Wild Soul Journal

The Dance

A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and
somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man
she’s with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained
but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and
moving him with effortless grace
into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all
rhythmically solid music in this second-rate cafe,

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some
sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,
nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be
admired or be repentant for,
but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we
misbelieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which
sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

~ C. K. Williams ~

(Repair)

With thanks to panhala

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you

~ Sheenagh Pugh ~

(In Good Poems, ed. by Garrison Keillor,
contributed by Holly Thomas)

With thanks to panhala

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 ~

With thanks to panhala

This is My Heart

This is my heart. It is a good heart.
Bones and a membrane of mist and fire
are the woven cover.
When we make love in the flower world
my heart is close enough to sing
to yours in a language that has no use
for clumsy human words.

My head is a good head, but it is a hard head
and it whirs inside with a swarm of worries.
What is the source of this singing, it asks
and if there is a source why can’t I see it
right here, right now
as real as these hands hammering
the world together
with nails and sinew?

This is my soul. It is a good soul.
It tells me, “come here forgetful one.”
And we sit together with a lilt of small winds
who rattle the scrub oak.
We cook a little something
to eat: a rabbit, some sofkey
then a sip of something sweet
for memory.

This is my song. It is a good song.
It walked forever the border of fire and water
climbed ribs of desire to my lips to sing to you.
Its new wings quiver with
vulnerability.

Come lie next to me, says my heart.
Put your head here.
It is a good thing, says my soul.

~ Joy Harjo ~

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

~ John O’Donohue ~

(To Bless the Space Between Us)

With thanks to panhala

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbably beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays)

With thanks to panhala

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,

what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain –
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(What Do We Know)

With thanks to panhala

In spite of the fact that it’s twenty below
and winter has gone on for five long months,

in spite of being starved, starved almost to death
for greenness and warmth, flowers and birds,

in spite of the deadness of endless classrooms,
shopping centres, television shows,

in spite of the pains in the gut, the migraines,
the wakings, the palpitations,

in spite of a guilty knowledge of laziness,
of failure to meet some obligations,

in spite of all these things, and more,
I have to report that the moon tonight

is filling the house with a wild blueness,
my children grow, excel, are healthy,

my wife is gentle, there are friends,
and once in a while a poem will come.

In spite of the fact that it’s twenty below,
tonight I smile. Summer bursts inside me.

~ Christopher Wiseman ~

With thanks to panhala

The Honey Tree

And so at last I climbed
the honey tree, ate
chunks of pure light, ate
the bodies of bees that could not
Get out of my way, ate
the dark hair of the leaves,
the rippling bark,
the heartwoods. Such
frenzy! But joy does that,
I’m told, in the beginning.
Later, maybe,
I’ll come here only
sometimes and with a
middling hunger. But now
I climb like a snake,
I clamber like a bear to
the nuzzling place, to the light
salvaged by the thights
of bees and rackedup
in the body of the tree.
Oh, anyone can see
how I love myself at last!
how I love the world! Climbing
by day or night
in the the wind, in the leaves, kneeling
at the secret rip, the cords
of my body stretching
and singing in the
heaven of appetite.

Mary Oliver

My good friend, wild soul alum and housemate just learned she has a rare and incurable cancer. On Monday she had a full hysterectomy and while recovering, waited for test results. She said I could share what she wrote:

Saturday, 7 March, waking from afternoon nap:

How utterly bizarre. Yesterday I waited and waited to have the MRI, then waited and waited for the results, the whole day focused on waiting, anticipation, expectation, hope, fear. By the end of it when we got the results, I was exhausted, depressed, afraid, anxious. The results? “inconclusive” – the spots on my liver too small to allow for meaningful interpretation.

What was I so yearning to know? What did I think the results would bring me? If they indicated benign, there were still the spots on the lungs to know about, the results of the uterine pathology, and then the treatment plan, and then what kind of reaction I might have to the radiation or chemotherapy (if I chose to go those routes), and then the next set of MRIs or CAT scans and their results—shrinking or growing or holding steady or inconclusive, and success/failure percentages, or options, or statistics of survival longevity.

Next week we’ll get the pathology report. On Thursday Dr. Wong will explain the treatment options. What I am to do till then, wait in limbo? Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: 4 precious days between now and then. I can make them days of waiting or I can make them days of being.

Tonight, this night, we spring forward into daylight savings time. the world is lighting up; spring is opening. Soon the first warm rains will come and the yellow spotted salamanders will make their way to the vernal pools. I want to listen for those warm rains, don my boots and rain slicker, trudge thru the dark and sodden land and, if I am lucky, catch sight of them doing the spring mating ritual they’ve done for thousands, perhaps millions of years. That, I believe, is more important than the pathology results.