Don't close the windows tonight, if someone is coming in, just let them.
Turn off the porch light, the darkness is like ink
and our lives are like paper;
there must still be something left to write.
I can't tell you often I have dreamed of the dead,
dreams that are more like small visits.
Do you find it hard to really trust people?
Aren't there some secrets that you are willing carry
all the way to the grave?
When the porch light goes off, do the lives of the moths
still have meaning, or are they lost and confused?
Searching for something and they don't even know what?
Don't close the windows tonight,
if someone is coming in, just let them.
The breeze is so very nice.
I never wanted to live forever anyway.
Did you?
jobe
I'm gonna live till I die.
Frank Sinatra
Run, and don't stop running.
An equation on the chalkboard; the teacher said
to solve it. And through the window, the magic
of a slow autumn. Red and orange leaves swirling
in chipper air. And somewhere, I just knew it,
a girl was laughing while the leaves fell.
Somewhere, I was certain, was the life
that was just waiting for me to claim it.
There would be poems and romance.
I would be more than I had been so far.
I would be complete, I would find those pieces
of myself that seemed to be missing,
pieces that the others seem to already possess.
I would ease through this world with strength
and pleasure, I just knew it. Time is up,
the teacher announced, did I know the answer?
Yes, I did. I absolutely did.
jobe
A poem by Robert Bly
What Things Want
You have to let things
Occupy their own space.
This room is small,
But the green settee
Likes to be here.
The big marsh reeds,
Crowding out the slough,
Find the world good.
You have to let things
Be as they are.
Who knows which of us
Deserves the world more?
I loved Robert Bly. I met him once, but I have already told that story here. His book, The Light Around The Body, won the National Book Award when I was in middle school. I read it when I was in high school. Its poems largely were anti-war, about Vietnam, and as a young fellow approaching draft age, I loved it. I started reading his earlier books. His first book, Silence In The Snowy Fields, especially grabbed me and still does today. I ended up reading everything he wrote, much of it several times.
Robert Bly lived to be 94, but the last few years he had dementia, and it got worse as time passed. To have seen Bly doing a reading in person was a captivating experience. For some poems he would play the dulcimer and chant the words. He would stop a poem at times and explain some odd connection to history or religion or travel. Or whatever. He would sometimes read things 2 or 3 times until he felt the audience ‘got it.’
An example. I saw Bly read a poem by the late James Wright, they had been very close friends, and often edited their poems together. I don’t know if you’re a poet, but that’s close. At one point he stopped and explained that while he and Wright admired the poet Charles Olsen, they both thought his collection, Maximus Poems, was the worst collection by a major poet, ever. Bly said they had one copy between them, and whenever they got together whoever had the book would slip it in with the other’s luggage, briefcase, whatever. “We did this for years. Then Jim up and died, and stuck me with the son of a bitch.” He held the book up to great applause.
Bly believed, and now I believe as well, that a poet does well to adopt two mentors and study their work for the rest of their life. One mentor should write in your language and the one should write in another language. These mentors don’t need to know that they are your mentor, they don’t even need to be alive; the work is for you to do.
My mentors are Rumi and Robert Bly. I don’t write like either one of them, but they help me to understand poetics. And life, really.
jobe
Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.
John Ray
Long days when Rhonda didn't smile even once.
A river, hidden by a single grain of rice,
provides water for the countryside.
Thank god for the river.
Fresh-water eels and old men with long beards live there.
(Part of me wants to write that they die there.)
Who has time for nonsense anymore? Who doesn't?
The herb garden, hidden by design, waits deep in the valley.
Elm trees have stories that they rarely share.
In the shade of the elms, the valley looks especially nice
in the daytime. And also at night, the valley, the river,
and the garden looks beautiful from the shadows.
A lot of life is lived in the shadows.
Rhonda looks especially sad as she holds her flowers.
The lines of her face are like runways at an airport
where no planes ever take off or land.
(Part of me pictures her death, dying alone.)
She keeps track of time with a sundial,
which is a useless thing at night.
Is it midnight yet? Rhonda doesn't know.
Lifting the grain of rice she finds the river.
Thank god for the river.
And beneath the elm trees she finds the garden
of herbs, the smell of the sage and the rosemary
and the lavender, the old men, the eels.
jobe
A dream.*
I dreamed an illness was in the roses and it spread out over all creation. And though the sickness was slow moving, by the time I woke up from the dream, the entire world had been made ill by the roses. people were coughing up blood and petals and thorns. This was just an afternoon nap, so I went out into the yard to check on my own little rosebush. It was bare of flowers. I leaned in close and looked it right in the eye. "Don't think for a minute that I'm not watching you," I whispered.
jobe
Reading this, one might think that the dream was about COVID. Nah. This was dreamed and written 5 years before COVID. Thanks for reading this!
Thanks for the restack!