June 2, 2011

Often When I Imagine You

Path in the Woods, by Vincent van Gogh

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.

From The Book of Hours I, 45

9 comments:

  1. Cool and wonderful; a nice poem for early summer, too.

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  2. To be dark is all right, for there are always luminosities of the o/Other running around in the forest of him/me/us. Remember. It is always there. Both, and.

    Rumi:

    A human being is like the rod
    Moses held or the words
    that Jesus said.

    The outer is just a piece of wood,
    or mouth-sounds of a country dialect,
    whose inner parts can divide
    the green ocean and make the dead
    sit up and smile.

    You see the far-off tents
    of an encampment. You go closer.

    There is a dust-shape, someone walking near.
    Inside that, a man, bright eyes
    and the strength of his presence.

    When Moses returns from the wilderness
    where he has gone alone,
    Mount Sinai begins to dance.

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  3. the luminosities of "you" running through the dark forests of "me". oh my. i very like that!! there's a tickle of edge every time i begin to accept the notion of the dark or darkness enetering into my own vocabulary as a begining writer. i shy away from it and yet it has so much to offer. steven

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  4. The forest image connotes thickness, the wild and unknown (and thus the dark). I like the contrast with "your wholeness" and its "luminosities", the light that comes in seeing through.

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  5. yes~

    the hand

    the rabbit soft, naive and nibbling
    by the river, the vulture enduring above,
    the trinketed shrine of once deer clacking bones
    released upon itself like lungs relaxing,
    the river shaping stone like drum, like bowl,
    like shard-sharp knife and rooting tool,
    i, who walk through the forest poking,
    plodding, hungry, entreated by the heady scent
    of springtime, interrupted by the roiling rot of skin,
    we are fingers on the hand of wholeness,
    a sole and scabby finger left to scratch the self,
    but together we are everything,
    together we are god.


    xo
    erin

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  6. Each individual form is one ray of the full sun, one running deer from all fauna - one splinter of the divine.

    Without the darkness of the forest we would not know the light of the clearing.

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  7. I can't help feeling that Rilke, on this intense inward conversation, revels some rebellion against Christianity hypocrit prejudices and conventions. By the time he wrote the Book of Hours he was possessed by an intense passion for Lou, who was a maried woman. Maybe he saw himself as a dark forest because he was seeking for something forbitten which betraied Christian principles. Should love be restrained by prejudice? Do we betray any form of religious conventions just by seeking real love? It 's a pity when someone feels dark, full of guilt and remorse just for being honest about his true feelings. It reminds me the Middle Age Inquisition fires, when innocent people were burned to dead so that they could purged their guilts.

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"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Go ahead, bloom recklessly!