Tiny Plastic Houses

Are You Breathing, Just a Little, and Calling it a Life?

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 2:20 pm. It is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.