The Winter of Listening, by David Whyte

Maurice Ravel - Gaspard de la nuit: Trois poèmes pour piano d'après Aloysius Bertrand
Piano: Samson François

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.



poem from here

Betrayal, by William Hathaway

Maurice Ravel - Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose)
with Martha Argerich and Lang Lan

It’s now all about money

about which poetry rarely reaches

transcendence. But love must still fester

even under that. Everyone I know

frets if poetry can still matter,

but what about love? It’s all become

too much for them, and they’re all

on the soma. It makes sense

with these pills when the someone

they thought they loved for years

by never thinking about it says,

“I don’t love you anymore,

but let’s stay friends in that mellow

woebegone way poetry now

sings without singing.” Of course,

they’re always asking “What is poetry?”

and then answering by saying

it’s what Boethius was thinking about

when they squished his head

until his eyes popped out,

or anything barbaric enough to get

everyone to stop eating for a bit

and reach for a moment past

a chatty moment. Sort of a solution

to awkward goodbyes. How money

becomes a sort of welcome

relief that defuses the poetry

charging tense moments. “Interesting,”

someone remarks between bites,

“to be right here in the moment

yet also out there watching

some once-in-a-lifetime sublimity

unfold, as if living as if already

dead.” As if standing in a dream far up

in the stars somewhere with Scipio

and seeing how little love matters,

or poetry for that matter,

considering how glory endures

only in glittering plunder. But best

of all, all of it stays just sort of

as if.

poem from Poetry (October 2009)

These Poems, She Said, by Robert Bringhurst

Maurice Ravel - Bolero 

These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
                                               You are, he said,
beautiful.
                    That is not love, she said rightly.


poem from The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982 (Copper Canyon Press, 1982)
as posted at poetryfoundation.org

post inspired by this blog 

Of Rain and Air, by Wayne Dodd

Maurice Ravel, Piano Concerto in G major, II (Martha Argerich, 1990)

All day I have been closed up
inside rooms, speaking of trivial
matters. Now at last I have come out
into the night, myself a center

of darkness.
Beneath the clouds the low sky glows
with scattered lights. I can hardly think
this is happening. Here in this bright absence

of day, I feel myself opening out
with contentment.
All around me the soft rain is whispering
of thousands of feet of air

invisible above us.