by May Sarton
Under the green leaf hangs a little pouch
Shaped like a gourd, purple and leathery.
It fits the palm, it magnetizes touch.
What flesh designed as fruit can this fruit be?
The plump skin gives a little at the seam.
Now bite it deep for better or for worse!
Oh multitude of stars, pale green and crimson—
And you have dared to eat a universe!
Hawaiian Palm
Being ourselves still earthbound,
All we see in the beginning
Is tree rooted, tree from the ground,
That tensile gray trunk just leaning
(Literal, stiff, a little off-plumb)
Over the lazy purple and greening
Of waves on the coral honeycomb.
From here our wandering eyes mount
Slowly to its surprising head,
A baroque casque, a great fount
Of spiny plumes that tremble their load,—
See first panache against flat blue,
And only later under this shade
The clutch of rich ovarian fruit.
The tree is separated essence,
First rooted, then fruitful, standing
Unmoved, it would seem, and tense.
We do not catch the subtle blending
Until we are bored, half in trance,
Able to sense the ever-spending
Rich presence as a dance.
Vision, airborne, is shifted slightly
To watch the singing mind in motion.
Wind plays the pleated leaves so sweetly
Form is not broken; silence is seen,
A shimmer, a music for the eye;
And now we penetrate all sheen
To wisdom, rooted, dancing lightly.
Part Four
A Hard Death
We have seen how dignity can be torn
From the naked dying or the newly born
By a loud voice or an ungentle presence,
Harshness of haste or lack of reverence;
How the hospital nurse may casually unbind
The suffering body from the lucid mind.
The spirit enclosed in that fragile shell
Cannot defend itself, must endure all.
And not only the dying, helpless in a bed,
Ask for a little pillow for the head,
A sip of water, a cool hand to bless:
The living have their lonely agonies.
“Is there compassion?” a friend asked me.
“Does it exist in another country?”
The busy living have no time to see
The flowers, so silent and so alive,
That paling to lavender of the anemone,
That purpling of the rose no one can save,
Dying, but at each second so complete
A photograph would show no slightest change.
Only the human eye, imperfect but aware,
Knows that the flower arrested on the air
Is flying through space, doing a dance
Toward the swift fall of petals, all at once.
God’s Grace, given freely, we do not deserve,
But we can choose at least to see its ghost
On every face. Oh, we can wish to serve
Each other gently as we live, though lost.
We cannot save, be saved, but we can stand
Before each presence with gentle heart and hand;
Here in this place, in this time without belief,
Keep the channels open to each other’s grief;
Never accept a death or life as strange
To its essence, but at each second be aware
How God is moving always through each flower
From birth to death in a multiple gesture
Of abnegation; and when the petals fall
Say it is beautiful and good, say it is well.
I saw my mother die and now I know
The spirit cannot be defended. It must go
Naked even of love at the very end.
“Take the flowers away” (Oh, she had been their friend!),
And we who ached could do nothing more—
She was detached and distant as a star.
Let us be gentle to each other this brief time
For we shall die in exile far from home,
Where even the flowers can no longer save.
Only the living can be healed by love.
The Silence
At first the silence is a silence only,
A huge lack rather than a huge something.
I listen for a voice in this dead vacuum,
Feel destitute, abandoned, full of dread.
Season of growing light and dirty snow
When we are too vulnerable for words.
The silence—at first it is empty.
Tears fall out of my eyes like falling leaves.
To whom, to what is it goodbye? Such grief.
At first the silence is a silence only.
Season of separation and the winter freeze.
Only the skies are open these hard days.
The brooks are numbed inside their caves of ice.
Who knows—who can?—what is in store for us?
Our dying planet where the glazed fields shine—
No gentle snow falls in this cruel time.
Silence, a membrane. Somehow I must get through
Into the universe where stars still flock,
To the rich world not empty but wide open,
Where soul quietly breathes and is at home.
First, I must go beyond the loneliness,
Refuse dependence and not ask for love.
So I went up the hill with my raw grief,
Found lambs there, shivering, newly born.
The sheep’s gruff voice, anxious, as she licked one,
Repeated a hoarse word, a word torn from her,
I had never heard that sound before—
That throaty cry of hunger and arrival.
Oh yes, I nearly drowned with longing then…
Now winter hills surround me in the evening light.
A dying sun, cold sky flushed with rose
Speak of the separation in all birth.
At first the silence is a silence only…
But huge lack bears huge something through the dark.
Annunciation
In this suspense of ours before the fall,
Before the end, before the true beginning,
No word, no feeling can be pure or whole.
Bear the loss first, then the infant winning;
Agony first, and then the long farewell.
So the child leaves the parent torn at birth.
No one is perfect here, no one is well:
It is a time of fear and immolation.
First the hard journey down again to death
Without a saving word or a free breath,
And then the terrible annunciation:
And we are here alone upon the earth.
The angel comes and he is always grave.
Joy is announced as if it were despair.
Mary herself could do nothing to save,
Nothing at all but to believe and bear,
Nothing but to foresee that in the ending
Would lie the true beginning and the birth,
And all be broken down before the mending.
For there can never be annunciation
Without the human heart’s descent to Hell.
And no ascension without the fearful fall.
The angel’s wings foretold renunciation,
And left her there alone upon the earth.
At Chartres
Perhaps there is no smallest consolation,
No help, no saving grace, no little ease;
Only the presence of this pure compassion
We lifted up, who fall upon our knees.
Nothing we have to give it or implore.
&nb
sp; It does not speak to us. It has no face,
And is itself only an open door—
Forever open, that will never close.
Here we are measured by our own creation.
Against this little anguish, this short breath,
Those choirs of glass rise up in an ovation,
Ourselves so small, this house so huge with faith.
Here we are measured against the perfect love,
Transparent glowing walls define and free.
The door is open, but we cannot move,
Nor be consoled or saved. But only see.
Once More At Chartres
A desperate child, I run up to this gate
With all my fears withheld and all my dark
Contained, to breathe out in one breath
All I have carried in my heart of death,
All I have buried in my mind of hate.
Once more I stand within the ancient ark.
Chartres, you are here who never will not be,
Ever becoming what you always are.
So, lifted by our human eyes, each hour,
The arch is breathed alive into its power,
Still being builded for us who still see
Hands lifting stone into the perilous air.
A child, I rest in your maternal gaze,
That which encompasses and shelters, yet,
Lifting so gently, still demands re-birth,
Breaks open toward sky the dark of earth,
And proves unyielding where the rose is set,
Where Love is light itself and severe praise.
Chartres, you the reason beyond any faith,
The prayer we make who never learned to pray,
The patient recreator of creation,
O distant friend, O intimate relation,
You living seed in the disease of death,
And long becoming of our only day,
I stand within your arduous embrace.
This is pure majesty, there is no other.
I suffer all beginnings and all ends.
Here this enclosure opens and transcends
All weaker hopes under your tragic face—
The suffering child here must become the mother.
Jonah
I come back from the belly of the whale
Bruised from the struggle with a living wall,
Drowned in a breathing dark, a huge heart-beat
That jolted helpless hands and useless feet,
Yet know it was not death, that vital warm,
Nor did the monster wish me any harm;
Only the prisoning was hard to bear
And three-weeks’ need to burst back into air.
Slowly the drowned self must be strangled free
And lifted whole out of that inmost sea,
To lie newborn under compassionate sky,
As fragile as a babe, with welling eye.
Do not be anxious, for now all is well,
The sojourn over in that fluid Hell,
My heart is nourished on no more than air,
Since every breath I draw is answered prayer.
Easter Morning
The extreme delicacy of this Easter morning
Spoke to me as a prayer and as a warning.
It was light on the brink, spring light
After a rain that gentled my dark night.
I walked through landscapes I had never seen
Where the fresh grass had just begun to green,
And its roots, watered deep, sprung to my tread;
The maples wore a cloud of feathery red,
But flowering trees still showed their clear design
Against the pale blue brightness chilled like wine.
And I was praying all the time I walked,
While starlings flew about, and talked, and talked.
Somewhere and everywhere life spoke the word.
The dead trees woke; each bush held its bird.
I prayed for delicate love and difficult,
That all be gentle now and know no fault,
That all be patient—as a wild rabbit fled
Sudden before me. Dear love, I would have said
(And to each bird who flew up from the wood),
I would be gentler still if that I could,
For on this Easter morning it would seem
The softest footfall danger is, extreme…
And so I prayed to be less than the grass
And yet to feel the Presence that might pass.
I made a prayer. I heard the answer, “Wait,
When all is so in peril, and so delicate!”
The Godhead As Lynx
Kyrie Eleison, O wild lynx!
Mysterious sad eyes, and yet so bright,
Wherein mind never grieves or thinks,
But absolute attention is alight—
Before that golden gaze, so deep and cold,
My human rage dissolves, my pride is broken.
I am a child here in a world grown old.
Eons ago its final word was spoken.
Eyes of the god, hard as obsidian,
Look into mine. Kyrie Eleison.
Terrible as it is, your gaze consoles,
And awe turns tender before your guiltless head.
(What we have lost to enter into souls!)
I feel a longing for the lynx’s bed,
To submerge self in that essential fur,
And sleep close to this ancient world of grace,
As if there could be healing next to her,
The mother-lynx in her pre-human place.
Yet that pure beauty does not know compassion—
O cruel god, Kyrie Eleison!
It is the marvelous world, free of our love,
Free of our hate, before our own creation,
Animal world, so still and so alive.
We never can go back to pure sensation,
Be self-possessed as the great lynx, or calm.
Yet she is lightning to cut down the lamb,
A beauty that devours without a qualm,
A cruel god who only says, “I am,”
Never, “You must become,” as you, our own
God say forever. Kyrie Eleison!
How rarely You look out from human eyes,
Yet it is we who bear creation on,
Troubled, afflicted, and so rarely wise,
Feeling nostalgia for an old world gone.
Imperfect as we are, and never whole,
Still You live in us like a fertile seed,
Always becoming, and asking of the soul
To stretch beyond sweet nature, answer need,
And lay aside the beauty of the lynx
To be this laboring self who groans and thinks.
The Waves
Even in the middle of the silent firs,
The secret world of mushroom and of moss,
Where all is delicate and nothing stirs,
We get the rumor of those distant wars
And the harsh sound of loss.
This is an island open to the churning,
The boom, the constant cannonade,
The turning back of tides and their returning,
And ocean broken like some restless mourning
That cannot find a bed.
Oh love, let us be true then to this will—
Not to each other, human and defeated,
But to great power, our Heaven and our Hell,
That thunders out its triumph unabated,
And is never still.
For we are married to this rocky coast,
To the charge of huge waves upon it,
The ceaseless war, the tide gained and then lost,
And ledges worn down smooth but not downcast—
Wild rose and granite.
Here in the darkness of the stillest wood,
Absence, the ocean, tires us with its roar;
We bear love’s thundering rumor in the blood
Beyond our understanding, ill or good—
Listen, once more!
Beyond the Question
1
The phoebe sits on her nest
Hour after hour,
Day after day,
Waiting for life to burst out
From under her warmth.
Can I weave a nest for silence,
Weave it of listening,
Listening,
Layer upon layer?
But one must first become small,
Nothing but a presence,
Attentive as a nesting bird,
Proffering no slightest wish,
No tendril of a wish
Toward anything that might happen
Or be given,
Only the warm, faithful waiting,
Contained in one’s smallness.
Beyond the question, the silence.
Before the answer, the silence.
2
When all is in ORDER,
Flowers on each mantel,
Floors swept,
Newspapers laid aside,
Wars, deaths suspended…
Silence flows in
And it happens—
A patch of sunlight
On the wall, a message;
The great white peony,
An illumination.
Each thing is haloed.
I live in a Book of Hours.
3
Before my eyes the peony,
An arrested whirlpool,
Soft as the breast of a swan,
Floats on the air…
Before my eyes,
The petals fall apart,
Plop down
In shapeless confusion,
The pure form spent.
Creation itself
Tears the fabric apart,
In the instant of achievement
Makes new demands.
Must I rejoice
In the harsh, fertile
Answer to loss,
The stiff, five-pointed seed?
Not keep it
A moment longer,
Magic floating on air,
The flower,
The fulfillment?
No, creation says,
Not a moment longer.
4
Voices do not speak
From a cloud.