passer by, these are words

on my front lawn is a big old cherry tree. it has suffered through harsh winters. it has suffered through plagues of locusts (or some bug), it has suffered through drought. yet it comes back in a sort of withered and eventually leafy form each year. last year for the first time in seven years it flowered and bore fruit. the birds were ecstatic!! i'm going to tuck some images of part of its weathered trunk in with today's post..

i was mentioning yesterday about music and how i love to stumble across music and musicians who really float my boat. so today i'm going to say much the same thing about poets. i admire poets who write as if it really mattered. they can be quiet, simple, state obvious truths elegantly or be flamboyant and earthy and rich and leave nothing to my imagination but if they hit that hard to define and harder to describe sweet spot then - they're in!!!

yves bonnefoy is one such poet. i didn't know much about him - and yet when i read his work i felt that good feeling of "oh yeah i get what you're saying." so i'll share this lovely piece with you today. it makes its place hovering at the interstice between what is and what might be (and who among us is brave enough to decide where that is or might be?)

life.

a measure of the distance between what is and what we wish for is contained in our experiencing of degrees of wistfulness and longing that i characterize as a form of conscious suffering.

if you allow the details of a moment to enter you in all their fullness, the riches of this world become so apparent and overwhelming that feelings of wishing for more, feelings of the inadequacy of what is, actually diminish.

bonnefoy’s writing describes the transitory nature of “here” and “there”, “this” and “that”: thresholds. places where ideas melt, deliquesce one into the other.

passer-by, these are words

passer-by, these are words. but instead of reading
i want you to listen: to this frail
voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
it flits between two sprays of leaves,
carrying the sound of branches that are real
to those that filigree the still unseen.

then know an even fainter sound, and let it be
the endless murmuring of all our shades.
their whisper rises from beneath the stones
to fuse into a single heat with that blind
light you are as yet, who can still gaze.

may your listening be good! silence
is a threshold where a twig breaks in your hand,
imperceptibly, as you attempt to disengage
a name upon a stone:

and so our absent names untangle your alarms.
and for you who move away, pensively,
here becomes there without ceasing to be.

yves bonnefoy