Appointment With Winter

I

I have waited for this winter as no winter
has been waited for by any man before me.
Everyone else had an appointment with joy.
I was the only one waiting for you, dark time.
Is this one like other winters, father and mother, coal fire,
and the neighing of a horse in the street?
Is this one like a winter in the future,
an absolute cold, in which we don't exist,
and nature not realizing we are gone?
No. I laid claim to a solitude surrounded
by a great sash of sheer rain
and here in my own ocean winter found me, with the wind
flying like a bird between two regions of water.
Everything was ready for the sky to weep.
The vast sky with a single eyelid
let fall its tears like glacial swords
and the world shuttered up like an empty
hotel room: sky, rain, and spaces.

II

Center of things, vessel without latitude or end!
Blue heart of the spread water!
Between air and water quivers and dances
some body seeking
its transparent nourishment
as I arrive and enter with my hat,
my dusty boots
worn out by the thirsty roads.
Nobody had arrived for the solitary ceremony.
I can scarcely feel alone
now that I feel the pureness of the place.
I know I have limitless depths, like the well
which filled us with dread as children;
and that, surrounded by transparency
and the throbbing of the needles,
I am in touch with winter,
with its overwhelming power,
power of its shadowy element,
with the spread and splash
of its late-blooming rose,
until, suddenly, light has gone,
and under the roof
of the dark house
I shall go on speaking to the earth,
although nobody replies.

III

Who doesn't wish for a stubborn spirit?
Who hasn't sharpened the edge of his soul?
When, just as our eyes are opened, we see hate,
and just after learning to walk, we are tripped,
and just for wanting love, we are hated,
and for no more than touching, we are hurt,
which of us hasn't started to arm himself,
to make himself sharp, somehow,
like a knife, to pay back the hurt?
The sensitive one tries to be cynical,
the gentlest reaches for his sword.
The one that only wanted to be loved
at least once, with the ghost of a kiss,
turns cold and aloof, and doesn't look at the girl
who was waiting for him, open and unhappy.
There is nothing to do. In the streets,
they set up stalls selling masks
and the dealer tries on everyone
twilight faces, face of a tiger,
faces sober or virtuous, faces of ancestors,
until the moon dies
and in the lampless night we are all equal.

IV

I had a face which I lost in the sand,
a pale and wistful paper face,
and it was hard for my spirit to change its skin
till it found its true nature,
and could claim the sad right;
to wait for winter, alone unwitnessed,
to wait, under the wings
of a dark sea-cormorant,
for a wave to flow, restored
to the fullness of solitude,
to wait and to find myself
with a touch of light of mourning
or nothing:
what my reason is scarcely aware of,
my unreason, my heart, my doubts.

V

By now the water is so very old
that it's new. The ancient water went,
breaking through glass into another life,
and the sand did not save up time.
The new sea has a clean shirt.
Identity lost its mirror
and we grow by changing our ways.

VI

Winter, don't come looking for me. I've left.
I belong to later, to now, when the thin rain
arrives and unlooses
its endless needles, the marriage
of the spirit with the dripping trees,
the sea's ash, the crash
of a gold capsule in the foliage,
and my belated eyes
preoccupied with earth, with earth alone.

VII

With earth alone, with earth, wind, sand, and water,
which granted me an absolute clarity.

Pablo Neruda

Trans. Alastair Reid

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

The Dragon-Princess

'To speak of solitude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though we are not so. That is all. But how much better is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near anymore and everything far is infinitely far. A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him. He would think himself falling or hurled into space, or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a monstrous lie his brain would have to invent to catch up and explain the state of his senses!
So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in it. That is at the bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life infinite harm; the experiences that are called "visions", the whole so-called "spirit-world", death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we grasp them have been atrophied. To say nothing of God.
But fear of the inexplicable had not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has been so cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for anything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or a smaller room, it appears evident that most people only learn to know a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they can walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives prisoner in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.
We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And only if we arrange our lives according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which still seems to us now the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us'.

Rainer Maria Rilke

An Honest Description Of Myself With A Glass Of Whiskey At An Airport, Let Us Say, In Minneapolis

My ears catch less and less of conversations, and my eyes have weakened,
though they are still insatiable.

I see their legs in miniskirts, slacks, wavy fabrics.

Peep at each one separately, at their buttocks and thighs, lulled by the
imaginings of porn.

Old lecher, it's time for you to the grave, not to the games and
amusements of youth.

But I do as I have always done: compose scenes of this earth under
orders from the erotic imagination.

It's not that I desire these creatures precisely; I desire everything, and
they are like a sign of ecstatic union.

It's not my fault that we are made so, half from disinterested con-
templation, half from appetite.

If I should accede one day to Heaven, it must be there as it is here,
except that I will be rid of my dull senses and my heavy bones.

Changed into pure seeing, I will absorb, as before, the proportions of
human bodies, the color of irises, a Paris street in June at dawn, all of it
incomprehensible, incomprehensible the multitude of visible things.

Czelsaw Milosz

Death Is My Best Friend

Death is my best friend
We get along just fine
He wakes me in the morning
And he tucks me in at night
He sits there like a butterfly
In the corner of my mind
Death is my best friend
He's always by my side

Death is my best friend
We talk and love and laugh
He sits there on the toilet seat
While I'm lying in the bath
He lights up like a firefly
And guides me on my path
Death is my best friend
Death's my other half

An Apology For Double Posting On Facebook

I'm sorry that you are annoyed by the same post coming up twice on your feed from two different pages on Facebook. I feel the same way. "Ok, so you're playing in some bar a thousand miles from where I'm sitting and I have to hear about it twice? I probably wouldn't go if you were playing in the house next door". I know, I know. I promise to try and minimize the double posts and just go with the flow until the cyber world rights itself, as it must. Of course I'd prefer to have one page but the internet is like some horny a-sexual monkey that just keeps mating with itself and spawning new ways of spurting information all over the place, I gotta keep up. Of course, you could just say, "I like Freddie as a person but his music stinks and therefore I shall only be his friend on his personal page" or "I hate Freddie as a person but his music...." you get the drift. All I'd say is that the person and the music go fairly hand in hand, so don't hasten to judge and please forgive the annoying double posts while they last. Because, really, who's to say? On one side I have Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj telling me I'm the supreme causeless source of all being and on the other I have strangers telling me I'm a cunt. Go figure. Bliss Bliss! Freddie.

'Rain' by Edward Thomas

Rain Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been Since I was born into this solitude. Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon: But here I pray that none whom once I loved Is dying to-night or lying still awake Solitary, listening to the rain, Either in pain or thus in sympathy Helpless among the living and the dead, Like a cold water among broken reeds, Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff, Like me who have no love which this wild rain Has not dissolved except the love of death, If love it be towards what is perfect and Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint. Edward Thomas

'Dawn' by Zbigniew Herbert

Dawn

At the profoundest moment before dawn, the first voice resounds, both
blunt and sharp like a knife stab. Then rustlings growing from minute to
minute bore through the stump of night.
It seems there is no hope at all.
Whatever is struggling for light is mortally frail.
And when a bloody cross section of a tree appears on the horizon,
surreally big and almost painful, let us not for get to bless the miracle.

Zbigniew Herbert