Solnit

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete — for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

Cassian

 

Temptation

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you

that for the first time you’ll feel your pores opening

like fish mouths, and you’ll actually be able to hear

your blood surging through all those lanes, and

you’ll feel light gliding across the cornea

like the train of a dress. For the first time

you’ll be aware of gravity

like a thorn in your heel, and your shoulder blades will ache 

for want of wings. Call yourself alive? I promise you

you’ll be deafened by

dust falling on the furniture,

you’ll feel your eyebrows turning to two gashes,

and every memory you have

will begin at Genesis.

 

Call yourself alive? Love Poems Nina Cassian (edited by Andrea Deletant and Brenda Walker) 1988

 

Penone

"all sculpture is rooted in the experience of our body as the primary positive volume which imprints itself on the Negative of its surroundings"
Giuseppe Penone Spazio di Luce p31

Rilke

I. We are right at the start, do you see.

As though before everything. With

a thousand and one dreams behind us and

no act.

II I can imagine no knowledge holier

than this:

that you must become a beginner.

Someone who writes the first word after a 

centuries-long

dash. 

Rainer Maria Rilke 
From Notes on the Melody of Things

R.S. Thomas

Raptor

You have made God small,
setting him astride
a pipette or a retort
studying the bubbles,
absorbed in an experiment
that will come to nothing.
I think of him rather
as an enormous owl
abroad in the shadows,
brushing me sometimes
with his wing so the blood
in my veins freezes, able
to find his way from one
soul to another because
he can see in the dark.
I have heard him crooning
to himself, so that almost
I could believe in angels,
those feathered overtones
in love’s rafters, I have heard
him scream, too, fastening
his talons in his great
adversary, or in some lesser
denizen, maybe, like you or me.

R.S Thomas   
No Truce with the Furies 1995

Jane Hirshfield

Rebus

You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus - slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life -
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

 Jane Hirshfield, “Rebus” from Given Sugar, Given Salt Harper Collins 2001

Carol Ann Duffy

The Windows

How do you earn a life going on

Behind yellow windows, writing at night

The Latin names of plants for a garden,

Opening the front door to a wet dog?

Those you love forgive you, clearly,

With steaming casseroles and red wine.

It’s the same film down all the suburban streets,

It’s a Wonderful Life. How do you learn it?

What you hear – the doorbell’s familiar chime.

What you touch – the clean, warm towels.

What you see what you smell what you taste

All tangible to the stranger passing your gate.

There you are again, in a room where those early hyacinths

Surely sweeten the air, and the right words wait

In the dictionaries, on the tip of the tongue you touch

In a kiss, drawing your crimson curtains now

Against dark hours. And again, in a kitchen,

The window ajar, sometimes the sound of your radio

Or the scent of your food, and a cat in your arms, a child in your arms, a lover. Such vivid flowers.

In New Selected Poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Picador 2004