Nights

There’s nothing that I really want:
The stars tonight are rich and cold
Above my house that vaguely broods
Upon a path soon lost in dark.

My dinner plate is chipped all round
(It tells me that I’ve changed a lot);
My glass is cracked all down one side
(It shows there is a path for me).

My hands—I rest my head on them.
My eyes—I rest my mind on them.
There’s nothing that I really need
Before I set out on that path.

-Kevin Hart

Hafiz

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe me."

Look what happens with a love like that -
it lights the whole world.

In Praise of Coldness

by Jane Hirshfield

"If you wish to move your reader,"
Chekhov wrote, "you must write more coldly."

Herakleitos recommended, "A dry soul is best."

And so at the center of many great works
is found a preserving dispassion,
like the vanishing point of quattrocento perspective,
or the tiny packets of desiccant enclosed
in a box of new shoes or seeds.

But still the vanishing point
is not the painting,
the silica is not the blossoming plant.

Chekhov, dying, read the timetables of trains.
To what more earthly thing could he have been faithful?-
Scent of rocking distances,
smoke of blue trees out the window,
hampers of bread, pickled cabbage, boiled meat.

Scent of the knowable journey.

Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

Passover

"I still believe, as many of us do, what the Exodus first taught:

-- first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;

-- second, that we can make a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;

-- and third, that the way to the land is through the wilderness.

There is no way to get from here to there, except by joining together and marching."

When the Time Comes for Singing

The water flings itself down insistently,
laughing,
a thousand shifting mouths
gulping at the ground.
"You are like me," it says,
"hurtling from moment to moment,
atoms dancing and clinging,
full of vibration and crashing silence."
Do not be afraid, my darling!
Water falls,
and your body's samba dances itself.
Silence snags and catches in your throat,
but your heart still sings the song it knows.
When the time comes for breaking open,
you will break open.
When the time comes for singing,
you will fill your lungs and fling yourself,
laughing,
in the only direction there is.

The Precipice

I stand, within four shivering walls
and their wood plank door,
on top of a mountain,
trembling with fear and promise
at the roar of gushing wind
wrapping its arms around my sticks and plaster, screaming,
demanding everything.
The door rattles its latch, and each thunderclap cracks closer,
coming to claw at walls and proud defenses.
The storm rages nearer, and I stand alone, on top of a mountain,
trembling with fear and promise
under the cold fire of invisible stars.

Tonight, again, the world demands this of me:
that I stand with my whole self bare at the center of the storm
and feel it through to my bones-
that I surrender again and again
and even here, even on the mountaintop,
trembling before the precipice,
be willing to tumble end over end into this life.