monday, monday

mundane.
a breadth of hours
wider than
the indigo well
of your thoughts
is deep.

you come to
four o’ clock
after throwing out
line after line;
buckets pull up
nothing close
to enough
to sate

a day’s heart-
hunger. silly you,
fishing just
water to fill

that internal
gnaw for only
plain roots after
everyone’s temporary
tendrils tie you
down, constrict &
eat all your
sunlight,

green lust in
their leaves only
spreads further up
& further out.

you: full sick
of shallow sums
& only want some
challenge:

wading through
thick mud, thigh-
deep problems &
bootpulls of just
the most real,
necessary
work.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, 
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, 
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep,
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear; the darkness around us is deep.

In this language, no industrial revolution;

no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;

only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.

The middle class can hardly speak it.

In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble

through dark and rain with a handful of rags.

The door groans; the old smell comes

up from under the earth to meet you.

But this language believes in ghosts;

chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses

neigh inside an empty gully, nothing

at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

The woman with marble hands whispers

this language to you in your sleep; faces

come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies

wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

In this language, you can’t chit-chat

holding a highball in your hand, can’t

even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,

all your grief and failure come clear at last.

Old inflections move from case to case,

gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening

vowels, till they sound like the sea moving

icebergs back and forth in its mouth.”

— 

The Icelandic Language by Bill Holm

“I come from a land where poetry is like a tree which watches over man and where a poet is a guard who understands the rhythm of this world. He travels with history, and feels the rhythm of history. By heeding this rhythm, he realizes the gaps and distances that separate man from man. I see this separation between men as a darkness which science cannot dispel despite its transformative power. Only poetry can illuminate this darkness.”

— Ali Ahmad Said, aka Adonis

“Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone.”

- Gertrude Stein