Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
Wonder and grief. the light spraying
Through the lace of fern is as delicate
As the rivers of memory forming their web
Around the knot in my throat. The breeze
Makes the birds move from branch to branch
As this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
In the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
Of the next stranger. In the very Center, under
It all, what we have that no one can take
Away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
By a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

~ From Inside the Miracle: Enduring Suffering, Approaching Wholeness, (Sounds True, 2016)

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.
 
To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
 
And however sharply
you are tested –
this sorrow, that great love –
it too will leave on that clean knife. 	

~ from The October Palace (HarperPerrenial, 1994)

What things are steadfast? Not the birds. 
Not the bride and groom who hurry 
in their brevity to reach one another. 
The stars do not blow away as we do. 
The heavenly things ignite and freeze. 
But not as my hair falls before you. 
Fragile and momentary, we continue. 
Fearing madness in all things huge 
and their requiring. Managing as thin light 
on water. Managing only greetings 
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice 
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand. 
As the lovers quickening, riding time. 
Making safety in the moment. This touching 
home goes far. This fishing in the air.

~ from All of It Singing, New and Selected Poems
(Greywolf Press, 2008)

This awkward speck of dust, 
this universe, time, and every
act and thought  
from mineral to man,
deposited in the library of my marrow.

I do not know what I know
it enters through another door,
disturbs my fragile understandings,
rattles my dinnerware and knocks
all my trophies off their shelves. 

Breathed in loving madness,
revealed beyond the mind
and the shape of things.

Do not be betrayed
by philosophies and enlightenments– 
all there is to be 
was yours before you began. 

~ from Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace 
(Larson Publications, 2007)

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here's the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names. 

~ from Only As The Day Is Long, New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton and Co, 2019)

Some days it’s all fuzzy.
I can’t find the world,
Can’t find the beloved.
Can’t even find the words.

Time to lie back and listen.
Maybe something’s being said,
Something I haven’t heard.

Time to stop talking	
And let the beloved speak.

Time to trust it all;
To stop searching
And let the beloved seek.

~ From Concerning The Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

Our pool is still blue but a few leaves
have fallen, floating on the surface

of summer. The other swimmers
went home last week, tossed

their faded bathing suits aside,
so my daughter and I are alone

in the water which has grown colder
like a man's hand at the end of

a romance. The lifeguard is under
her umbrella but her bags are packed

for college. We are swimming against
change, remembering the endless

shores of June: the light like lemonade,
fireflies inside our cupped hands,

watermelon night. We are swimming
towards the darkness of what

is next, walking away from the sounds
of laughter and splashing, towels

wrapped around the dampness of our loss.

~ from Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011)

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place's name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm:
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
 
~ Public Domain

What could be easier than learning to write?
Novels, poems, fables with and without morals,	
they’re all within you, in the heart, the head,
the bowel, the tip of the pen a diviner’s rod.
Reach inside and there they are, the people	
one knows, their scandalous comments,
the silly things they do, the unforgettable feeling
of a wet eyelash on your burning cheek.
This moment, that, an eruption of violence,	
a glancing away, the grandest of entrances,
the telling gesture, the banal and the beautiful
all conspire with feeling and passion to transport,
to deliver, to inspire.  Story emerges
from this cocoon, a crystalline moment, epiphanies
flashing like lightbulbs above the heads
of cartoon characters.  All this within you	
where you least expect it, not so much in the head
as under the arms, glistening with sweat, stinking
with the knowledge of the body, the writer
neither practitioner nor artisan but miner, digging
within himself for riches unimagined, for salt.

~ from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009 
(Tightrope Books, 2009)

Some summer nights you
can hear them getting all
worked up over this idea
of cheerfulness and song.

Deep in the grasses where
they hide, there is a need
to be heard in the darkness,
even if their voices are

so small they sound
like a door creaking on
its hinge, or the squeak
a drawer makes when

it opens up at last.
It seems as if the damp
air and dew are trying
to hold their song down

out of sheer gravity,
but neither dampness nor
darkness makes them stop.
In fact, the crickets like

to show off their song,
to let it lift up off
the earth the way that
all notes rise to the stars,

and float up through the
thick night, as if their
joy itself were the only light
we needed to follow.
 
~ from The Yellow Shoe Poets: Selected Poems 1964-1999 (Louisiana State University Press, 1999

Low wail of night and its unseen chitterings, sweeps of tail 
        on dead leaves, slow
rustle and creep of ferns.

The dark on it’s own terms and us	
        racked out in a room
reeked with cedar and shaved wood, this handmade cabin.
	Two windows, the pitch		

of hot night, the creaky lean of spruce and fir.  We’re restless,	
        years stacked behind like kindling.
Where have we left to go, together?

	Two shrieks pack the dark; bird call, a human
timbre and panic.  The night endures, slips onward, becomes all sound,
	slick of stream-burrowed branches, rivulets tunnelling
thin-skinned trucks; drip, slide—

	still outside’s parched and brittle, holds its breath,
waiting for rain.

At light, under the rattle and gab of waxwings and crows,	
        we find the river’s source in swells of sawdust
like sugar on the russet floor; carpenter ants, their constant fluid chewing.
	Glossy heads big as thumbnails.

Morning expounds this	
        mystery— but what of those other walls
	        we’ll lean an arm through—

~ from Cityscapes in Mating Season (Signature Editions, 2017)

You want there to be a separate god for owls, for the barred, the burrowing, the saw whet, the spotted, the great-horned, the barn owl whose gaze draws your gaze to his wide face and you see yourself, pale, uncanny. You want this god to keep the owls from harm so the night will be lavishly feathered. Their wings in flight will row through the waters of your sleep and you’ll sense the dip and rise of them, the sky riddled with eyes. You want this god to instruct them not to scoop a cat into the sky, or a family’s only chicken. You want the slow unrolling of the owls’ vowels to slip into your speaking. So much, so little they have to say. You want the owls’ silence to be this god’s silence, one that doesn’t mean there’s no one there, but a refined and honed attention, a keen listening high above you, and a steady looking down.

~ from God of Shadows (McClelland and Stewart, 2018)

I was sitting cross-legged one morning         

in our sunny new meditation room

wondering if it would be okay

to invite our out-of-town guest

to Frank’s dinner party next weekend

when it occurred to me

that I wasn’t really meditating at all.

In fact, I had never meditated            

in our sunny new meditation room.

I had just sat cross-legged     

now and then for 15 or 20 minutes

worrying about one thing or another,

how the world will end

or what to get Alice for her birthday.

It would make more sense                 

to rename the meditation room

our new exercise room

and to replace all the candles,

incense holders, and the little statues

with two ten-pound hand weights

and a towel in case I broke a sweat.

Then I pictured the new room
with nothing in it but a folded white towel,
and a pair of numbered hand weights –
an image of such simplicity
that the sustaining of it
as I sat cross-legged under a tall window,
my palms open weightlessly on my bare knees,

made me wonder if I wasn’t actually,
meditating for a moment then and there
in our former meditation room,

where the sun seemed to be brightening

as it suffused with light the grain

in the planks of that room’s gleaming floor.

~ from The Rain in Portugal (Random House, 2016)

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

~from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1998)

It begins at the Chinese place
on Spring Street,
our first date.
Though the dish looks good,
I cannot eat.
He scrapes my leftovers
to the sidewalk
for his patient old Lab,
waiting by the restaurant door.
I have that queasy, excited feeling,
when you know something
is about to happen.
 
~ from Night Ringing (Headmistress Press, 2016)

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

~ from In Praise of Mortality, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29;
(Riverhead Books, 2005) translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.

I have stopped being the heroine	
of my bad dreams.  The melodramas		
of betrayal and narrow escapes
from which I wake up grateful
for an unexciting life
are starring my troubled young friend
or one of my daughters.  I’m not the one
who swims too far out to sea;
I am the one who waves from shore		
vainly and in despair.
Life is what happens to someone else;
I stand on the sidelines and wring my hands.
Strange that my dreams should have accepted	
the minor role I’ve been cast in
by stories since stories began.
Does that mean I have solved my life?
I’m still afraid in my dreams, but not for myself.
Fear gets rededicated	
with a new stone that bears a needier name.

~ from Alive Together  (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.

~ from The Healing Time: Finally On My Way to Yes  
(Pudding House Publications, 2008)

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,  
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek 
across the sky made me think about my life, the places 
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief 
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling, 
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place. 
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold 
for a brief while, then lose it all each November. 
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst 
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves 
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields, 
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds. 
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find 
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks. 
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can. 
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

~ from Radiance (Word Press, 2005)

If you put your hands on this oar with me, 
they will never harm another, and they will come to find 
they hold everything you want. 

If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer 
lift anything to your 
mouth that might wound your precious land – 
that sacred earth that is your body. 

If you put your soul against this oar with me, 
the power that made the universe will enter your sinew 
from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm 
that lives in us. 

Exuberant is existence, time a husk. 
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space; 
love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give. 

Why lay yourself on the torturer’s rack of the past and the future? 
The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities 
will find no rest. 

Be kind to yourself, dear – to our innocent follies. 
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance. 
You will come to see that all evolves us. 

~from Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East 
and West by Daniel Ladinsky (Penguin Books, 2002)