Quoting

You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved,

who were lost from the start,
I don’t even know what songs would please you.

I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment.

All the immense images in me –

the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods–
all rise within me to mean you,

who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing.

An open window
in a country house,

and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me.

Streets that I chanced upon,
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,

gave back my too-sudden image.

Who knows?

Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…

Rainer Maria Rilke

Being a Person

Be a person here.

Stand by the river, invoke the owls.

Invoke winter, then spring.

Let any season that wants to come here make its own call.

After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth and begins to include sky, stars, all space, even the outracing expanding thought.

Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.

If a different call came, there wouldn’t be any world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important.

How you listen for the next things to happen.

How you breathe.

William Stafford