Alice Notley: Then I Became Mercy

Then I Became Mercy

     Then I became Mercy with her one thousand arms; they were all I was. All over my front and from my back – I had no hidden thoughts. No time, it seemed, for the Secret. The arms were the space of me: what was my face? I tried for a delicate Korean aspect at first, but then I might as well be the cloud: am I the cloud? I’m still not sure. Having the arms one scarcely sees what one does with them. Obviously one cannot choose who one’s merciful to, one doesn't even see them! It’s all arms, arms, arms. I think it works by my simply having the arms, they are what you need; you touch one, and it’s done. You've obtained mercy, which is what? Cessation of your suffering for a time. How do I have this ability? All I can say is that I accepted the arms, the arms themselves. It’s contained in the leap from not having the arms to having them. Once you have them, that’s it. 

Alice Notley, from Culture of One

Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.  You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and      purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you every where like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

Che fece .... il gran rifiuto

Che fece .... il gran rifiuto

To certain people there comes a day
when they must say the great Yes or the great No.
He who has the Yes ready within him
immediately reveals himself, and saying it he follows

his honor and his own conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Should he be asked again,
he would say no again. And yet that no --
the right no -- crushes him for the rest of his life.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1901) 

Ring of Bone, Lew Welch

I saw myself 
a ring of bone 
in the clear stream 
of all of it

and vowed, 
always to be open to it 
that all of it 
might flow through

and then heard 
“ring of bone” where 
ring is what a

bell does.

—Lew Welch

Reflections: One Night in January, 2011

Reflections: One Night in January, 2011

The stories we tell one another 
with equations and statistics, 
sentences and sounds, 
ringing and pealing
true or hollow;
even the truth of hollow.

(O Shirakawa, the Kamo River is a god
Its water magically turning red and green.)
PW's White River Ode circa 1966.

Something BIG &
Brown!

Stylistically revealing
The finger tips on
The IPhone,
the ear phone
VARIANTS.

PW says: “I think ‘form’ is for crystals or for the thing after it has been seen. OK, form it or arrange it to suit your vision, if that’s how you want to spend your afternoons; the things ALREADY have a shape, Ginsberg is absolutely right, MIND IS SHAPELY, ART IS SHAPELY.”

one rock
clinging
time
to morsel.

See Book of Serenity, Case 90.

PW:
he got bigger over time, and bigger.
It was good to walk behind him or alongside,
the swath so wide,
the underbrush, the thicket, brambles and thorns
no longer seeming of
consequence.