is happy
glimpses something
or a hair of sound touches him

and his heart overflows with a longing
he does not recognize

then it must be that he is remembering
in a place out of reach
shapes he has loved

in a life before this

the print of them still there in him waiting