I heard a man say a poem once, he said, ‘All that lives is holy.’ —Steinbeck

 

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In daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” 

But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. 

Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. 

Not a single day and not a single night after it.


—Wisława Szymborska

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I would give all metaphors

in return for one word

drawn out of my breast like a rib

for one word

contained within the boundaries

of my skin


—Zbigniew Herbert
Czesław Miłosz version 

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tricky

  

sea water

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When we first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it's still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them. 

But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only charitably be called a spot.
The glass doesn't even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.

To say they're many isn't saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they're multiplied.
They don't even have decent innards.
They don't know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are - or aren't.
Still they decide our life and death.
Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don't know what their moment is.

Since they're so minuscule themselves,
their duration may be
pulverized accordingly.
A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a farflung labyrinth
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and upanishads.
I've wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it's a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.


—Wisława Szymborska
microcosmos 
Stanisław Barańczak, Clare Cavanagh version

 

 

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To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. 

These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man’s kingdoms rise and fall.

—Rachel Carson

Under the Sea Wind

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It’s nice
after dinner
to walk down
to the beach
and find
the biggest thing
on earth
relatively calm.

—A. R. Ammons

Reading

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signs on the frontier

  

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It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and arranging your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.


—Italo Calvino
If on a winter's night a traveler

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It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from our view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. 

If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. 

This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.

—Franz Kafka

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So what can they tell us,

the writers of dreambooks,

the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,

the doctors

with couches for analyses—

if anything fits,

it’s accidental,

and for one reason only,

that in our dreamings,

in their shadowings and gleamings,

in their multiplings, inconceivablings,

in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times

even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

—Wisława Szymborska

Dreams, excerpt

Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak version

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pi

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The admirable number pi:

three point one four one.

All the following digits are also initial,

five nine two because it never ends.

It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,

eight nine by calculation,

seven nine or imagination,

not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison

four six to anything else

two six four three in the world.

The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.

Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.

The pageant of digits comprising the number pi

doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.

It goes on across the table, through the air,

over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,

through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.

Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!

How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!

While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen

my phone number your shirt size the year

nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor

the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents

hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,

in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert

alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,

as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,

but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,

it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,

its uncommonly fine eight,

its far from final seven,

nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity

to continue.


—Wisława Szymborska

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you are the deep innerness of all things

 

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The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows. 


—Wisława Szymborska
View With a Grain of Sand
Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh version

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You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.

To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.


—Rainer Maria Rilke 
Anita Barrows version

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Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. —Carl Jung

  

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There are three states only, the waking, dream and sleep. Turiya is not a fourth one; it is what underlies these three. But people do not readily understand it. Therefore it is said that this is the fourth state and the only Reality. In fact it is not apart from anything, for it forms the substratum of all happenings; it is the only Truth; it is your very Being. The three states appear as fleeting phenomena on it and then sink into it alone. Therefore they are unreal.


—Ramana Maharishi
Talks with Ramana

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So what can they tell us,
the writers of dreambooks,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors
with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times
even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.


—Wisława Szymborska
Dreams, excerpt
Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak version

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We have seen so much.

Reality has almost used us up ...

—Tomas Tranströmer

Windows and Stones

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I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. —Fernando Pessoa

 

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My originality consists in putting logic of the visible 

to the service of the invisible.

—Odilon Redon

The Death of Buddha

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So what can they tell us,

the writers of dreambooks,

the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,

the doctors

with couches for analyses—

if anything fits,

it’s accidental,

and for one reason only,

that in our dreamings,

in their shadowings and gleamings,

in their multiplings, inconceivablings,

in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times

even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

—Wisława Szymborska

Dreams, excerpt

Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak version

.