Lady Butterfly in love

From munieca

A poem for the moon in its full glory tonight

All night I could not sleep

because of the moonlight on my bed.

I kept on hearing a voice calling:

Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered “yes.”

~Zi Ye

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

~ Tony Hoagland

The moon through dead trees

 

 

I hold against all modern religions that they have provided their believers with consolations and embellishments of death, instead of giving them means, in their heart, of living with it and coming to an understanding with it. With it, with its entire unmasked harshness: this harshness is so tremendous that precisely with it the circle is closed: it leads back to the extreme of a gentleness that is great, as pure, and as perfectly clear (all comfort is murky!) as we have never suspected gentleness to be, not even on the sweetest spring day. But toward the experiencing of this deepest gentleness which, if only some of us felt it with conviction, could perhaps gradually penetrate and make transparent all the circumstances of life; toward the experiencing of this richest and most wholesome gentleness humanity has never taken even the first steps - unless it be in its oldest and most unsuspicious times - the secret of which has been almost lost to us. Nothing else, I am sure, was ever the content of the 'initiations' but precisely the communication of a "key" that made it possible to read the word "death" without negation. Like the moon, so surely life has a side that is continually turned away from us, which is not its opposite, but rather its completion to perfection, to fullness, to the whole and full sphere and globe of being.

One should not fear that our strength would not be sufficient to endure any experience of death, even though it would be the nearest and most terrible; death is not beyond our strength, it is the measuring mark of the brim of the vessel: we are full whenever we reach it - and being full means being heavy...that is all. I do not wish to say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculating and selecting, that love of death (the turned-away side of life) is continually and involuntarily included - which actually happens invariably in the great motions of love, which are impetuous and illimitable....It would be conceivable that death stands infinitely closer to us than life itself....What do we know about it?


And love too, which mixes up the numbers between people for a game of nearness and distances, in which we enroll only insofar as the universe seems so full and there is space nowhere but in us. Love too takes no account of our categories, but snatches us, trembling as we are, into an infinite consciousness of the whole. Lovers do not live by the segregated Here; but as if a separation had never been undertaken, they lay hands on the tremendous possession of their hearts. Of them one can say that God becomes truthful to them and death does not harm them: for they are full of death in being full of life.

- Rilke, Letter to Lotte Hepner (1915)

(Quote found on Blind Pony Books)

Bad (r)omens

The other night I spilled an almost-full glass jar of Celtic sea salt on the floor of my kitchen. I knew there was some superstition about this, but I couldn't remember what exactly it was, or what I was supposed to do to counteract it (throw some salt over my left shoulder to spite the devil). So it looks like now, as penalty, I'll have to wait outside the gate of Paradise for as many years as there are grains of salt. Or maybe I will just "shed as many tears as may suffice to dissolve the quantity of salt which I have spilled." Either way, that's a lot of years, or a lot of tears.

And perhaps too the spill represents the decay of a Bad Romance.

We 'el tel you the reason
Why spilling of Salt
Is esteemed such a Fault,
Because it doth ev'rything season.
Th' antiques did opine
'T was of Friendship a sign,
So served it to guests in decorum,
And thought Love decayed,
When the negligent Maid
Let the salt-cellar tumble before them.
- "British Apollo" (1708)

Well. As a man thinketh.

Butterfly burning

She lived, more than most, in a world of make-believe.

I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders

I dreamt of an elephant standing before a small pool. There was a line of elephants, adolescent-sized, all standing in front of pools, and people would square off before them for some kind of hand-to-hand combat. It was my turn, and I said to the people around me, "I would rather hurt a human than an animal," and then something about animals' consciousness being pure. I walked up to the elephant and gently extended my face to his, offering soft sounds and words. He came closer and our energy simply melted.

Then the elephant stood up on its hind legs and rested its front feet on my shoulders, like a puppy.

The day after the dream I saw this post on The Lipstick Diaries and felt inspired to find myself an elephant necklace. Of course I went straight to etsy, and after a fair bit of contemplating, decided on this cute little guy.

The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira's

    body; all the other colors washed out.

Making love with the Dark One and eating little,

    those are my pearls and my carnelians.

Meditation beads and the forehead streak, those are

    my scarves and my rings.

That's enough feminine wiles for me. My teacher

    taught me this.

Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain

    Energy night and day.

I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken

    for centuries.

I don't steal money, I don't hit anyone. What will you

    charge me with?

I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders;
    and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try
    to be serious.

                               - Mirabai