Still More Poems that Strike me

July Mountain

We live in a constellation

Of patches and of pitches,

Not in a single world,

In things said well in music,

On the piano, and in speech,

As in a page of poetry –

Thinkers without final thoughts

In an always incipient cosmos,

The way, when we climb a mountain,

Vermont throws itself together.

~ Wallace Stevens

Aura

All day the mountain

flared in blue

September air.

The valley lay stunned 

by color.

autumn's maple-brightness.

Now twilight comes;

not dark but a moments 

clarity, so that brute

wonder drains

from my eyes, relieved 

by the evening star,

there, calm, over 

the horizon, a lucidity.

lucency. That light, far

lavender, restores

distance 

and measure,

and inside my skull I rise

tall and free again.

Then

the mountain, free too

in its subduing,

intercedes, a new presence now,

a sense given beyond 

color, around and surrounding-

Is it shadow, is it

a blue myth coming to be?

Ah, wonder gone, how 

lovely this welcoming! I see,

see the new dimension, form 

wavering into essence 

and shimmering-oh!

so slightly!-back to 

new form, while

the mountain looks at me.

~ Hayden Carruth

Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

The birds have vanished down the sky.

Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

until only the mountain remains.

Li Po/ Li Bai (Hamill, translator) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Going out in stormy weather

Cold Mountain

I am sometimes asked the way to the Cold Mountain;

There is no path that goes all the way.

Even in summer the ice never melts;

Far into the morning the mists gather thick.

How, you may ask, did I manage to get here?

My heart is not like your heart.

If only your heart were like mine

You too would be living where I live now.

Han-shan

Translated by Arthur Waley

Dream in the Summer of my Seventy-third Year 

I am behind a funeral cortege on a mountain road 

And decide to pass it, but it seems to go on forever 

And I'm completely exposed in the oncoming lane 

And the only way out is to merge into the caravan 

Of mourners. It is getting dark and a thick snow 

Begins to fall in a sudden flurry and then stops 

Abruptly, which gives the world an expectant air, 

Though, really, nothing in particular happens 

After a snowfall, except for the intense stillness 

In the pine forest the road is winding through.

Robert Haas

[Traveler, your footprints]

Traveler, your footprints 

are the only road, nothing else.

Traveler, there is no road;

you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path 

you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship's wake on the sea.

-Antonio Machado

To See It

We need to separate

to see the life we’ve made,

to leave our house

where someone waits, patiently,

warm beneath the sheets;

to don layers of armor,

sweater, coat, mittens, scarf,

to stride down the frozen road,

putting distance between us,

this cold winter morning,

to look back and see,

on the hilltop, our life,

lit from inside.

~ Laura Foley

Let my snow-tracks lead 

on, on. Let them, where they stop, 

stop. There, in mid-field.

~ Hayden Carruth

Kono michi ya / yuku hito nashi ni / aki no kure

this road

with no traveler

autumn evening

~ Basho

“The truth is, of course, that there is no journey.

We are arriving and departing all at the same time.”

― David Bowie

Do it well

What is that lyric I am reminded of?

It’s Buckets of Rain, by Bob Dylan:

Life is sad

Life is a bust

All ya can do is do what you must

You do what you must do 

              and ya do it well

Rosanne Cash interviewed by Scott Simon in January 2024 said “I have this thing I wrote in my old datebook. I actually saw yesterday which said (paraphrasing Gandhi)

"what you do will be insignificant, but it’s essential that you do it.” *

 

And here is Antonio Machado –

Slowly form nice neat letters; 

doing things well 

is more important than doing them. 

(Proverb XXI )

Of course it all comes from Aristotle –

“. . . human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue . . .”

In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle explains that happiness is the highest good is (Greek eudaimonia, literally meaning ‘good spirits’), and that living and doing well are the same as being happy. Eudaimonia  is “excellence of performing the proper function.” – doing things well.

As Thoreau says: The motive of the laborer should be not to get his living, to get a good job, but to perform well a certain work. ~ June 15, 1852

Do the things which lie 

nearest to you – but which are 

difficult to do.

January 12, 1852

You do what you must do 

             and ya do it well.

~ Zphx

See note to A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, What we do best or most perfectly ("What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice.")

*Here is the quote from Gandhi:

“Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, 

but it is important that you do it.”