Hiku for Mary

Even grandma
goes out drinking--
moonlit night

-Issa

At Lake Scugog

by Troy Jollimore

1.

Where what I see comes to rest,

at the edge of the lake,

against what I think I see

and, up on the bank, who I am

maintains an uneasy truce

with who I fear I am,

while in the cabin’s shade the gap between

the words I said

and those I remember saying

is just wide enough to contain

the remains that remain

of what I assumed I knew.

2.

Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were

gingerly trades spots

with the person you are

and what I believe I believe

sits uncomfortably next to

what I believe.

When I promised I will always give you

what I want you to want,

you heard, or desired to hear,

something else. As, over and in the lake,

the cormorant and its image

traced paths through the sky.

From: The NewYorker

July 27, 2009

by James Broughton

Simplify. Clarify. Vivify.
Surprise your eyes. Break your heart open.
Dose all your ills with laughter.
Look out! Here comes the Imperishable Light!
Accept no substitutes.
We are all participants in the marvelous.

~ James Broughton

! Thanks Lewis!

The Place

by R S Thomas

Summer is here.
Once more the house has its
Spray of martins, Prousts fountain
Of small birds, whose light shadows
Come and go in the sunshine
Of the lawn as thoughts do
In the mind. Watching them fly
Is my business, not as a man vowed
To science, who counts their returns
To the rafters, or sifts their droppings
For facts, recording the wave-length
Of their screaming; my method is so
To have them about myself
Through the hours of this brief
Season and to fill with their
Movement, that it is I that they build
In and bring up their young
To return to after the bitter
Migrations, knowing the site
Inviolate through its outward changes.

The Crows Start Demanding Royalties

By Lucia Perillo


Of all the birds, they are the ones
who mind their being armless most:
witness how, when they walk, their heads jerk
back and forth like rifle bolts.
How they heave their shoulders into each stride
as if they hoped that by some chance
new bones there would come popping out
with a boxing glove on the end of each.
Little Elvises, the hairdo slicked
with too much grease, they convene on my lawn
to strategize for their class-action suit.
Flight they would trade in a New York minute
for a black muscle car and a fist on the shift
at any stale green light. But here in my yard
by the Jack-in-the-Box Dumpster
they can only fossick* in the grass for remnants
of the world’s stale buns. And this
despite all the crow poems that have been written
because men like to see themselves as crows
(the head-jerk performed in the rearview mirror,
the dark brow commanding the rainy weather).
So I think I know how they must feel:
ripped off, shook down, taken to the cleaners.
What they’d like to do now is smash a phone against a wall.
But they can’t, so each one flies to a bare branch and screams.


*intransitive verb
1. Australian & New Zealand : to search for gold or gemstones typically by picking over abandoned workings
2. chiefly Australian & New Zealand : to search about : rummage

transitive verb chiefly Australian & New Zealand : to search for by or as if by rummaging : ferret out

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Verses from Rumi

[From our retreat: here are a few lines from Rumi translated by Coleman Barks.]

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob, blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his son and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down
and brings up a flowing prophet?
Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.
Now there's a pearl.

A vagrant wanders empty ruins
Suddenly he's wealthy.

But don't be satisfied with stories,
how things have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth,
without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.

St. Sarah Sarai Carrying the Infant Christ Child

By Sarah Sarai





























Creeping, is what a saffron sun is doing,

creeping out from a past it will soon revisit.



I hike my blood-red tunic to my thighs

with one hand while the other, well,

in my arms, well, always a child,

always delivered to us in indrawn-

infant stillness, as if creation

holds its breath because, really,

all this is over so much too soon.



Isn’t making art remembering

what we knew? Why not, then, salvation?



The water over rocks cold on granite—

quartz and orthoclase—and slick moss.

I’m the last person who should be entrusted

to carry Him, me of the angry sinner school.



And I would forswear sainthood and irony,

I would, for this one, held against my heart.


In response to: Saint Christopher and the Infant Christ, Follower of Dieric Bouts (Netherlandish, ca. 1480)
Mississippi Review

The Making of the Bear

By Ramon Gutherie

Perhaps for fear of saying to oneself, —
it is not good to plan such things too long.

No question others had more craft than I.
I had waited for the Old One to give the sign
to one of us, half hoping still his choice
might fall on me. But lately he had turned
to graving stags and reindeer on bits of antler,
art that for all his pains my clumsy fingers
could never seem to master. In any case,
his choice for cavern walls ran to pregnant cows,
bison and ponies. That, and more and more
he favored places not too hard to get at.
"What's the harm in having good work seen?"

Meanwhile the first full moon of spring was near.

I can't say why I chose the cave I did.
Passing that way one day, I'd seen it
and taken it for a badger's hole until
I saw an owl rise from it and listening close,
caught the voices of water.
I set out before dawn and took along
well-scorched moss and tallow, stone lamp, firestick
in a deer bladder lashed tight with pitched sinews.
The fling I carried in a pouch tied to my wrist.
I crawled with hips and belly till I came
into a place where I could squat. There I made
my first light. The water sounded fairly near
though the first spur I took was fell of twists
that lead me further from it. I turned back.
Now inching on a ledge with a steep sloped roof,
I struck a fissure where the torrent spouted.
I whispered to the spirit, filled my lungs
and plunged.
Swim? I doubt a salmon could
have swum it. I braced and fought for holds
in walls and ceiling to haul my self along,
still with no sign that anything but more
and wilder water lay ahead, a chance
a man must take. Half drowned, I reached a sweep
and lay there spewing out my lungs and caught between
terror of the dark and the solid feel
of rock beneath me. I hoped the bladder
still was staunch but dared not open it until
I knew my hands were dry. When at last I twirled
the firestick and coaxed the wick to flame,
I saw the place was far to open
to waste good work on.
I edged my way along a slit so barred
by stone icicles that I would have given up
when, almost now in reach, I saw the wall
that i have known since childhood
yet never saw before. I saw it now
even to the scratches other men,
knowing the place for what it was, had made
ages before me. Some of their animals were not
like ours-one hairy beast with two horns on his snout
was half glazed over by a layer of stone-ice.
Many of them were drawn overlapping others—
as mine would sprawl on theirs. None of them
was anything the size that I intended.

The stone was even-grained, would take flint clean,
and yet not soft enough to flake with time.
Pressing my back against the other wall
to have full arm-room, I sketched him in—
a bear as big as living. I worked fast,
paused only when the need was to renew
the wick and tallow. First I got the spine
of any living beast is—cut firmly—
that line where limberness and strength,
the head scaled in and forelegs placed
before the tallow failed.
Spilling down the torrent,
then guided most by slithering in my own tracks,
I found my out—into moonlight. The sun,
it see,ed had set twice since I left.
Ate and slept but, lest
the bear-feel be dimmed in me, did not go in
to wither of my women.
I told on one where I had been nor why.

Next day I packed another bladder, taking
a good supply of moss and tallow, honey and nuts,
and other, heavier, newly beveled flints.
As a last thought, I went to see old Kill-Bear.
"Look like?" he puffed. "A bear? Why, you've seen bears
since you were a baby." (And drawn them too,
he might have said, since I could scratch earth
with a stick.) "Come now, you've seen those I killed.
Look like? Well, they've got hair all over them.
Stub tails, big paws and heads and lots of teeth."
I left the old fool bawling after me:
"Hey, you ain't found one, have you? You're supposed
to tell me if you have. Don't you go trying
to get my job by killing it yourself!"

I found the cave was easier going this time,
but the torrent sucked and swirled up to the ceiling.
I moved half into it to test its tug.
It grabbed me, pulled me under. The bladder buoying me,
I found a shallow dome that let me nose just clear
the water. Strange, there with death so sure, I thought
not for my women nor their young but for the bear
that I would leave unfinished. Him I commended
to the spirits of the dark.
Slowly the water
ebbed below my chin and then my shoulders.
It rose again and then as sudden fell.
I was on a rock shelf.
I had slept. The bladder was still with me.
The roar was gone, the water gurgled like a brook.

The new flints bit well. To give him weight,
I undergouged the belly and hind quarters.
A natural bulge I fashioned into head.
I gave him teeth and claws. The last of all,
he took eyes and nostrils. When he began to breathe,
I stopped and snuffed the wick, safe in his
protection, slept.
Waking and making light the last time,
I scratched a spear mark on his flank as we were taught—
so shallow though that he would never feel it,
made him an offering of honey, nuts and tallow,
ate some myself. The lamp and flints I left there.

Heft, strength, the saddle and the soles,
the rambling appetite, fur the rolling amble,
the curious, investigating "Whoof!"
the clatter of unretracting claws, the bear-play—
sliding on their rumps down clay banks into puddles,
standing erect and balancing vines against their noses—
patience to wait with poised paw
on a rock among the rapids
to snatch the salmon as they leap,
the good
bear-smell of being bears
are what I had tried to make the flint say
on the cavern wall,

Ferocity and gentleness

Your bear is a great fool and so is man!
I have seen a naked child in pigtails,
squealing her delight,
chase a full grown bear splashing across the meadow--
and a half grown cub stand up and brave
a dozen hunters with javelins and torches.

Bison are better eating
and their hides tan easier
but you can't laugh at a bison.

Beside the profound, absolute
dark of caves, our night seems noon.
Even beneath a starless sky,
the eye makes out bulk and shapes,
but in winding scapes of underground
where no sun's light has ever shone,
finger may touch the lash
of open eye unseen.

There
in that total lack of light
is where my bear is.
No one will ever see him
but he still
is there.

For The Anniversary Of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what


W.S. Merwin

The war is over --

As long as we imagine there is something to defend, we will find enemies.
The war is always with ourselves in that respect.
Mind divides itself into self and other,
and so the wild rumpus continues.

"Except for deserted wilderness what is there to protect?"

~Joshu


The war is over --
nobody survived.

No time to mourn the dead,
sunrise over the settling dust
was too captivating for any lament.

Crimson trails of mind's lingering exhaust
scar-streaked dawn's early sky, as if
the dream of night itself exploded,
as if from now on there would be
flooding daylight only, though
even that wild wonder will
fall in time from the eyes,
till what remains is
not of time, not of mind,
yet even in its flash of vanishing --
true balm for wounded hearts.

We wake and rise and fall breathless
into this luminosity, this sky meadow
vibrant with vernal signs, hues,
and vivid budding wonders --
the ordinary evidence of everything
changing, even as we ourselves are
changed beyond our cherished dreams.

Something unspeakable, unimaginable,
falls deeper into the serene still presence
of itself, no longer fixed in desperate conflict
with itself, just drifting lazily, aimlessly,
softly over a killing floor where
nobody survives, nobody lingers
to tell brave tales of some
imagined victory.

Yes, fight on Arjuna!
Do your best!

We'll be down in Krishna's Kitchen,
cooking everybody lunch.

Today's ala carte menu will be hand-lettered
in a spicy calligraphy of love's rocket-red glare,
with combustible garnish: heads flaming in air.

Each crispy ash-head will eventually
reincarnate as a kind of moon, orbiting
its own promised world, drifting in a space
we all once hoped would be the case
when peace ruled every planet,
and love outshone the stars.
~ Bob O’Hearn

In Honour Of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

Laybrother of the Society of Jesus
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;

And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield

Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,

And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.

On Christ they do and on the martyr may;

But be the war within, the brand we wield

Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,

Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray. 

Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,

Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,

Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)

Could crowd career with conquest while there went

Those years and years by of world without event

That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.


I dedicate this to my friend Tom Marshall, S.J., 
a laybrother of the Society of Jesus,
a zen priest, 
and a hero.