Monthly Archives: January 2015

It even comes to the boulder.

poetry

I have read this poem so many times, and still feel that I’m not equal to it, I can’t hope to plumb its depths. In that way the poem is like its subject, which speaks to me of the grace of God, something of Himself He gives us even though we are undeserving, unworthy, dense as rocks. It falls in the form of joy or peace or repentance, and when you’ve recovered from the surprise, you want to bake a cake and give a party.

HAPPINESS

There’s no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

~ Jane Kenyon

Collis refutes thin air.

nature, quotes, ,

You cannot make things out of thin air, people say. There is no such thing as thin air, if by that is meant something empty. It is really very thick and powerful, and from it all things are made that are made, or without it cannot be made, whether tree, plant, person, or army tank.

What is the atmosphere? It is an air ocean. We walk at the bottom of an air ocean at a depth of from two hundred to five hundred miles. We cannot see it, we cannot touch it, and yet it presses down upon us with a pressure of a ton to every square foot. Each acre of land sustains forty-six thousand tons of air. It is possible to carry this surprising weight on our heads owing to the way it equalizes the pressure all around us.

The atmosphere is composed, as everything is composed, of small items called molecules. They are not all of the same kind. Some contain oxygen, others carbon dioxide, some nitrogen, others argon; some ozone, others nitric acid; some water vapour, others ammonia. In quantity nitrogen heads the list and oxygen seconds it, while in importance the carbon dioxide is second to none. When we grasp that water, carbon, nitrogen, nitric acid, and ammonia contribute ninety per cent of all the materials that are built into the tissues of plants, it is easy to see how necessary it is that they should have roots in the air as well as roots in the soil.

The leaves are these upper roots or mouths — plants are pretty well all mouth.

— John Stewart Collis in The Worm Forgives the Plough

lamium & plum leaves Nov 08

We kiss and name and praise.

poetry, the language, ,

I have a few hours to myself this afternoon and have been perusing a book of poetry that my husband gave me for Christmas, Dana Gioia’s Interrogations at Noon. I think I borrowed this collection from the library once, but long enough ago that even the poems I vaguely remembered are now fresh gifts — like this one on the first page.

WORDS

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other –
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper –
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always –
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

— Dana Gioia

half dome 4 more sun yet
Webcam of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park

Collis cannot hear ants.

nature, quotes,

I’ve continued reading along in The Worm Forgives the Plough by John Stewart Collis, though days and weeks did go by when I neglected that paperback sitting on my nightstand and followed instead the lives of fascinating characters in Pearl S. Buck’s novels.

After the first half of the Collis book and its descriptions of farm work, the author begins to give lessons on clouds and chalk, geology and evolution. He explains botany in lucid prose, and earthworms. I wasn’t so interested in some of these topics and did skim a bit, but when he started writing in vivid detail about the kingdoms of ants and how they live, I paid closer attention. Just a short example here:

Thus ants are specialized in activity, but they all share common destinies and dooms. All, for instance, are without ears, and live in a world dedicated to silence. Here again we cannot easily conceive this life. There is silence along their streets, and even on the field of battle there is no sound. And since they are deaf it seems certain that they are also voiceless. It may be that we have not the ears to hear the utterances of insects even as we have not the eyes to see the tiniest of their brothers. Anyway the fact iant-trail-2s that we don’t hear anything and it is probable that the silence is absolute. Just as we can watch a spider attack a fly caught in its web and see it slowly eat its living meal without a sound being heard, so also, however close we might bend down upon cohorts of embattled ants, we will hear no shout of insectual command, no cry of triumph, no moans of the dying, and even when a head is sawn off or a severed limb falls to the ground, no shriek of pain will humanize the scene.

— John Stewart Collis