All that Falls

Slipping – Personal

Naomi — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:15:26 +0000

I heard the sky sigh
silver, sweet and swollen
it dipped into a horizon
along an ocean
strained of color
anyone who spent time
in the wringer
could recognize
exasperation
written in the clouds
white blends to gray
which blends to pale
I strained my ear
to decipher a sound
I thought I’d never forget
Down by the shore
I have so many questions
I could pray, but instead
I hold out my hands
cupped, feeling empty
even if I stood in the rain
for a week
these hands wouldn’t hold water
falling through the crevices
one can never squeeze
what slips

“A Man Doesn’t Have Time In His Life” – Yehuda Amichai

Naomi — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:23:14 +0000

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.

“Wild Geese” – Mary Oliver

Naomi — Thu, 12 May 2011 02:58:27 +0000

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

“Small Things” – Den Ming~Dao

Naomi — Fri, 06 May 2011 02:35:20 +0000

You may be capable of great things,
But life consists of small things.

“Hazy Moon” – Personal

Naomi — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:19:59 +0000

Forty feet out to sea
Lies a sandbar just for me
It glistens in the waning sun
For when the wild day is done

I’ll lie and waste the time away
While the tides come out to play
and float amongst the waxing waves
Head back, heart up, melodic sways

Awake! Ablaze! A harvest haze.

Dixie Chicken

Naomi — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:53:28 +0000

“Blue Jeans and Moon Beams” – Personal

Naomi — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:34:12 +0000

Sometimes,
In the heat and hurry
of a heavy winter
it’s plenty nice
to roll up your jeans
and run barefoot

Find a jetty,
find some stone
find some spot
to claim your own

And seep into
hour upon hour
till the evening calms

The light on the water,
mystifies..

- Let it quiet the doldrums
the fire, the haste
the freckles of sunflowers,
the bittersweet taste

So to stumble, quite shaken
to daydream, bewitched
and let banter and follies
ache and then itch

The fog will arise then,
all sultry and pink
A tangerine sweetness,
the air you could drink

The light on the water,
illuminates..

“Prologue” – Thomas Kinsella

Naomi — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:53:05 +0000

I wonder whether one expects
Flowing tie or expert sex
Or even absent-mindedness
Of poets any longer. Less
Candour than the average,
Less confidence, a ready rage,
Alertness when it comes to beer,
An affectation that their ear
For music is a little weak,
These are the attributes we seek;
But surely not the morning train,
The office lunch, the look of pain
Down the blotched suburban grass,
Not the weekly trance at Mass . . .
Drawing on my sober dress
These, alas, I must confess.

I pat my wallet pocket, thinking
I can spare an evening drinking;
Humming as I catch the bus
Something by Sibelius,
Suddenly–or as I lend
A hand about the house, or bend
Low above an onion bed–
Memory stumbles in the head;
The sunlight flickers once upon
The massive shafts of Babylon
And ragged phrases in a flock
Settle softly, shock by shock.

And so my bored menagerie
Once more emerges: Energy,
Blinking, only half awake,
Gives its tiny frame a shake;
Fouling itself, a giantess,
The bloodshot bulk of Laziness
Obscures the vision; Discipline
Limps after them with jutting chin,
Bleeding badly from the calf:
Old Jaws-of-Death gives laugh for laugh
With Error as they amble past,
And there as usual, lying last,
Helped along by blind Routine,
Futility flogs a tambourine . . .

“Note” – William Stafford

Naomi — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:05:00 +0000

Straw, feathers, dust -
little things

but if they all go one way,
that’s the way the wind goes.

Butterflies

Naomi — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 12:03:01 +0000